The Buccaneers Of America Or The Pirates Of Panama

Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin (also spelled Esquemeling, Exquemeling, or Oexmelin and who also wrote as John Esquemeling) (c. 1645-1707) was a French writer. Born about 1645, it is likely that he was a native of Harfleur, France, who on his return from buccaneering settled in Holland, possibly because he was a Huguenot. In 1666 he was engaged by the French West India Company and went to Tortuga, where he stayed for three years. There he enlisted with the buccaneers, in particular with the band of Henry Morgan, whose confidante he was, probably as a barber-surgeon, and remained with them until 1674. Shortly afterwards he returned to Europe; but he was later once again in the Caribbean as his name appears on the muster-roll as a surgeon in the attack on Cartagena in 1697. Exquemelin is most known as the author of one of the most important sourcebooks of seventeenth century piracy, first published in Dutch as De Americaensche Zee- Roovers, in Amsterdam, Jan ten Hoorn, in 1678. The bibliographic legacy of Exquemelin's History of the Bouccaneers of America is complex. It has rightly been said that perhaps no book of the seventeenth century in any language was ever the parent of so many imitations and the source of so much fiction.