Alexander Exquemelin
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Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin [Esquemeling, Oexmelin] (c. 1645-1707) was a French writer most known as the author of one of the most important sourcebooks of seventeenth century piracy, first published in Dutch as "De Americaensche Zee-Roovers", in Amsterdam, Jan ten Hoorn, in 1678.
Born about 1645, it is likely that Exquemelin was a native of Hartfleur, France, who on his return from buccaneering 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 buccaneers, 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 Caribbean 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.