INTRODUCTION.I.
Whyis it that a little spice of deviltry lends not an unpleasantly titillating twang to the great mass of respectable flour that goes to make up the pudding of our modern civilization? And pertinent to this question another—Why is it that the pirate has, and always has had, a certain lurid glamour of the heroical enveloping him round about? Is there, deep under the accumulateddébrisof culture, a hidden ground-work of the old-time savage? Is there even in these well-regulated times an unsubdued nature in the respectable mental household of every one of us that still kicks against the pricks of law and order? To make my meaning more clear, would not every boy, for instance—that is every boy of any account—rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament? And we ourselves; would we not rather read such a story as that of Captain Avery’s capture of the East Indian treasure-ship, with its beautiful princess and load of jewels (which gems he sold by the handful, history sayeth, to a Bristol merchant), than—say one of Bishop Atterbury’s sermons or the goodly Master Robert Boyle’s religious romance of “Theodora and Didymus”? It is to be apprehended that to the unregenerate nature of most of us, there can be but one answer to such a query.
In the pleasurable warmth the heart feels in answer to tales of derring-do, Nelson’s battles are all mightily interesting, but even in spite of their romance of splendid courage, I fancy that the majority of us would rather turn back over the leaves of history to read how Drake captured the Spanish treasure-ship in the South Sea, and of how he divided such a quantity of booty in the Island of Plate (so named because of the tremendous dividend there declared) that it had to be measured in quart bowls, being too considerable to be counted.
Courage and daring, no matter how mad and ungodly, have always a redundancy ofvimand life to recommend them to the nether man that lies within us, and no doubt his desperate courage, his battle against the tremendous odds of all the civilized world of law and order have had much to do in making a popular hero of our friend of the black flag. But it is not altogether courage and daring that endears him to our hearts. There is another and perhaps a greater kinship in that lust for wealth that makes one’s fancy revel more pleasantly in the story of the division of treasure in the pirate’s island retreat, the hiding of his godless gains somewhere in the sandy stretch of tropic beach, there to remain hidden until the time should come to rake the dubloons up again and to spend them like a lord in polite society, than in the most thrilling tales of his wonderful escapes from commissioned cruisers through tortuous channels between the coral-reefs.
And what a life of adventure is his to be sure! A life of constant alertness, constant danger, constant escape! An ocean Ishmaelite, he wanders for ever aimlessly, homelessly; now unheard of for months, now careening his boat on some lonely uninhabited shore, now appearing suddenly to swoop down on some merchant-vessel with rattle of musketry, shouting, yells, and a hell of unbridled passions let loose to rend and tear.
What a Carlislean hero! What a setting of blood and lust and flame and rapine for such a hero!
Piracy such as was practised in the flower of its days—that is, during the early eighteenth century—was no sudden growth. It was an evolution, from the semi-lawful buccaneering of the sixteenth century, just as buccaneering was upon its part, in a certain sense, an evolution from the unorganized, unauthorized warfare of the Tudor period.
For there was a deal of piratical smack in the anti-Spanish ventures of Elizabethan days. Many of the adventurers—of the Sir Francis Drake school, for instance—actually overstepped again and again the bounds of international law, entering into the realms ofde factopiracy. Nevertheless, while their doings were not recognized officially by the Government, the perpetrators were neither punished nor reprimanded for their excursions against Spanish commerce at home or in the West Indies; rather were they commended, and it was considered not altogether a discreditable thing for men to get rich upon the spoils taken from Spanish galleons in times of nominal peace. Many of the most reputable citizens and merchants of London, when they felt that the Queen failed in her duty of pushing the fight against the great Catholic Power, fitted out fleets upon their own account and sent them to levy good Protestant war of a private nature upon the Pope’s anointed.
Some of the treasures captured in such ventures were immense, stupendous, unbelievable. For an example, one can hardly credit the truth of the “purchase” gained by Drake in the famous capture of the plate-ship in the South Sea.
One of the old buccaneer writers of a century later says: “The Spaniards affirm to this day that he took at that time twelve-score tons of plate and sixteen bowls of coined money a man (his number being then forty-five men in all), insomuch that they were forced to heave much of it overboard, because his ship could not carry it all.”
Maybe this was a very greatly exaggerated statement put by the author and his Spanish authorities, nevertheless there was enough truth in it to prove very conclusively to the bold minds of the age that tremendous profits—“purchases” they called them—were to be made from piracy. The Western World is filled with the names of daring mariners of those old days, who came flitting across the great trackless ocean in their little tub-like boats of a few hundred tons burden, partly to explore unknown seas, partly—largely, perhaps—in pursuit of Spanish treasure: Frobisher, Davis, Drake, and a score of others.
