by Howard Pyle
Chapter I. BUCCANEERS AND MAROONERS OF THE SPANISH MAIN
JUST above the northwestern shore of the old island of Hispaniola--theSanto Domingo of our day--and separated from it only by a narrow channelof some five or six miles in width, lies a queer little hunch of anisland, known, because of a distant resemblance to that animal, asthe Tortuga de Mar, or sea turtle. It is not more than twenty miles inlength by perhaps seven or eight in breadth; it is only a little spot ofland, and as you look at it upon the map a pin's head would almost coverit; yet from that spot, as from a center of inflammation, a burning fireof human wickedness and ruthlessness and lust overran the world, andspread terror and death throughout the Spanish West Indies, from St.Augustine to the island of Trinidad, and from Panama to the coasts ofPeru.
About the middle of the seventeenth century certain French adventurersset out from the fortified island of St. Christopher in longboats andhoys, directing their course to the westward, there to discover newislands. Sighting Hispaniola "with abundance of joy," they landed, andwent into the country, where they found great quantities of wild cattle,horses, and swine.
Now vessels on the return voyage to Europe from the West Indies neededrevictualing, and food, especially flesh, was at a premium in theislands of the Spanish Main; wherefore a great profit was to be turnedin preserving beef and pork, and selling the flesh to homeward-boundvessels.
The northwestern shore of Hispaniola, lying as it does at the easternoutlet of the old Bahama Channel, running between the island of Cuba andthe great Bahama Banks, lay almost in the very main stream of travel.The pioneer Frenchmen were not slow to discover the double advantage tobe reaped from the wild cattle that cost them nothing to procure, and amarket for the flesh ready found for them. So down upon Hispaniola theycame by boatloads and shiploads, gathering like a swarm of mosquitoes,and overrunning the whole western end of the island. There theyestablished themselves, spending the time alternately in hunting thewild cattle and buccanning(1) the meat, and squandering their hardlyearned gains in wild debauchery, the opportunities for which were neverlacking in the Spanish West Indies.
(1) Buccanning, by which the "buccaneers" gained their name, was of process of curing thin strips of meat by salting, smoking, and drying in the sun.
At first the Spaniards thought nothing of the few travel-worn Frenchmenwho dragged their longboats and hoys up on the beach, and shot a wildbullock or two to keep body and soul together; but when the few grew todozens, and the dozens to scores, and the scores to hundreds, it was avery different matter, and wrathful grumblings and mutterings began tobe heard among the original settlers.
But of this the careless buccaneers thought never a whit, the only thingthat troubled them being the lack of a more convenient shipping pointthan the main island afforded them.
This lack was at last filled by a party of hunters who ventured acrossthe narrow channel that separated the main island from Tortuga. Herethey found exactly what they needed--a good harbor, just at the junctionof the Windward Channel with the old Bahama Channel--a spot wherefour-fifths of the Spanish-Indian trade would pass by their verywharves.
There were a few Spaniards upon the island, but they were a quiet folk,and well disposed to make friends with the strangers; but when moreFrenchmen and still more Frenchmen crossed the narrow channel, untilthey overran the Tortuga and turned it into one great curing house forthe beef which they shot upon the neighboring island, the Spaniards grewrestive over the matter, just as they had done upon the larger island.
Accordingly, one fine day there came half a dozen great boatloadsof armed Spaniards, who landed upon the Turtle's Back and sent theFrenchmen flying to the woods and fastnesses of rocks as the chaff fliesbefore the thunder gust. That night the Spaniards drank themselvesmad and shouted themselves hoarse over their victory, while the beatenFrenchmen sullenly paddled their canoes back to the main island again,and the Sea Turtle was Spanish once more.
But the Spaniards were not contented with such a petty triumph as thatof sweeping the island of Tortuga free from the obnoxious strangers,down upon Hispaniola they came, flushed with their easy victory, anddetermined to root out every Frenchman, until not one single buccaneerremained. For a time they had an easy thing of it, for each Frenchhunter roamed the woods by himself, with no better company than hishalf-wild dogs, so that when two or three Spaniards would meet such aone, he seldom if ever came out of the woods again, for even his restingplace was lost.
But the very success of the Spaniards brought their ruin along with it,for the buccaneers began to combine together for self-protection,and out of that combination arose a strange union of lawless man withlawless man, so near, so close, that it can scarce be compared toany other than that of husband and wife. When two entered upon thiscomradeship, articles were drawn up and signed by both parties, a commonstock was made of all their possessions, and out into the woods theywent to seek their fortunes; thenceforth they were as one man; theylived together by day, they slept together by night; what one suffered,the other suffered; what one gained, the other gained. The onlyseparation that came betwixt them was death, and then the survivorinherited all that the other left. And now it was another thing withSpanish buccaneer hunting, for two buccaneers, reckless of life, quickof eye, and true of aim, were worth any half dozen of Spanish islanders.
By and by, as the French became more strongly organized for mutualself-protection, they assumed the offensive. Then down they came uponTortuga, and now it was the turn of the Spanish to be hunted off theisland like vermin, and the turn of the French to shout their victory.
Having firmly established themselves, a governor was sent to the Frenchof Tortuga, one M. le Passeur, from the island of St. Christopher; theSea Turtle was fortified, and colonists, consisting of men of doubtfulcharacter and women of whose character there could be no doubt whatever,began pouring in upon the island, for it was said that the buccaneersthought no more of a doubloon than of a Lima bean, so that this was theplace for the brothel and the brandy shop to reap their golden harvest,and the island remained French.
Hitherto the Tortugans had been content to gain as much as possible fromthe homeward-bound vessels through the orderly channels of legitimatetrade. It was reserved for Pierre le Grand to introduce piracy as aquicker and more easy road to wealth than the semi-honest exchange theyhad been used to practice.
Gathering together eight-and-twenty other spirits as hardy and recklessas himself, he put boldly out to sea in a boat hardly large enough tohold his crew, and running down the Windward Channel and out into theCaribbean Sea, he lay in wait for such a prize as might be worth therisks of winning.
For a while their luck was steadily against them; their provisions andwater began to fail, and they saw nothing before them but starvationor a humiliating return. In this extremity they sighted a Spanish shipbelonging to a "flota" which had become separated from her consorts.
The boat in which the buccaneers sailed might, perhaps, have served forthe great ship's longboat; the Spaniards out-numbered them three toone, and Pierre and his men were armed only with pistols and cutlasses;nevertheless this was their one and their only chance, and theydetermined to take the Spanish ship or to die in the attempt. Down uponthe Spaniard they bore through the dusk of the night, and giving ordersto the "chirurgeon" to scuttle their craft under them as they wereleaving it, they swarmed up the side of the unsuspecting ship and uponits decks in a torrent--pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other. Apart of them ran to the gun room and secured the arms and ammunition,pistoling or cutting down all such as stood in their way or offeredopposition; the other party burst into the great cabin at the heels ofPierre le Grand, found the captain and a party of his friends at cards,set a pistol to his breast, and demanded him to deliver up the ship.Nothing remained for the Spaniard but to yield, for there was noalternative between surrender and death. And so the great prize was won.
