If we tear down a wasps' nest, we destroy the abode of a fierce and pitiless community, but we scatter the wasps, and it is likely that each one of them, in the unrestricted and irresponsible career to which he has been unwillingly forced, will prove a much more angry and dangerous insect than he had ever been before.
This is what happened to these buccaneers who would not give up a piratical life; driven away from Jamaica, from San Domingo, and even from Tortuga, they retained a resting-place only at New Providence, an island in the Bahamas, and this they did not maintain very long.

Then they spread themselves all over the watery world.

They were no longer buccaneers, they were no longer brothers of any sort or kind, they no longer set out merely to pillage and fight the Spaniards, but their attacks were made upon people of every nation.

English ships and French ships, once safe from them, were a welcome prey to these new pirates, unrestrained by any kind of loyalty, even by any kind of enmity.

They were more rapacious, they were more cruel, they were more like fiends than they had ever been before.