In this left-handed war against Catholic Spain many of the adventurers were, no doubt, stirred and incited by a grim, Calvinistic, Puritanical zeal for Protestantism. But equally beyond doubt the gold and silver and plate of the “Scarlet Woman” had much to do with the persistent energy with which these hardy mariners braved the mysterious unknown terrors of the great unknown ocean that stretched away to the sunset, there in far away waters to attack the huge, unwieldy treasure-ladened galleons that sailed up and down the Caribbean Sea and through the Bahama Channel.
Of all ghastly and terrible things old-time religious war was the most ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous cruelty of those times. Generally death was the least penalty that capture entailed. When the Spaniards made prisoners of the English, the Inquisition took them in hand, and what that meant all the world knows. When the English captured a Spanish vessel the prisoners were tortured, either for the sake of revenge or to compel them to disclose where treasure lay hidden. Cruelty begat cruelty, and it would be hard to say whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Latin showed himself to be most proficient in torturing his victim.
When Cobham, for instance, captured the Spanish ship in the Bay of Biscay, after all resistance was over and the heat of the battle had cooled, he ordered his crew to bind the captain and all of the crew and every Spaniard aboard—whether in arms or not—to sew them up in the mainsail and to fling them overboard. There were some twenty dead bodies in the sail when a few days later it was washed up on the shore.
Of course such acts were not likely to go unavenged, and many an innocent life was sacrificed to pay the debt of Cobham’s cruelty.
Nothing could be more piratical than all this, nevertheless, as was said, it was winked at, condoned, if not sanctioned, by the law; and it was not beneath people of family and respectability to take part in it. But by and by Protestantism and Catholicism began to be at somewhat less deadly enmity with one another, religious wars were still far enough from being ended, but the scabbard of the sword was no longer flung away when the blade was drawn. And so followed a time of nominal peace, and a generation arose with whom it was no longer respectable and worthy—one might say a matter of duty—to fight a country with which one’s own land was not at war. Nevertheless, the seed had been sown; it had been demonstrated that it was feasible to practice piracy against Spain and not to suffer therefor. Blood had been shed and cruelty practised, and once indulged no lust seems stronger than that of shedding blood and practising cruelty.
Though Spain might be ever so well grounded in peace at home, in the West Indies she was always at war with the whole world—English, French, Dutch. It was almost a matter of life or death with her to keep her hold upon the New World. At home she was bankrupt and, upon the earthquake of the Reformation, her power was already beginning to totter and to crumble to pieces. America was her treasure-house, and from it alone could she hope to keep her leaking purse full of gold and silver. So it was that she strove strenuously, desperately to keep out the world from her American possessions—a bootless task, for the old order upon which her power rested was broken and crumbled for ever. But still she strove, fighting against fate, and so it was that in the tropical America it was one continual war between her and all the world. Thus it came that long after piracy ceased to be allowed at home, it continued in those far away seas with unabated vigour, recruiting to its service all that lawless malign element which gathers together in every newly-opened country where the only law is lawlessness, where might is right and where a living is to be gained with no more trouble than cutting a throat.
Such were the conditions of life that gave rise to that peculiar class of outlaws and semi-outlaws known as the buccaneers—those pirates, hunters, and freebooters, whose very name has become a synonym of all that is lawless, desperate, godless.
Little or nothing is known of the lives and habits of these nomadic hunter-pirates beyond what is to be found in a short concise history of some of their greater exploits, written by one of their number—John Esquemeling by name—who lived with them, and was with Captain Morgan during his most deservedly famous attack upon the City of Panama.
The temptation is always great to an editor to interlope his own ideas of character and his own views of the results to the world of the world’s happenings; but in the case of the Esquemeling history—though more serious historians are prone to say that the statements therein given are not to be depended upon—it should be decidedly hands off. One touch of the modern brush would destroy the whole tone of dim local colours of the past made misty by the lapse of time. It needs the quaint old archaic language of the seventeenth century to tell of those deeds of blood and rapine and cruelty, and the stiff, formal style of the author-translator seems in some way to remove those deeds out of the realms of actuality into the hazy light of romance. So told the adventures of those old buccaneers still remain a part of humbler history, but they do not sound so cruel, so revolting as they would be told in our nineteenth-century vernacular.