It was not long before the news of this great exploit and of the vasttreasure gained reached th
e ears of the buccaneers of Tortuga andHispaniola. Then what a hubbub and an uproar and a tumult there was!Hunting wild cattle and buccanning the meat was at a discount, and theone and only thing to do was to go a-pirating; for where one such prizehad been won, others were to be had.
In a short time freebooting assumed all of the routine of a regularbusiness. Articles were drawn up betwixt captain and crew, compacts weresealed, and agreements entered into by the one party and the other.
In all professions there are those who make their mark, those whosucceed only moderately well, and those who fail more or less entirely.Nor did pirating differ from this general rule, for in it were men whorose to distinction, men whose names, something tarnished and rusted bythe lapse of years, have come down even to us of the present day.
Pierre Francois, who, with his boatload of six-and-twenty desperadoes,ran boldly into the midst of the pearl fleet off the coast ofSouth America, attacked the vice admiral under the very guns of twomen-of-war, captured his ship, though she was armed with eight guns andmanned with threescore men, and would have got her safely away, onlythat having to put on sail, their mainmast went by the board, whereuponthe men-of-war came up with them, and the prize was lost.
But even though there were two men-of-war against all that remained ofsix-and-twenty buccaneers, the Spaniards were glad enough to make termswith them for the surrender of the vessel, whereby Pierre Francois andhis men came off scot-free.
Bartholomew Portuguese was a worthy of even more note. In a boat mannedwith thirty fellow adventurers he fell upon a great ship off CapeCorrientes, manned with threescore and ten men, all told.
Her he assaulted again and again, beaten off with the very pressure ofnumbers only to renew the assault, until the Spaniards who survived,some fifty in all, surrendered to twenty living pirates, who poured upontheir decks like a score of blood-stained, powder-grimed devils.
They lost their vessel by recapture, and Bartholomew Portuguesebarely escaped with his life through a series of almost unbelievableadventures. But no sooner had he fairly escaped from the clutches of theSpaniards than, gathering together another band of adventurers, he fellupon the very same vessel in the gloom of the night, recaptured her whenshe rode at anchor in the harbor of Campeche under the guns of the fort,slipped the cable, and was away without the loss of a single man. Helost her in a hurricane soon afterward, just off the Isle of Pines; butthe deed was none the less daring for all that.
Another notable no less famous than these two worthies was RochBraziliano, the truculent Dutchman who came up from the coast of Brazilto the Spanish Main with a name ready-made for him. Upon the very firstadventure which he undertook he captured a plate ship of fabulous value,and brought her safely into Jamaica; and when at last captured by theSpaniards, he fairly frightened them into letting him go by truculentthreats of vengeance from his followers.
Such were three of the pirate buccaneers who infested the SpanishMain. There were hundreds no less desperate, no less reckless, no lessinsatiate in their lust for plunder, than they.
The effects of this freebooting soon became apparent. The risks to beassumed by the owners of vessels and the shippers of merchandise becameso enormous that Spanish commerce was practically swept away from thesewaters. No vessel dared to venture out of port excepting under escortof powerful men-of-war, and even then they were not always secure frommolestation. Exports from Central and South America were sent to Europeby way of the Strait of Magellan, and little or none went through thepasses between the Bahamas and the Caribbees.
So at last "buccaneering," as it had come to be generically called,ceased to pay the vast dividends that it had done at first. The creamwas skimmed off, and only very thin milk was left in the dish. Fabulousfortunes were no longer earned in a ten days' cruise, but what moneywas won hardly paid for the risks of the winning. There must be a newdeparture, or buccaneering would cease to exist.
Then arose one who showed the buccaneers a new way to squeeze money outof the Spaniards. This man was an Englishman--Lewis Scot.
The stoppage of commerce on the Spanish Main had naturally tended toaccumulate all the wealth gathered and produced into the chief fortifiedcities and towns of the West Indies. As there no longer existed prizesupon the sea, they must be gained upon the land, if they were to begained at all. Lewis Scot was the first to appreciate this fact.
Gathering together a large and powerful body of men as hungry forplunder and as desperate as himself, he descended upon the town ofCampeche, which he captured and sacked, stripping it of everything thatcould possibly be carried away.
When the town was cleared to the bare walls Scot threatened to set thetorch to every house in the place if it was not ransomed by a large sumof money which he demanded. With this booty he set sail for Tortuga,where he arrived safely--and the problem was solved.
After him came one Mansvelt, a buccaneer of lesser note, who first madea descent upon the isle of Saint Catharine, now Old Providence, which hetook, and, with this as a base, made an unsuccessful descent upon NeuvaGranada and Cartagena. His name might not have been handed down to usalong with others of greater fame had he not been the master of thatmost apt of pupils, the great Captain Henry Morgan, most famous ofall the buccaneers, one time governor of Jamaica, and knighted by KingCharles II.
After Mansvelt followed the bold John Davis, native of Jamaica, where hesucked in the lust of piracy with his mother's milk. With only fourscoremen, he swooped down upon the great city of Nicaragua in the darkness ofthe night, silenced the sentry with the thrust of a knife, and thenfell to pillaging the churches and houses "without any respect orveneration."
Of course it was but a short time until the whole town was in an uproarof alarm, and there was nothing left for the little handful of men to dobut to make the best of their way to their boats. They were in the townbut a short time, but in that time they were able to gather together andto carry away money and jewels to the value of fifty thousand pieces ofeight, besides dragging off with them a dozen or more notable prisoners,whom they held for ransom.
And now one appeared upon the scene who reached a far greater heightthan any had arisen to before. This was Francois l'Olonoise, whosacked the great city of Maracaibo and the town of Gibraltar. Cold,unimpassioned, pitiless, his sluggish blood was never moved by onesingle pulse of human warmth, his icy heart was never touched by one rayof mercy or one spark of pity for the hapless wretches who chanced tofall into his bloody hands.
Against him the governor of Havana sent out a great war vessel, and withit a negro executioner, so that there might be no inconvenient delays oflaw after the pirates had been captured. But l'Olonoise did not wait forthe coming of the war vessel; he went out to meet it, and he found itwhere it lay riding at anchor in the mouth of the river Estra. At thedawn of the morning he made his attack sharp, unexpected, decisive. In alittle while the Spaniards were forced below the hatches, and the vesselwas taken. Then came the end. One by one the poor shrieking wretcheswere dragged up from below, and one by one they were butchered in coldblood, while l'Olonoise stood upon the poop deck and looked coldly downupon what was being done. Among the rest the negro was dragged upon thedeck. He begged and implored that his life might be spared, promising totell all that might be asked of him. L'Olonoise questioned him, and whenhe had squeezed him dry, waved his hand coldly, and the poor black wentwith the rest. Only one man was spared; him he sent to the governor ofHavana with a message that henceforth he would give no quarter to anySpaniard whom he might meet in arms--a message which was not an emptythreat.
The rise of l'Olonoise was by no means rapid. He worked his way up bydint of hard labor and through much ill fortune. But by and by, aftermany reverses, the tide turned, and carried him with it from one successto another, without let or stay, to the bitter end.
