Captain Easterling, whose long duel with Peter Blood finds an important place in the chronicles which Jeremy Pitt has left us, must be regarded as the instrument chosen by Fate to shape the destiny of those rebels-convict who fled from Barbadoes in the captured Cinco Llagas.
At least it can be said that no law ran in Tortuga that was at issue with the l.
Actually it was of no nationality, unless the Brethren of the Coast, as the buccaneering fraternity was called, could be deemed to constitute a nation.
Therefore he steered clear of the Dutch as of the others and made for Tortuga, which, belonging to the French West India Company, was nominally French, but nominally only.
But Blood regarded neutrality as the most untrustworthy of all conditions, since it implies liberty of action in any direction.
There remained the Dutch, who were neutral.
They could trust themselves to no ordinary French colony because of the recent agreement between the Governments of France and England for the apprehension and interchange of any persons escaping from penal settlements.
The hand of Spain would naturally be against them not only because they were English, but, further, because they were in possession of a Spanish ship.
No English settlement would harbour them because of their antecedents.
They had chosen it because it was the one haven in the Caribbean where they could count upon being unmolested and where no questions would be asked of them.
Blood and his associates had run to this buccaneer stronghold of Tortuga, assured of finding shelter there whilst they deliberated upon their future courses.
And Peter Blood\'s, at a time when it was still fluid, was certainly fashioned by the October hurricane which blew Captain Easterling\'s ten-gun sloop into Cayona Bay, where the Cinco Llagas had been riding idly at anchor for close upon a month.
A whole destiny may be influenced by no more than the set of the wind at a given moment.
The lives of men are at the mercy of the slenderest chances.
Captain Easterling, whose long duel with Peter Blood finds an important place in the chronicles which Jeremy Pitt has left us, must be regarded as the instrument chosen by Fate to shape the destiny of those rebels-convict who fled from Barbadoes in the captured Cinco Llagas