And as for the lives of the buccaneers themselves—the account of how they wrenched Tortuga from Spain, of how they peopled Western Hispaniola with cattle-killing hunters and desperadoes, of how they roamed through the tropical rankness of the forests, with their half-wild dogs and their huge, unwieldy firelock guns, now hunted by the Spaniards like wild beasts, and now like wild beasts turning at bay to rend and tear with savage quickness—it would be, if anything, still more a pity to mar the telling as he tells it with his pithy conciseness. And then, after all, it is such old histories alone that can bring one in full touch with the empty shell of a life that is past and gone, and such a history is doubly, trebly full of interest when told by an actor who actually lived it in the scenes of which he writes. And so we leave honest John Esquemeling to tell his own history in his own way.
However, of the differentiation of the buccaneer pirate from the buccaneer proper something may, perhaps, be added to aid the reader in a clearer understanding of the manner in which they came to graduate from cattle-stealing to throat-cutting.
The buccaneers took their name from a peculiar method of curing beef by drying it in the sun, which was termed buchanning. The beef so cured was, itself wild or half-wild cattle, stolen from the neighbouring Spaniards of the great Island of Hispaniola—the San Domingo of our day. The chief rendezvous of these nomadic hunters and curers of meat was upon a little hunch of an island known as Tortuga de Mar, so called from its supposed resemblance to the sea-turtle. Of the manner in which the French settled upon this island of the sea-turtle, of their bloody fights with the Spaniards, of the conquest of the island by the one, of its recapture by the other, of its recapture again by the French, the author tells at length. Suffice it to be said here that, in spite of all the power of Spain, the buccaneers finally made conquest of Tortuga, and that a French governor was sent to rule over them.
No better situation could have been found for the trade in which they were busied. Tortuga, lying as it does off the north-west shore of Hispaniola and at the outlet of the Old Bahama Channel (a broad stretch of navigable water extending between the Island of Cuba and the great Bahama Banks), was almost in the very centre of the main route of travel between the Western World and Europe, along which the commerce of the West Indies came and went, ebbed and flowed. It afforded, perhaps, one of the most convenient ports of the whole Western World in which home-returning vessels might provision and take in water. The captains and owners of the trading vessels asked no questions as to the means whereby cattle were procured. It sufficed them that the meat was well dried and well cured, and, having been stolen, was cheaper than that to be had at Porto Bello, Santa Catharina, and other Spanish ports. So buccaneering (in its proper sense) was quite a profitable business, and prospered accordingly; the step from stealing cattle to piracy was not so very great.
Among the buccaneers were to be found the offscourings of all the French and English West Indies—a mad, savage, unkempt phase of humanity, wilder than the wildest Western cow-boys—fierce, savage, lawless, ungoverned, ungovernable. The Spaniards were merely the means whereby money was to be gained—money to spend in the wild debaucheries, for which the world has afforded few better opportunities than were to be found in the Spanish West Indies. The old days of legalized piracy had never been forgotten, and by and by it began to be felt by the wild cattle-hunters that beef-curing was too slow and laborious a means of earning doubloons. It needed only the leadership of such a one as Pierre le Grand to awaken dormant piracy to a renewed vigour of life.
Our author only gives us meagre details concerning the result of that first bold expedition of the buccaneers under Pierre le Grande into the Carribbean Sea. He tells us but little of the capture of the great galleon by the pirate crew of the long-boat, and as to the gains made by the buccaneers upon the occasion he tells us only that “he (Pierre) set sail for France, carrying with him all the riches he found in that huge vessel, and that there he continued without ever returning to the parts of America again.” But though our author does not tell just what was the plunder taken upon this memorable occasion, it must have been very considerable indeed, and one can imagine how the success of the venture set agog all the buccaneers of Tortuga and Hispaniola. One can fancy what a ferment the rumour of the great capture occasioned; what a hurrying hither and thither; what a crowding of crews of desperadoes into long-boats and hoys! It was so infinitely much easier, so vastly quicker and so much more congenial a means of getting rich upon ill-gotten gains than the dangerous and monotonous business of hunting and stealing cattle in an enemy’s country. So, in a little while—a few years—the West Indian seas were alive with pirates—English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese.
