Not caring whither he went, so he could get to sea, he embarked in 1697 from Dieppe for St. Domingo. Here he remained for five months _engagé_ to a French planter, "more a Turk than a Frenchman." "But what misery," he says, "soever I have undergone with him, I freely forgive him, being resolved to forget his name, which I shall not mention in this place, because the laws of Christianity require that at my hand, though as to matters of charity he is not to expect much of that in me, since he, on his part, has been every way defective in the exercise thereof upon my account." But his patience at last worn out, and weary of cruelties that seemed endless, De Lussan applied to M. de Franquesnay, the king's lieutenant, who himself gave him shelter in his house for six months. He was now in debt, and thinking it "honest to pay his creditors," he joined the freebooters in order to satisfy them, not willing to apply again for money to his parents. "These borrowings from the Spaniards," he says, "have this advantage attending them, that there is no obligation to repay them," and there was war between the two crowns, so that he was a legal privateersman. Selecting a leader, De Lussan pitched on De Graff, as a brave corsair, who happened to be then at St. Domingo, eager to sail. Furnishing himself with arms, at the expense of Franquesnay, he joined De Graff. "We were," he says, "in a few hours satisfied with each other, and became such friends as those are wont to be who are about to run the same risk of fortune, and apparently to die together." The 22nd of November, the day he sailed from Petit Guave, seemed the happiest of his life. Dampierre mentions an old Buccaneer, who was slain at the taking of Leon. "He was," he says, "a stout, grey-headed old man, aged about eighty-four, who had served under Oliver Cromwell in the Irish rebellion; after which he was at Jamaica, and had followed privateering ever since. He would not accept the offer our men made him to tarry ashore, but said he would venture as far as the best of them; but when surrounded by the Spaniards he refused "to take quarter, but discharged his gun amongst them, keeping a pistol still charged; so they shot him dead at a distance. His name was Swan (_rara avis_). He was a very merry, hearty old man, and always used to declare he would never take quarter."