ABSTRACT
An impoverished Royalist fleeing the turmoil of the English civil war, Richard Ligon visited Barbados from 1647 to 1650. He had hoped to find a new fortune, but instead contracted a near-fatal fever. He returned to England and soon landed in debtor's prison. The Island of Barbados is divided into three sorts of men, viz: Masters, Servants, and Slaves. The slaves and their posterity, being subject to their Masters forever, are kept and preserved with greater care than the servants, who are theirs but for five years, according to the law of the Island. Cultivation and commerce were not; however, the only routes to riches in the Caribbean, and the sea's famous pirates quickly found that cannon and cutlass could extort from ship and town what the whip had extracted from soil and servant. Having endured the travails of servitude on the island of Tortuga, French surgeon John Esquemeling tried a pirate's life beginning around 1669.