Cruising off Maracaibo, he captured a rich prize laden with a vastamount of plate and ready money, and there conceived the design ofdescending upon the powerful town of Maracaibo itself. Without loss oftime he ga
thered together five hundred picked scoundrels from Tortuga,and taking with him one Michael de Basco as land captain, and twohundred more buccaneers whom he commanded, down he came into the Gulf ofVenezuela and upon the doomed city like a blast of the plague. Leavingtheir vessels, the buccaneers made a land attack upon the fort thatstood at the mouth of the inlet that led into Lake Maracaibo and guardedthe city.
The Spaniards held out well, and fought with all the might thatSpaniards possess; but after a fight of three hours all was given up andthe garrison fled, spreading terror and confusion before them. Asmany of the inhabitants of the city as could do so escaped in boats toGibraltar, which lies to the southward, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo,at the distance of some forty leagues or more.
Then the pirates marched into the town, and what followed may beconceived. It was a holocaust of lust, of passion, and of blood such aseven the Spanish West Indies had never seen before. Houses and churcheswere sacked until nothing was left but the bare walls; men and womenwere tortured to compel them to disclose where more treasure lay hidden.
Then, having wrenched all that they could from Maracaibo, theyentered the lake and descended upon Gibraltar, where the rest of thepanic-stricken inhabitants were huddled together in a blind terror.
The governor of Merida, a brave soldier who had served his king inFlanders, had gathered together a troop of eight hundred men, hadfortified the town, and now lay in wait for the coming of the pirates.The pirates came all in good time, and then, in spite of the bravedefense, Gibraltar also fell. Then followed a repetition of the scenesthat had been enacted in Maracaibo for the past fifteen days, only herethey remained for four horrible weeks, extorting money--money! evermoney!--from the poor poverty-stricken, pest-ridden souls crowded intothat fever hole of a town.
Then they left, but before they went they demanded still more money--tenthousand pieces of eight--as a ransom for the town, which otherwiseshould be given to the flames. There was some hesitation on the part ofthe Spaniards, some disposition to haggle, but there was no hesitationon the part of l'Olonoise. The torch WAS set to the town as he hadpromised, whereupon the money was promptly paid, and the pirates werepiteously begged to help quench the spreading flames. This they werepleased to do, but in spite of all their efforts nearly half of the townwas consumed.
After that they returned to Maracaibo again, where they demanded aransom of thirty thousand pieces of eight for the city. There was nohaggling here, thanks to the fate of Gibraltar; only it was utterlyimpossible to raise that much money in all of the poverty-strickenregion. But at last the matter was compromised, and the town wasredeemed for twenty thousand pieces of eight and five hundred head ofcattle, and tortured Maracaibo was quit of them.
In the Ile de la Vache the buccaneers shared among themselves twohundred and sixty thousand pieces of eight, besides jewels and bales ofsilk and linen and miscellaneous plunder to a vast amount.
Such was the one great deed of l'Olonoise; from that time his starsteadily declined--for even nature seemed fighting against such amonster--until at last he died a miserable, nameless death at the handsof an unknown tribe of Indians upon the Isthmus of Darien.
And now we come to the greatest of all the buccaneers, he who standspre-eminent among them, and whose name even to this day is a charmto call up his deeds of daring, his dauntless courage, his truculentcruelty, and his insatiate and unappeasable lust for gold--Capt. HenryMorgan, the bold Welshman, who brought buccaneering to the height andflower of its glory.
Having sold himself, after the manner of the times, for his passageacross the seas, he worked out his time of servitude at the Barbados. Assoon as he had regained his liberty he entered upon the trade of piracy,wherein he soon reached a position of considerable prominence. He wasassociated with Mansvelt at the time of the latter's descent uponSaint Catharine's Isle, the importance of which spot, as a center ofoperations against the neighboring coasts, Morgan never lost sight of.
The first attempt that Capt. Henry Morgan ever made against any townin the Spanish Indies was the bold descent upon the city of Puerto delPrincipe in the island of Cuba, with a mere handful of men. It wasa deed the boldness of which has never been outdone by any of a likenature--not even the famous attack upon Panama itself. Thence theyreturned to their boats in the very face of the whole island of Cuba,aroused and determined upon their extermination. Not only did they makegood their escape, but they brought away with them a vast amount ofplunder, computed at three hundred thousand pieces of eight, besidesfive hundred head of cattle and many prisoners held for ransom.
But when the division of all this wealth came to be made, lo! there wereonly fifty thousand pieces of eight to be found. What had become of therest no man could tell but Capt. Henry Morgan himself. Honesty amongthieves was never an axiom with him.
Rude, truculent, and dishonest as Captain Morgan was, he seems to havehad a wonderful power of persuading the wild buccaneers under him tosubmit everything to his judgment, and to rely entirely upon his word.In spite of the vast sum of money that he had very evidently made awaywith, recruits poured in upon him, until his band was larger and betterequipped than ever.
And now it was determined that the plunder harvest was ripe at PortoBello, and that city's doom was sealed. The town was defended by twostrong castles thoroughly manned, and officered by as gallant a soldieras ever carried Toledo steel at his side. But strong castles and gallantsoldiers weighed not a barleycorn with the buccaneers when their bloodwas stirred by the lust of gold.
Landing at Puerto Naso, a town some ten leagues westward of Porto Bello,they marched to the latter town, and coming before the castle, boldlydemanded its surrender. It was refused, whereupon Morgan threatened thatno quarter should be given. Still surrender was refused; and then thecastle was attacked, and after a bitter struggle was captured. Morganwas as good as his word: every man in the castle was shut in the guardroom, the match was set to the powder magazine, and soldiers, castle,and all were blown into the air, while through all the smoke and thedust the buccaneers poured into the town. Still the governor held out inthe other castle, and might have made good his defense, but that he wasbetrayed by the soldiers under him. Into the castle poured the howlingbuccaneers. But still the governor fought on, with his wife and daughterclinging to his knees and beseeching him to surrender, and the bloodfrom his wounded forehead trickling down over his white collar, until amerciful bullet put an end to the vain struggle.
Here were enacted the old scenes. Everything plundered that could betaken, and then a ransom set upon the town itself.
This time an honest, or an apparently honest, division was made ofthe spoils, which amounted to two hundred and fifty thousand pieces ofeight, besides merchandise and jewels.
The next towns to suffer were poor Maracaibo and Gibraltar, now justbeginning to recover from the desolation wrought by l'Olonoise. Oncemore both towns were plundered of every bale of merchandise and of everyplaster, and once more both were ransomed until everything was squeezedfrom the wretched inhabitants.
Here affairs were like to have taken a turn, for when Captain Morgancame up from Gibraltar he found three great men-of-war lying in theentrance to the lake awaiting his coming. Seeing that he was hemmed inin the narrow sheet of water, Captain Morgan was inclined to compromisematters, even offering to relinquish all the plunder he had gained if hewere allowed to depart in peace. But no; the Spanish admiral would hearnothing of this. Having the pirates, as he thought, securely in hisgrasp, he would relinquish nothing, but would sweep them from the faceof the sea once and forever.
That was an unlucky determination for the Spaniards to reach, forinstead of paralyzing the pirates with fear, as he expected it would do,it simply turned their mad courage into as mad desperation.
