With this force, and a proportional number of troops, he took St. Iago, in the Cape Verde Islands, then crossed the Atlantic and pillaged Montserrat and Antigua, ransomed Surinam and St. Eustatia, and, after some difficulties, treated Curaçoa similarly.
Despite his really brilliant achievements, Jacques Cassard was destined to spend his declining years in comparative poverty, and die in confinement. Jealousy on the part of the aristocrats, false accusations of misappropriation of prize goods, impudence amounting to mutiny in dealing with an admiral, and finally loss of temper and insolence to the all-powerful Cardinal Fleury--this was the end of all: he was imprisoned in the fortress of Ham, and there he died, in 1740, having survived Du Guay Trouin by four years.
[Footnote 12: As related in "The Corsairs of France," by C.B. Norman; but it appears probable that it was in the previous year, for reasons to be stated later.]
Robert Surcouf, another prominent French privateersman, was born on December 12th, 1773--just one hundred years after Du Guay Trouin, to whose family he was related.
Like his famous relative, he was intended for the Church; but he speedily manifested a militant spirit by no means of an ecclesiastical quality--he was, in fact, an awful pickle at home and at school; insubordinate, always fighting with some one, tearing his clothes to pieces, and quite unamenable to parental or pedagogic admonition. Severity and entreaty were alike futile. However, he was sent to a seminary at Dinan, under a superior of great reputed strictness, and here for a time he raised his parents' hopes; but he soon grew weary of the monotony of obedience, ceased to evince any interest in his studies, and speedily became the leader in every description of mischief.
The crisis arrived one day when the class-master seized young Robert with the intention of administering personal chastisement. The scholar proved to be exceedingly robust for his years, and resisted the operation with tremendous vigour; and when at length the master had got him down, he seized his leg in his teeth, and compelled him to desist for the moment and seek for assistance. Surcouf's classmates loudly applauded him; but, knowing that he would be ultimately compelled to yield to superior force, he got through the window, scaled the garden wall, and, without hat or shoes, started to walk home, the snow lying thickly on the ground. He had more than twenty miles to walk, and when it became dark he slipped about on the frozen snow, and at length, worn out and half perished with cold and hunger, he sank senseless by the roadside. Luckily, some fish-merchants found him and took him home, where he was nursed by his mother with the tenderest devotion during an attack of pneumonia. Thanks to his strong constitution, he recovered completely; but he was not sent back to Dinan. It was obvious that there was nothing to be done but to recognise his vocation as a seaman; and accordingly, at the age of thirteen, he was shipped on board the _Heron_, brig, bound for Cadiz.