28 The Beginning of 'British Honduras
 In this time the waters of the colony were regularly hunted
for manatees by boats from Santo Domingo for feeding the
slaves. This very vulnerable animal is about the bigness of
a horse, and some were fifteen feet long in the time when
Captain Dampier, Pere du Tertre, and Exquemelin wrote.
They like brackish water and those that live in the sea go
regularly to the mouths of the rivers. They live on sea grass
of a narrow blade, 7 or 8 inches long, which grows amongst
the cayes near the Main where the shallow water affords
proper pasture and where they feed like beeves in a meadow
on the sea grass. Both the fat and the lean of the flesh are
white, and the fresh flesh is like veal, delicious and whole-
some, but it is made hard and inferior if the least possible
amount of salt is not added to preserve it. The fat is excel-
lent and many buccaneers melted it to use the lard on their
bread instead of butter. The manatee's sight is poor, but
its sense of hearing is of an extraordinary subtlety. Lamen-
tin is the French name, which like the Spanish name refers
to the little fore-fins that resemble hands.
 During the Thirty Years War the Dutch privateers were
active in the Bay of Honduras. Portugal was then under
Spain, and the Dutch held seven provinces of Brazil from
where they often came by way of Curacao, anchoring at the
haunted Sapodilla Caye and Caye Bokel, then the two stra-
tegic spots from which they watched the Bay. The Dutch
West India Company had a monopoly for the trade on the
eastern coast of America from Bahia and Pernambuco to New
Amsterdam or New York. This was a semi-official buccaneer-
ing organization with a large number of bases on the main-
land and on the Caribbean islands, more or less fortified and
fixed up to serve the Company's privateersmen as anchorages,
places for barter, and store houses. After crossing from Hol-
land to Brazil the ships used to beat up the coast to New
Amsterdam from where they returned to Holland. The repe-
tition of the names Orange, Nassau, and Amsterdam were
given to make clear their priority if not claim in the same