A great vessel that they had taken with the town of Maracaibo wasconverted into a fire ship, manned with logs of wood in montera caps andsailor jackets, and filled with brimstone, pitch, and palm leaves soakedin oil. Then out of the lake the pirates sailed to meet t
he Spaniards,the fire ship leading the way, and bearing down directly upon theadmiral's vessel. At the helm stood volunteers, the most desperate andthe bravest of all the pirate gang, and at the ports stood the logs ofwood in montera caps. So they came up with the admiral, and grappledwith his ship in spite of the thunder of all his great guns, and thenthe Spaniard saw, all too late, what his opponent really was.
He tried to swing loose, but clouds of smoke and almost instantly a massof roaring flames enveloped both vessels, and the admiral was lost. Thesecond vessel, not wishing to wait for the coming of the pirates, boredown upon the fort, under the guns of which the cowardly crew sankher, and made the best of their way to the shore. The third vessel, nothaving an opportunity to escape, was taken by the pirates without theslightest resistance, and the passage from the lake was cleared. Sothe buccaneers sailed away, leaving Maracaibo and Gibraltar prostrate asecond time.
And now Captain Morgan determined to undertake another venture, the likeof which had never been equaled in all of the annals of buccaneering.This was nothing less than the descent upon and the capture of Panama,which was, next to Cartagena, perhaps, the most powerful and the moststrongly fortified city in the West Indies.
In preparation for this venture he obtained letters of marque from thegovernor of Jamaica, by virtue of which elastic commission he beganimmediately to gather around him all material necessary for theundertaking.
When it became known abroad that the great Captain Morgan was aboutundertaking an adventure that was to eclipse all that was ever donebefore, great numbers came flocking to his standard, until he hadgathered together an army of two thousand or more desperadoes andpirates wherewith to prosecute his adventure, albeit the venture itselfwas kept a total secret from everyone. Port Couillon, in the island ofHispaniola, over against the Ile de la Vache, was the place of muster,and thither the motley band gathered from all quarters. Provisions hadbeen plundered from the mainland wherever they could be obtained, and bythe 24th of October, 1670 (O. S.), everything was in readiness.
The island of Saint Catharine, as it may be remembered, was at one timecaptured by Mansvelt, Morgan's master in his trade of piracy. It hadbeen retaken by the Spaniards, and was now thoroughly fortified by them.Almost the first attempt that Morgan had made as a master pirate was theretaking of Saint Catharine's Isle. In that undertaking he had failed;but now, as there was an absolute need of some such place as a baseof operations, he determined that the place must be taken. And it wastaken.
The Spaniards, during the time of their possession, had fortified itmost thoroughly and completely, and had the governor thereof been asbrave as he who met his death in the castle of Porto Bello, there mighthave been a different tale to tell. As it was, he surrendered it in amost cowardly fashion, merely stipulating that there should be a shamattack by the buccaneers, whereby his credit might be saved. And soSaint Catharine was won.
The next step to be taken was the capture of the castle of Chagres,which guarded the mouth of the river of that name, up which river thebuccaneers would be compelled to transport their troops and provisionsfor the attack upon the city of Panama. This adventure was undertaken byfour hundred picked men under command of Captain Morgan himself.
The castle of Chagres, known as San Lorenzo by the Spaniards, stood uponthe top of an abrupt rock at the mouth of the river, and was one ofthe strongest fortresses for its size in all of the West Indies. Thisstronghold Morgan must have if he ever hoped to win Panama.
The attack of the castle and the defense of it were equally fierce,bloody, and desperate. Again and again the buccaneers assaulted, andagain and again they were beaten back. So the morning came, and itseemed as though the pirates had been baffled this time. But just atthis juncture the thatch of palm leaves on the roofs of some of thebuildings inside the fortifications took fire, a conflagration followed,which caused the explosion of one of the magazines, and in theparalysis of terror that followed, the pirates forced their way intothe fortifications, and the castle was won. Most of the Spaniardsflung themselves from the castle walls into the river or upon the rocksbeneath, preferring death to capture and possible torture; many whowere left were put to the sword, and some few were spared and held asprisoners.
So fell the castle of Chagres, and nothing now lay between thebuccaneers and the city of Panama but the intervening and tracklessforests.
And now the name of the town whose doom was sealed was no secret.
Up the river of Chagres went Capt. Henry Morgan and twelve hundred men,packed closely in their canoes; they never stopped, saving now and thento rest their stiffened legs, until they had come to a place known asCruz de San Juan Gallego, where they were compelled to leave their boatson account of the shallowness of the water.
Leaving a guard of one hundred and sixty men to protect their boats asa place of refuge in case they should be worsted before Panama, theyturned and plunged into the wilderness before them.
There a more powerful foe awaited them than a host of Spaniardswith match, powder, and lead--starvation. They met but little or noopposition in their progress; but wherever they turned they found everyfiber of meat, every grain of maize, every ounce of bread or meal, sweptaway or destroyed utterly before them. Even when the buccaneers hadsuccessfully overcome an ambuscade or an attack, and had sent theSpaniards flying, the fugitives took the time to strip their deadcomrades of every grain of food in their leathern sacks, leaving nothingbut the empty bags.
Says the narrator of these events, himself one of the expedition, "Theyafterward fell to eating those leathern bags, as affording something tothe ferment of their stomachs."
Ten days they struggled through this bitter privation, doggedly forcingtheir way onward, faint with hunger and haggard with weakness and fever.Then, from the high hill and over the tops of the forest trees, they sawthe steeples of Panama, and nothing remained between them and their goalbut the fighting of four Spaniards to every one of them--a simple thingwhich they had done over and over again.
Down they poured upon Panama, and out came the Spaniards to meet them;four hundred horse, two thousand five hundred foot, and two thousandwild bulls which had been herded together to be driven over thebuccaneers so that their ranks might be disordered and broken. Thebuccaneers were only eight hundred strong; the others had eitherfallen in battle or had dropped along the dreary pathway through thewilderness; but in the space of two hours the Spaniards were flyingmadly over the plain, minus six hundred who lay dead or dying behindthem.
As for the bulls, as many of them as were shot served as food there andthen for the half-famished pirates, for the buccaneers were never moreat home than in the slaughter of cattle.
Then they marched toward the city. Three hours' more fighting andthey were in the streets, howling, yelling, plundering, gorging,dram-drinking, and giving full vent to all the vile and nameless luststhat burned in their hearts like a hell of fire. And now followed theusual sequence of events--rapine, cruelty, and extortion; only this timethere was no town to ransom, for Morgan had given orders that it shouldbe destroyed. The torch was set to it, and Panama, one of the greatestcities in the New World, was swept from the face of the earth. Why thedeed was done, no man but Morgan could tell. Perhaps it was that allthe secret hiding places for treasure might be brought to light; butwhatever the reason was, it lay hidden in the breast of the greatbuccaneer himself. For three weeks Morgan and his men abode in thisdreadful place; and they marched away with ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVEbeasts of burden loaded with treasures of gold and silver and jewels,besides great quantities of merchandise, and six hundred prisoners heldfor ransom.
Whatever became of all that vast wealth, and what it amounted to, noman but Morgan ever knew, for when a division was made it was found thatthere was only TWO HUNDRED PIECES OF EIGHT TO EACH MAN.
