72 The Beginning of British Honduras
ren of the Coast because he was a native of Les Sables d'Ol-
lones in La Vendee. The Spaniards called him Francisco
Ollones. As a youth he had embarked from La Rochelle as
an indentured servant to a planter in the French Antilles,
from where he ran away because he resented the treatment
which some called good and some called bad. Then he joined
the buccaneers on Tortuga, amongst whom he quickly rose
to leadership. At Campeche he was wounded and made pris-
oner by Spaniards who killed most of his people, but he
smeared himself over with blood, hid amongst the dead
bodies, crawled away when the Spaniards left, washed him-
self at a river, and escaped. Assisted by Michel le Basque in
1666 he had led the expedition to Maracaibo which brought
him fame and two hundred thousand dollars worth of plun-
der from the rich convents, churches, and private homes,
though they all had much trouble with fever.
 Men flocked to him when he made known at Tortuga his
plan to go on another great expedition. Only after they had
started did he make known to the members of his fleet that
his destination was the interior cities of Nicaragua. But off
the Bay of Honduras the ships were taken by a persistent
calm, and the current which ran to the west made them drift
deeper into the Bay out of which they could not emerge in
spite of all their efforts during a whole month. Hunger be-
gan to affect them, and so they put out some canoes and sent
them up the Xagua or Sars river in the Truxillo area under
the guidance of some of the crews who had been there before.
They pillaged the native hutments of their maize and poul-
try, but this was not enough when divided with all the vessels.
Experienced men said this calm sometimes lasted four months
and proposed meantime to pillage the towns on the coast, so
they left the Xagua or Sars river and went further westward
into the bay to Puerto Caballos. Here they used short meth-
ods to get the natives to show them the way to San Pedro Sula.
 News of his coming had preceded him, causing half the
town to take to the bush. The other half answered that they