This picture was made using a technique of marquetry known as straw-work. It was probably executed in about 1810, during the Napoleonic Wars, by a French inmate at the world's first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp, at Norman Cross, near Peterborough. It depicts the 17th century French gentleman-buccaneer Daniel Montbars (born 1645), better known to history as 'Montbars the Exterminator'. Montbars was said to have harboured a passionate hatred for the Spanish, having read about atrocities committed by Conquistadors against indigenous American populations. His career at sea was spent raiding along the Spanish Main and in the Caribbean. He was said to have left a vast, unclaimed buried treasure after his death in the early 1700s. This myth, along with tales of numerous cruelties he enacted on Spanish prisoners, assured Montbars' status in the folklore of the sea, perhaps suggesting that the maker of this picture was a sailor.