When this dividend was declared a howl of execration went up, underwhich even Capt. Henry Morgan quailed. At night he and four othercommanders slipped their cables and ran out to sea, and it was said thatthese divid
ed the greater part of the booty among themselves. But thewealth plundered at Panama could hardly have fallen short of a millionand a half of dollars. Computing it at this reasonable figure, thevarious prizes won by Henry Morgan in the West Indies would stand asfollows: Panama, $1,500,000; Porto Bello, $800,000; Puerto delPrincipe, $700,000; Maracaibo and Gibraltar, $400,000; various piracies,$250,000--making a grand total of $3,650,000 as the vast harvest ofplunder. With this fabulous wealth, wrenched from the Spaniards bymeans of the rack and the cord, and pilfered from his companions by themeanest of thieving, Capt. Henry Morgan retired from business, honoredof all, rendered famous by his deeds, knighted by the good King CharlesII, and finally appointed governor of the rich island of Jamaica.
Other buccaneers followed him. Campeche was taken and sacked, and evenCartagena itself fell; but with Henry Morgan culminated the glory ofthe buccaneers, and from that time they declined in power and wealth andwickedness until they were finally swept away.
The buccaneers became bolder and bolder. In fact, so daring were theircrimes that the home governments, stirred at last by these outrageousbarbarities, seriously undertook the suppression of the freebooters,lopping and trimming the main trunk until its members were scatteredhither and thither, and it was thought that the organization wasexterminated. But, so far from being exterminated, the individualmembers were merely scattered north, south, east, and west, each forminga nucleus around which gathered and clustered the very worst of theoffscouring of humanity.
The result was that when the seventeenth century was fairly packed awaywith its lavender in the store chest of the past, a score or morebands of freebooters were cruising along the Atlantic seaboard in armedvessels, each with a black flag with its skull and crossbones at thefore, and with a nondescript crew made up of the tags and remnants ofcivilized and semicivilized humanity (white, black, red, and yellow),known generally as marooners, swarming upon the decks below.
Nor did these offshoots from the old buccaneer stem confine theirdepredations to the American seas alone; the East Indies and the Africancoast also witnessed their doings, and suffered from them, and even theBay of Biscay had good cause to remember more than one visit from them.
Worthy sprigs from so worthy a stem improved variously upon theparent methods; for while the buccaneers were content to prey upon theSpaniards alone, the marooners reaped the harvest from the commerce ofall nations.
So up and down the Atlantic seaboard they cruised, and for the fiftyyears that marooning was in the flower of its glory it was a sorrowfultime for the coasters of New England, the middle provinces, and theVirginias, sailing to the West Indies with their cargoes of salt fish,grain, and tobacco. Trading became almost as dangerous as privateering,and sea captains were chosen as much for their knowledge of theflintlock and the cutlass as for their seamanship.
As by far the largest part of the trading in American waters wasconducted by these Yankee coasters, so by far the heaviest blows, andthose most keenly felt, fell upon them. Bulletin after bulletin cameto port with its doleful tale of this vessel burned or that vesselscuttled, this one held by the pirates for their own use or that onestripped of its goods and sent into port as empty as an eggshell fromwhich the yolk had been sucked. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, andCharleston suffered alike, and worthy ship owners had to leave offcounting their losses upon their fingers and take to the slate to keepthe dismal record.
"Maroon--to put ashore on a desert isle, as a sailor, under pretense ofhaving committed some great crime." Thus our good Noah Webster gives usthe dry bones, the anatomy, upon which the imagination may construct aspecimen to suit itself.
It is thence that the marooners took their name, for marooning wasone of their most effective instruments of punishment or revenge. If apirate broke one of the many rules which governed the particular bandto which he belonged, he was marooned; did a captain defend his ship tosuch a degree as to be unpleasant to the pirates attacking it, hewas marooned; even the pirate captain himself, if he displeased hisfollowers by the severity of his rule, was in danger of having the samepunishment visited upon him which he had perhaps more than once visitedupon another.
The process of marooning was as simple as terrible. A suitable place waschosen (generally some desert isle as far removed as possible from thepathway of commerce), and the condemned man was rowed from the ship tothe beach. Out he was bundled upon the sand spit; a gun, a half dozenbullets, a few pinches of powder, and a bottle of water were chuckedashore after him, and away rowed the boat's crew back to the ship,leaving the poor wretch alone to rave away his life in madness, or tosit sunken in his gloomy despair till death mercifully released him fromtorment. It rarely if ever happened that anything was known of him afterhaving been marooned. A boat's crew from some vessel, sailing by chancethat way, might perhaps find a few chalky bones bleaching upon the whitesand in the garish glare of the sunlight, but that was all. And suchwere marooners.
By far the largest number of pirate captains were Englishmen, for,from the days of good Queen Bess, English sea captains seemed to havea natural turn for any species of venture that had a smack of piracyin it, and from the great Admiral Drake of the old, old days, to thetruculent Morgan of buccaneering times, the Englishman did the boldestand wickedest deeds, and wrought the most damage.
First of all upon the list of pirates stands the bold Captain Avary, oneof the institutors of marooning. Him we see but dimly, half hidden bythe glamouring mists of legends and tradition. Others who came afterwardoutstripped him far enough in their doings, but he stands pre-eminent asthe first of marooners of whom actual history has been handed down to usof the present day.
When the English, Dutch, and Spanish entered into an alliance tosuppress buccaneering in the West Indies, certain worthies of Bristol,in old England, fitted out two vessels to assist in this laudableproject; for doubtless Bristol trade suffered smartly from the Morgansand the l'Olonoises of that old time. One of these vessels was named theDuke, of which a certain Captain Gibson was the commander and Avary themate.
Away they sailed to the West Indies, and there Avary became impressed bythe advantages offered by piracy, and by the amount of good things thatwere to be gained by very little striving.
One night the captain (who was one of those fellows mightily addictedto punch), instead of going ashore to saturate himself with rum at theordinary, had his drink in his cabin in private. While he lay snoringaway the effects of his rum in the cabin, Avary and a few otherconspirators heaved the anchor very leisurely, and sailed out of theharbor of Corunna, and through the midst of the allied fleet riding atanchor in the darkness.
By and by, when the morning came, the captain was awakened by thepitching and tossing of the vessel, the rattle and clatter of the tackleoverhead, and the noise of footsteps passing and repassing hither andthither across the deck. Perhaps he lay for a while turning the matterover and over in his muddled head, but he presently rang the bell, andAvary and another fellow answered the call.
"What's the matter?" bawls the captain from his berth.
"Nothing," says Avary, coolly.
"Something's the matter with the ship," says the captain. "Does shedrive? What weather is it?"
"Oh no," says Avary; "we are at sea."
"At sea?"
"Come, come!" says Avary: "I'll tell you; you must know that I'm thecaptain of the ship now, and you must be packing from this here cabin.We are bound to Madagascar, to make all of our fortunes, and if you're amind to ship for the cruise, why, we'll be glad to have you, if you willbe sober and mind your own business; if not, there is a boat alongside,and I'll have you set ashore."
The poor half-tipsy captain had no relish to go a-pirating under thecommand of his backsliding mate, so out of the ship he bundled, and awayhe rowed with four or five of the crew, who, like him, refused to joinwith their jolly shipmates.
