fort's cannon and demolished most of the town's defence walls to ensure that a hasty retreat was possible. L'Olonnais himself was an expert torturer, and his techniques included slicing portions of flesh off the victim with a sword, burning them alive, or tying knotted "woolding" (rope bound around a ship's mast to strengthen it) around the victim's head until their eyes were forced out. Over the following two months, l'Olonnais and his men tortured, pillaged and eventually burned much of Maracaibo before moving to San Antonio de Gibraltar, on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo. Despite being outnumbered the pirates slaughtered 500 soldiers of Gibraltar's garrison and held the city for ransom. Despite the payment of the ransom (20,000 pieces of eight and five hundred cattle), l'Olonnais continued to ransack the city acquiring a total of 260,000 pieces of eight, gems, silverware, silks as well as a number of slaves. Word of his attack on Maracaibo and Gibraltar reached Tortuga, and l'Olonnais earned a reputation for his ferocity and cruelty. He was given the nickname "The Bane of Spain" (). Expedition to Honduras Seven hundred pirates enlisted with l'Olonnais when he mounted his next expedition, this time to the Central American mainland. In 1667, after pillaging Puerto Cavallo on the coast of Honduras, l'Olonnais was ambushed by a large force of Spanish soldiers while en route to San Pedro. Only narrowly escaping with his life, l'Olonnais captured two Spaniards. Exquemelin wrote:"'He drew his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spanish, and pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth, like a ravenous wolf, saying to the rest: I will serve you all alike, if you show me not another way". Horrified, the surviving Spaniard showed l'Olonnais a clear route to San Pedro. L'Olonnais and the few men still surviving were repelled, and retreated back to their ship. They ran aground on a shoal on the Pearl keys from Nicaragua. Unable to dislodge their craft, they headed inland to find food. From here, he ran several operational attacks to Campeche, San Pedro Sula and Guatemala and trying to penetrate Nicaragua inland cities through the Nicaraguan river (now called El Rio Grande de Matagalpa) and was defeated and almost killed by the natives of the region. He escaped and went to Cartagena in Colombia, looking for