After the news of the rich capture reached Tortuga, many of the buccaneers turned to piracy and in a few years the Spanish seas were infested with small fleets of pirate vessels which obeyed fixed laws and were governed by a single chief. Desperate men in every European port came out to join them and in time many thousand men recognized the command of the great captains of the “Brethren of the Coast,” as they styled themselves. Before the end of the first year that followed the capture of the Spanish galleon, twenty large vessels had been taken, two great plate ships had been cut out of the harbor of Campeachy and a trade in looted merchandize had sprung up between Tortuga and Europe that soon made the piratical settlement one of the richest in America. The “Brethren of the Coast” established among themselves a code of laws the larger number of which related to captured booty. All offences against these laws were severely punished, the commonest penalty being “marooning” which consisted of landing the offender on an uninhabited key or island with only a small supply of food. The most desperate might well shrink from such an end. The invariable practice required that everything should be held in common and at the last be divided into shares according to a fixed ratio. The captain drew the largest number, of course, and the sailing master, carpenter and surgeon came next. There was also a tariff by which to indemnify those who were mutilated while fighting. For a right arm, six hundred Spanish pieces of eight were awarded or a corresponding value in slaves. The left arm was worth only five hundred pieces of eight, and a leg was of equal value. An eye was worth one hundred and a finger the same. The booty brought into the pirate rendezvous at Tortuga was enormous. Frequently pirates would land bringing in five or six thousand pieces of eight per man and a single vessel once brought in loot amounting to 260,000 pieces. Huge sums were gambled away in a single night and drunken buccaneers would sometimes buy pipes of wine and force every passer-by to drink or fight.