The rest of them sailed away to the East Indies, to try their fortunesin those waters, for our Captain Avary was of a high spirit, and hadno mind to fritt
er away his time in the West Indies squeezed dry bybuccaneer Morgan and others of lesser note. No, he would make a boldstroke for it at once, and make or lose at a single cast.
On his way he picked up a couple of like kind with himself--two sloopsoff Madagascar. With these he sailed away to the coast of India, and fora time his name was lost in the obscurity of uncertain history. Butonly for a time, for suddenly it flamed out in a blaze of glory. It wasreported that a vessel belonging to the Great Mogul, laden with treasureand bearing the monarch's own daughter upon a holy pilgrimage to Mecca(they being Mohammedans), had fallen in with the pirates, and after ashort resistance had been surrendered, with the damsel, her court, andall the diamonds, pearls, silk, silver, and gold aboard. It was rumoredthat the Great Mogul, raging at the insult offered to him through hisown flesh and blood, had threatened to wipe out of existence the fewEnglish settlements scattered along the coast; whereat the honorableEast India Company was in a pretty state of fuss and feathers. Rumor,growing with the telling, has it that Avary is going to marry theIndian princess, willy-nilly, and will turn rajah, and eschew piracy asindecent. As for the treasure itself, there was no end to the extent towhich it grew as it passed from mouth to mouth.
Cracking the nut of romance and exaggeration, we come to the kernel ofthe story--that Avary did fall in with an Indian vessel laden with greattreasure (and possibly with the Mogul's daughter), which he captured,and thereby gained a vast prize.
Having concluded that he had earned enough money by the trade he hadundertaken, he determined to retire and live decently for the rest ofhis life upon what he already had. As a step toward this object, he setabout cheating his Madagascar partners out of their share of what hadbeen gained. He persuaded them to store all the treasure in his vessel,it being the largest of the three; and so, having it safely in hand, healtered the course of his ship one fine night, and when the morningcame the Madagascar sloops found themselves floating upon a wide oceanwithout a farthing of the treasure for which they had fought so hard,and for which they might whistle for all the good it would do them.
At first Avary had a great part of a mind to settle at Boston, inMassachusetts, and had that little town been one whit less bleak andforbidding, it might have had the honor of being the home of this famousman. As it was, he did not like the looks of it, so he sailed away tothe eastward, to Ireland, where he settled himself at Biddeford, inhopes of an easy life of it for the rest of his days.
Here he found himself the possessor of a plentiful stock of jewels, suchas pearls, diamonds, rubies, etc., but with hardly a score of honestfarthings to jingle in his breeches pocket. He consulted with a certainmerchant of Bristol concerning the disposal of the stones--a fellownot much more cleanly in his habits of honesty than Avary himself.This worthy undertook to act as Avary's broker. Off he marched withthe jewels, and that was the last that the pirate saw of his Indiantreasure.
Perhaps the most famous of all the piratical names to American ears arethose of Capt. Robert Kidd and Capt. Edward Teach, or "Blackbeard."
Nothing will be ventured in regard to Kidd at this time, nor in regardto the pros and cons as to whether he really was or was not a pirate,after all. For many years he was the very hero of heroes of piraticalfame, there was hardly a creek or stream or point of land along ourcoast, hardly a convenient bit of good sandy beach, or hump of rock, orwater-washed cave, where fabulous treasures were not said to have beenhidden by this worthy marooner. Now we are assured that he never wasa pirate, and never did bury any treasure, excepting a certain chest,which he was compelled to hide upon Gardiner's Island--and perhaps evenit was mythical.
So poor Kidd must be relegated to the dull ranks of simply respectablepeople, or semirespectable people at best.
But with "Blackbeard" it is different, for in him we have a real,ranting, raging, roaring pirate per se--one who really did burytreasure, who made more than one captain walk the plank, and whocommitted more private murders than he could number on the fingers ofboth hands; one who fills, and will continue to fill, the place to whichhe has been assigned for generations, and who may be depended upon tohold his place in the confidence of others for generations to come.
Captain Teach was a Bristol man born, and learned his trade on board ofsundry privateers in the East Indies during the old French war--that of1702--and a better apprenticeship could no man serve. At last, somewhereabout the latter part of the year 1716, a privateering captain, oneBenjamin Hornigold, raised him from the ranks and put him in command ofa sloop--a lately captured prize and Blackbeard's fortune was made. Itwas a very slight step, and but the change of a few letters, to convert"privateer" into "pirate," and it was a very short time before Teachmade that change. Not only did he make it himself, but he persuaded hisold captain to join with him.
And now fairly began that series of bold and lawless depredations whichhave made his name so justly famous, and which placed him among the verygreatest of marooning freebooters.
"Our hero," says the old historian who sings of the arms and bravery ofthis great man--"our hero assumed the cognomen of Blackbeard from thatlarge quantity of hair which, like a frightful meteor, covered his wholeface, and frightened America more than any comet that appeared therein a long time. He was accustomed to twist it with ribbons into smalltails, after the manner of our Ramillies wig, and turn them about hisears. In time of action he wore a sling over his shoulders, with threebrace of pistols, hanging in holsters like bandoleers; he stuck lightedmatches under his hat, which, appearing on each side of his face, andhis eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such afigure that imagination cannot form an idea of a Fury from hell to lookmore frightful."
The night before the day of the action in which he was killed he sat updrinking with some congenial company until broad daylight. One of themasked him if his poor young wife knew where his treasure was hidden."No," says Blackbeard; "nobody but the devil and I knows where it is,and the longest liver shall have all."
As for that poor young wife of his, the life that he and his rum-crazyshipmates led her was too terrible to be told.
For a time Blackbeard worked at his trade down on the Spanish Main,gathering, in the few years he was there, a very neat little fortune inthe booty captured from sundry vessels; but by and by he took it intohis head to try his luck along the coast of the Carolinas; so offhe sailed to the northward, with quite a respectable little fleet,consisting of his own vessel and two captured sloops. From that time hewas actively engaged in the making of American history in his small way.
He first appeared off the bar of Charleston Harbor, to the no smallexcitement of the worthy town of that ilk, and there he lay for fiveor six days, blockading the port, and stopping incoming and outgoingvessels at his pleasure, so that, for the time, the commerce of theprovince was entirely paralyzed. All the vessels so stopped he held asprizes, and all the crews and passengers (among the latter of whom wasmore than one provincial worthy of the day) he retained as though theywere prisoners of war.
And it was a mightily awkward thing for the good folk of Charleston tobehold day after day a black flag with its white skull and crossbonesfluttering at the fore of the pirate captain's craft, over across thelevel stretch of green salt marshes; and it was mightily unpleasant,too, to know that this or that prominent citizen was crowded down withthe other prisoners under the hatches.
One morning Captain Blackbeard finds that his stock of medicine is low."Tut!" says he, "we'll turn no hair gray for that." So up he calls thebold Captain Richards, the commander of his consort the Revenge sloop,and bids him take Mr. Marks (one of his prisoners), and go up toCharleston and get the medicine. There was no task that suited ourCaptain Richards better than that. Up to the town he rowed, as bold asbrass. "Look ye," says he to the governor, rolling his quid of tobaccofrom one cheek to another--"look ye, we're after this and that, and ifwe don't get it, why, I'll tell you plain, we'll burn them bloody craftsof yours that we've took over yonder, and cut the weasand of everyclodpoll aboard o
f 'em."
