EXQUEMELIN (or ESQUEMELING, or OEXMELIN), Alexandre Olivier (ca. 1645-ca. 1707)

The author of one of the most important sourcebooks of seventeenth century piracy, first published in Dutch "De Americaensche Zee-Roovers", Amsterdam, Jan ten Hoorn, 1678. Born about 1645, it is likely that Exquemelin was a native of Hartfleur in France, who on his returning from boucaneering 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 bouccaneers , 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 Caribean as his name appears on the muster-roll as a surgeon in the attack on Cartagena in 1697.

The bibliography 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 many fictions.