By 1695, the French Navy was a shadow of its former power. Decades of war against England and the Dutch Republic had hollowed out the fleet, and France turned to what it called guerre de course - state-sanctioned piracy. Bernard Desjean, Baron de Pointis, had spent years in the Caribbean and knew its waters. He convinced Louis XIV to back an audacious plan: strike Cartagena, the port city where Spanish treasure fleets gathered before crossing the Atlantic. The king gave him seven warships, three frigates, and a handful of smaller vessels. The squadron sailed from Brest in January 1697, arriving at Saint-Domingue two months later. There, Pointis requested help from Governor Jean du Casse, who reluctantly agreed to contribute 650 buccaneers to supplement the 1,200 regular soldiers - though du Casse would have preferred to attack Portobelo instead.

Cartagena's defenses had been legendary. For a century and a half, the city's fortresses, chains, and gun batteries had repelled pirates, rival navies, and storms alike. But by 1697, neglect had taken its toll. Garrisons were undermanned. Walls needed repair. When Pointis brought his combined force before the city in early May, the famed Spanish fortifications fell with startling speed - he lost only sixty men taking both fortresses. For the next eighteen days, from 6 May to 24 May, the French systematically stripped Cartagena of its wealth. Churches were emptied of silver and gold. Private homes were ransacked. The loot amounted to somewhere between ten and twenty million livres, an almost incomprehensible fortune in an era when a common sailor earned perhaps two hundred livres a year.

Pointis had no intention of honoring his arrangement with the buccaneers. The moment the plunder was loaded, he sailed directly for France, leaving his buccaneer allies standing on the docks of a ruined city with nothing to show for their service. The buccaneers' response was predictable and savage. They turned back on Cartagena and sacked it again, this time without any restraining authority. What Pointis had conducted as a calculated military operation, the buccaneers carried out as raw revenge - extortion, assault, and murder accompanied their second plundering of a city that had already been emptied once. The people of Cartagena, who had survived one conquest, now endured a second at the hands of men who had nothing left to lose.

England dispatched Admiral John Nevell from Cadiz to intercept Pointis on his return voyage. After a three-day chase across the Atlantic, Nevell's squadron managed to capture a single ship - and it was the worst prize imaginable. The vessel was a French hospital ship crawling with yellow fever. The disease ripped through the English and Dutch fleets with devastating efficiency, killing 1,300 English sailors, six captains, and Nevell himself. Only one captain in the entire Dutch squadron survived. The French fleet suffered its own losses to the fever, but Pointis made it home. He delivered two million livres to Louis XIV and kept the rest, becoming one of the richest men in France. The following year, he published an account of the expedition in Amsterdam, apparently unburdened by guilt over the buccaneers he had cheated or the city he had helped destroy.

The 1697 raid was neither the first nor the last assault on Cartagena de Indias. Sir Francis Drake had sacked it in 1586. The English would try again in 1741 with a massive fleet, only to be repelled in one of the most lopsided defeats in British naval history. But the Pointis raid stands apart for its cascading consequences: a single act of greed triggered a chain of betrayal, retribution, and epidemic that touched four nations and killed thousands. Spain rebuilt the fortifications, the buccaneers scattered, and Cartagena endured. The city had been plundered before. It would be attacked again. Each time, it rose from the ruins, its walls a little thicker, its reputation a little more formidable.