There was no answering an argument of such force as this, and theworshipful governor and the good folk of Charleston knew very wellthat Blackbeard and his crew were the men to do as they promised. SoBlackbeard got his medicine, and though it cost the colony two thousanddollars, it was worth that much to the town to be quit of him.
They say that while Captain Richards was conducting his negotiationswith the governor his boat's crew were stumping around the streets ofthe town, having a glorious time of it, while the good folk gloweredwrathfully at them, but dared venture nothing in speech or act.
Having gained a booty of between seven and eight thousand dollars fromthe prizes captured, the pirates sailed away from Charleston Harbor tothe coast of North Carolina.
And now Blackbeard, following the plan adopted by so many others of hiskind, began to cudgel his brains for means to cheat his fellows out oftheir share of the booty.
At Topsail Inlet he ran his own vessel aground, as though by accident.Hands, the captain of one of the consorts, pretending to come to hisassistance, also grounded HIS sloop. Nothing now remained but for thosewho were able to get away in the other craft, which was all that wasnow left of the little fleet. This did Blackbeard with some forty of hisfavorites. The rest of the pirates were left on the sand spit to awaitthe return of their companions--which never happened.
As for Blackbeard and those who were with him, they were that muchricher, for there were so many the fewer pockets to fill. But even yetthere were too many to share the booty, in Blackbeard's opinion, and sohe marooned a parcel more of them--some eighteen or twenty--upon a nakedsand bank, from which they were afterward mercifully rescued by anotherfreebooter who chanced that way--a certain Major Stede Bonnet, of whommore will presently be said. About that time a royal proclamation hadbeen issued offering pardon to all pirates in arms who would surrenderto the king's authority before a given date. So up goes MasterBlackbeard to the Governor of North Carolina and makes his neck safe bysurrendering to the proclamation--albeit he kept tight clutch upon whathe had already gained.
And now we find our bold Captain Blackbeard established in the goodprovince of North Carolina, where he and His Worship the Governor struckup a vast deal of intimacy, as profitable as it was pleasant. There issomething very pretty in the thought of the bold sea rover giving up hisadventurous life (excepting now and then an excursion against a traderor two in the neighboring sound, when the need of money was pressing);settling quietly down into the routine of old colonial life, with ayoung wife of sixteen at his side, who made the fourteenth that he hadin various ports here and there in the world.
Becoming tired of an inactive life, Blackbeard afterward resumed hispiratical career. He cruised around in the rivers and inlets and soundsof North Carolina for a while, ruling the roost and with never a one tosay him nay, until there was no bearing with such a pest any longer. Sothey sent a deputation up to the Governor of Virginia asking if he wouldbe pleased to help them in their trouble.
There were two men-of-war lying at Kicquetan, in the James River, at thetime. To them the Governor of Virginia applies, and plucky LieutenantMaynard, of the Pearl, was sent to Ocracoke Inlet to fight this piratewho ruled it down there so like the cock of a walk. There he foundBlackbeard waiting for him, and as ready for a fight as ever thelieutenant himself could be. Fight they did, and while it lasted itwas as pretty a piece of business of its kind as one could wish tosee. Blackbeard drained a glass of grog, wishing the lieutenant luckin getting aboard of him, fired a broadside, blew some twenty of thelieutenant's men out of existence, and totally crippled one of hislittle sloops for the balance of the fight. After that, and under coverof the smoke, the pirate and his men boarded the other sloop, and thenfollowed a fine old-fashioned hand-to-hand conflict betwixt him and thelieutenant. First they fired their pistols, and then they took to itwith cutlasses--right, left, up and down, cut and slash--until thelieutenant's cutlass broke short off at the hilt. Then Blackbeard wouldhave finished him off handsomely, only up steps one of the lieutenant'smen and fetches him a great slash over the neck, so that the lieutenantcame off with no more hurt than a cut across the knuckles.
At the very first discharge of their pistols Blackbeard had been shotthrough the body, but he was not for giving up for that--not he. As saidbefore, he was of the true roaring, raging breed of pirates, and stoodup to it until he received twenty more cutlass cuts and five additionalshots, and then fell dead while trying to fire off an empty pistol.After that the lieutenant cut off the pirate's head, and sailed away intriumph, with the bloody trophy nailed to the bow of his battered sloop.
Those of Blackbeard's men who were not killed were carried off toVirginia, and all of them tried and hanged but one or two, their names,no doubt, still standing in a row in the provincial records.
But did Blackbeard really bury treasures, as tradition says, along thesandy shores he haunted?
Master Clement Downing, midshipman aboard the Salisbury, wrote a bookafter his return from the cruise to Madagascar, whither the Salisburyhad been ordered, to put an end to the piracy with which those waterswere infested. He says:
"At Guzarat I met with a Portuguese named Anthony de Sylvestre; he camewith two other Portuguese and two Dutchmen to take on in the Moor'sservice, as many Europeans do. This Anthony told me he had been amongthe pirates, and that he belonged to one of the sloops in Virginia whenBlackbeard was taken. He informed me that if it should be my lot everto go to York River or Maryland, near an island called Mulberry Island,provided we went on shore at the watering place, where the shipping usedmost commonly to ride, that there the pirates had buried considerablesums of money in great chests well clamped with iron plates. As to mypart, I never was that way, nor much acquainted with any that ever usedthose parts; but I have made inquiry, and am informed that there is sucha place as Mulberry Island. If any person who uses those parts shouldthink it worth while to dig a little way at the upper end of a smallcove, where it is convenient to land, he would soon find whether theinformation I had was well grounded. Fronting the landing place are fivetrees, among which, he said, the money was hid. I cannot warrant thetruth of this account; but if I was ever to go there, I should find somemeans or other to satisfy myself, as it could not be a great deal outof my way. If anybody should obtain the benefit of this account, if itplease God that they ever come to England, 'tis hoped they will rememberwhence they had this information."
Another worthy was Capt. Edward Low, who learned his trade ofsail-making at good old Boston town, and piracy at Honduras. No onestood higher in the trade than he, and no one mounted to more loftyaltitudes of bloodthirsty and unscrupulous wickedness. 'Tis strange thatso little has been written and sung of this man of might, for he was asworthy of story and of song as was Blackbeard.
It was under a Yankee captain that he made his first cruise--down toHonduras, for a cargo of logwood, which in those times was no betterthan stolen from the Spanish folk.
One day, lying off the shore, in the Gulf of Honduras, comes Master Lowand the crew of the whaleboat rowing across from the beach, where theyhad been all morning chopping logwood.
"What are you after?" says the captain, for they were coming back withnothing but themselves in the boat.
"We're after our dinner," says Low, as spokesman of the party.
"You'll have no dinner," says the captain, "until you fetch off anotherload."
"Dinner or no dinner, we'll pay for it," says Low, wherewith he up witha musket, squinted along the barrel, and pulled the trigger.
Luckily the gun hung fire, and the Yankee captain was spared to steallogwood a while longer.
