They were more cruel towards the Spaniards than the Israelites ever were
to the Canaanites. A Dutchman is spoken of, named Roc, who put several
Spaniards on a spit and caused them to be eaten by his comrades. Their
expeditions were tours of thieves, and never campaigns of conquerors;
thus, in all the West Indies, they were never called anything but _los
ladrones._ When they surprised and entered the house of a father of a
family, they put him to the torture to discover his treasures. That
sufficiently proves what we say in the article "Question," that torture
was invented by robbers.
What rendered their exploits useless was, that they lavished in
debauches, as foolish as monstrous, all that they acquired by rapine and
murder. Finally, there remains nothing more of them than their name, and
scarcely that. Such were the buccaneers.
But what people in Europe have not been pirates? The Goths, Alans,
Vandals, and Huns, were they anything else? What were Rollo, who
established himself in Normandy, and William Fier-a-bras, but the most
able pirates? Was not Clovis a pirate, who came from the borders of the
Rhine into Gaul?
PLAGIARISM.
It is said that this word is derived from the Latin word _plaga,_ and
that it signifies the condemnation to the scourge of those who sold
freemen for slaves. This has nothing in common with the plagiarism of
authors, who sell not men either enslaved or free. They only for a
little money occasionally sell themselves.
When an author sells the thoughts of another man for his own, the
larceny is called plagiarism. All the makers of dictionaries, all
compilers who do nothing else than repeat backwards and forwards the
opinions, the errors, the impostures, and the truths already printed, we
may term plagiarists, but honest plagiarists, who arrogate not the merit
of invention. They pretend not even to have collected from the ancients
the materials which they get together; they only copy the laborious
compilers of the sixteenth century. They will sell you in quarto that
which already exists in folio. Call them if you please bookmakers, not
authors; range them rather among second-hand dealers than plagiarists.
The true plagiarist is he who gives the works of another for his own,
who inserts in his rhapsodies long passages from a good book a little
modified. The enlightened reader, seeing this patch of cloth of gold
upon a blanket, soon detects the bungling purloiner.