All the same, that was no place for Ned Low to make a longer stay, sooff he and his messmates rowed in a whaleboat, captured a brig out atsea, and turned pirates.
He presently fell in with the notorious Captain Lowther, a fellow afterhis own kidney, who put the finishing touches to his education andtaught him what wickedness he did not already know.
And so he became
a master pirate, and a famous hand at his craft, andthereafter forever bore an inveterate hatred of all Yankees because ofthe dinner he had lost, and never failed to smite whatever one ofthem luck put within his reach. Once he fell in with a ship off SouthCarolina--the Amsterdam Merchant, Captain Williamson, commander--aYankee craft and a Yankee master. He slit the nose and cropped the earsof the captain, and then sailed merrily away, feeling the better forhaving marred a Yankee.
New York and New England had more than one visit from the doughtycaptain, each of which visits they had good cause to remember, for hemade them smart for it.
Along in the year 1722 thirteen vessels were riding at anchor in frontof the good town of Marblehead. Into the harbor sailed a strange craft."Who is she?" say the townsfolk, for the coming of a new vessel was nosmall matter in those days.
Who the strangers were was not long a matter of doubt. Up goes the blackflag, and the skull and crossbones to the fore.
"'Tis the bloody Low," say one and all; and straightway all was flutterand commotion, as in a duck pond when a hawk pitches and strikes in themidst.
It was a glorious thing for our captain, for here were thirteen Yankeecrafts at one and the same time. So he took what he wanted, and thensailed away, and it was many a day before Marblehead forgot that visit.
Some time after this he and his consort fell foul of an English sloopof war, the Greyhound, whereby they were so roughly handled that Low wasglad enough to slip away, leaving his consort and her crew behind him,as a sop to the powers of law and order. And lucky for them if no worsefate awaited them than to walk the dreadful plank with a bandage aroundthe blinded eyes and a rope around the elbows. So the consort was taken,and the crew tried and hanged in chains, and Low sailed off in as prettya bit of rage as ever a pirate fell into.
The end of this worthy is lost in the fogs of the past: some say that hedied of a yellow fever down in New Orleans; it was not at the end of ahempen cord, more's the pity.
Here fittingly with our strictly American pirates should stand MajorStede Bonnet along with the rest. But in truth he was only a poorhalf-and-half fellow of his kind, and even after his hand was fairlyturned to the business he had undertaken, a qualm of conscience wouldnow and then come across him, and he would make vast promises toforswear his evil courses.
However, he jogged along in his course of piracy snugly enough until hefell foul of the gallant Colonel Rhett, off Charleston Harbor, whereuponhis luck and his courage both were suddenly snuffed out with a puff ofpowder smoke and a good rattling broadside. Down came the "Black Roger"with its skull and crossbones from the fore, and Colonel Rhett had theglory of fetching back as pretty a cargo of scoundrels and cutthroats asthe town ever saw.
After the next assizes they were strung up, all in a row--evil applesready for the roasting.
"Ned" England was a fellow of different blood--only he snapped his whipacross the back of society over in the East Indies and along the hotshores of Hindustan.
The name of Capt. Howel Davis stands high among his fellows. He was theUlysses of pirates, the beloved not only of Mercury, but of Minerva.
He it was who hoodwinked the captain of a French ship of double the sizeand strength of his own, and fairly cheated him into the surrender ofhis craft without the firing of a single pistol or the striking of asingle blow; he it was who sailed boldly into the port of Gambia, on thecoast of Guinea, and under the guns of the castle, proclaiming himselfas a merchant trading for slaves.
The cheat was kept up until the fruit of mischief was ripe for thepicking; then, when the governor and the guards of the castle werelulled into entire security, and when Davis's band was scattered aboutwherever each man could do the most good, it was out pistol, up cutlass,and death if a finger moved. They tied the soldiers back to back, andthe governor to his own armchair, and then rifled wherever it pleasedthem. After that they sailed away, and though they had not made thefortune they had hoped to glean, it was a good snug round sum that theyshared among them.
Their courage growing high with success, they determined to attempt theisland of Del Principe--a prosperous Portuguese settlement on thecoast. The plan for taking the place was cleverly laid, and would havesucceeded, only that a Portuguese negro among the pirate crew turnedtraitor and carried the news ashore to the governor of the fort.Accordingly, the next day, when Captain Davis came ashore, he foundthere a good strong guard drawn up as though to honor his coming. Butafter he and those with him were fairly out of their boat, and well awayfrom the water side, there was a sudden rattle of musketry, a cloud ofsmoke, and a dull groan or two. Only one man ran out from under thatpungent cloud, jumped into the boat, and rowed away; and when it lifted,there lay Captain Davis and his companions all of a heap, like a pile ofold clothes.
Capt. Bartholomew Roberts was the particular and especial pupilof Davis, and when that worthy met his death so suddenly and sounexpectedly in the unfortunate manner above narrated, he was chosenunanimously as the captain of the fleet, and he was a worthy pupil ofa worthy master. Many were the poor fluttering merchant ducks that thissea hawk swooped upon and struck; and cleanly and cleverly were theyplucked before his savage clutch loosened its hold upon them.
"He made a gallant figure," says the old narrator, "being dressed in arich crimson waistcoat and breeches and red feather in his hat, a goldchain around his neck, with a diamond cross hanging to it, a sword inhis hand, and two pair of pistols hanging at the end of a silk slingflung over his shoulders according to the fashion of the pyrates."Thus he appeared in the last engagement which he fought--that with theSwallow--a royal sloop of war. A gallant fight they made of it, thosebulldog pirates, for, finding themselves caught in a trap betwixt theman-of-war and the shore, they determined to bear down upon the king'svessel, fire a slapping broadside into her, and then try to get away,trusting to luck in the doing, and hoping that their enemy might becrippled by their fire.
Captain Roberts himself was the first to fall at the return fire of theSwallow; a grapeshot struck him in the neck, and he fell forward acrossthe gun near to which he was standing at the time. A certain fellownamed Stevenson, who was at the helm, saw him fall, and thought he waswounded. At the lifting of the arm the body rolled over upon the deck,and the man saw that the captain was dead. "Whereupon," says the oldhistory, "he" [Stevenson] "gushed into tears, and wished that the nextshot might be his portion." After their captain's death the pirate crewhad no stomach for more fighting; the "Black Roger" was struck, and oneand all surrendered to justice and the gallows.
Such is a brief and bald account of the most famous of these pirates.But they are only a few of a long list of notables, such as CaptainMartel, Capt. Charles Vane (who led the gallant Colonel Rhett, of SouthCarolina, such a wild-goose chase in and out among the sluggish creeksand inlets along the coast), Capt. John Rackam, and Captain Anstis,Captain Worley, and Evans, and Philips, and others--a score or more ofwild fellows whose very names made ship captains tremble in their shoesin those good old times.
And such is that black chapter of history of the past--an evil chapter,lurid with cruelty and suffering, stained with blood and smoke. Yetit is a written chapter, and it must be read. He who chooses mayread betwixt the lines of history this great truth: Evil itself is aninstrument toward the shaping of good. Therefore the history of evil aswell as the history of good should be read, considered, and digested.