Nearly always, though our author does not explicitly say so, the buccaneers appear to have sailed under some semi-official letters of marque, granted by the colonial governors. It was under such that the famous Captain Morgan sailed in his expedition against Porto Bello, Santa Catharina, and Panama. But such unauthorized letters of marque only made piracy all the more strenuous, unrelaxing, merciless giving as they did some sanction to the cruel and bloody warfare. French and English West Indian towns—such, for instance, as Port Royal, in Jamaica—grew fabulously rich with an unbelievable quickness. In ten or twelve years Spain had lost millions upon millions of dollars, which vast treasure was poured in a golden flood into those hot fever-holes of towns, where Jews and merchants and prostitutes battened on the burning lusts of the wild hunters whose blood was already set aflame with plunder and rapine. At last the risks of Spanish West Indian commerce became so great that no vessel dared venture out of port, excepting under escort of men-of-war. Even then they were not secure always of protection, for there are records that tell of the capture of rich prizes from the very midst of the surrounding plate fleet.
Cargoes of value from the Western provinces of Central and South America, instead of being sent to Spain across the Isthmus from Panama as heretofore, were carried more often by way of the Strait of Magellan, there being less danger in that long and toilsome voyage than in the pirate-infested Carribbean Sea in spite of its trade-winds and steady ocean currents. So it came that by and by the trade of freebooting no longer returned the great profits that had been one time realized by those who embarked in it. It seemed for awhile as though the business were likely to find its death in the very thing that had given it birth—the weakness of Spanish power, decaying to ruin.
It was in this time of its threatened decadence that Francis Lolonois gave a new impulse to the free trade—as it was sometimes called—of the times.
In the temporary paralysis of commerce vast wealth had gathered and accumulated in the great treasure-houses of the walled and fortified towns of the West Indies—Cartagena, Porto Bello, Maracaibo, Havana, and numerous other centres of Spanish power. It was Lolonois who conceived the scheme of descending upon these storehouses of treasure, there to gather in one swoop a prize such as a score of ventures in times past could not return.
It was upon Maracaibo that the first attack was made, and in the matter-of-fact way with which our author describes the sacking of that city and of the town of Gibraltar a picture of a phase of the times is given, so grim, so terrible, that were it not for the further bearing out of the impeachable records, we of these days of light might well doubt that such things could really be in lands calling themselves Christian. The result of the expedition was all—more than all—that Lolonois’ most sanguine hopes could have anticipated; and when he returned in triumph to Tortuga, almost a howl of exultation went up from all the West Indies not under Spanish rule, for there were many other and richer towns than Maracaibo.
It was upon the lines marked out by Lolonois that the greatest of all the buccaneers reaped fame and wealth—Sir Henry Morgan, the hero of the author’s book, the Alexander of his history. Of the birth, parentage, and family of Morgan but little is known, that little being quite apocryphal in its nature. Our author tells us that he was a Welshman, as was to be supposed from his name; that he was of good strain, as was also to be supposed; and that his father was a rich yeoman. The history further tells us that Captain Morgan was, upon his first coming to the Americas, sold for his passage, such being the customary manner of dealing with the steerage passengers of the day. Having served his time he went to Jamaica, where he entered into the service of one Mansvelt, a buccaneer of not a little note, and presently his name becomes famous in the nether history of the period.
Another history, not so picturesque as that written by Esquemeling, but perhaps more accurate, tells us of the great buccaneer’s having been commissioned by Sir Thomas Modyford, then Governor of Jamaica, to levy war upon Spain and other nationalites upon behalf of the King of England.
As was said before, the governors of the non-Spanish West India Islands were accustomed to issue such warrants to the buccaneer privateersmen, but during Sir Thomas Modyford’s time some effort was beginning to be made by the home governments to put a stop to this semi-legal piracy. Sir Thomas, who, it was said, shared in the gains of the freebooters, was carried as prisoner to England to answer for the assumption of his authority in having declared war against a nation with whom the country was then at peace. Nevertheless the latent sympathy of the Government was still on the side of the buccaneers, and it was on account of his attack upon Panama that Captain Morgan was created Sir Henry Morgan by his Majesty King Charles II.
In the historical records of Jamaica his name appears twice as Lieutenant-Governor: once during the time that Sir Thomas Modyford, who had granted him commission, was a State prisoner in the Tower—once, succeeding Charles Earl, of Carlisle, in 1680.
It was perhaps a part of the paradoxical management of State affairs that he was finally recalled to England in 1683 by order of the Secretary of State, for breaking the peace with the Spaniards, contrary to his Majesty’s express orders, and it seems a very fitting epilogue to the comedy of fate that he should have died in the Tower of London for the very deeds for which he was knighted.
Such are the bald and meagre details of his life. Of his renown the world has heard more or less blatant blasts upon the trumpet of Fame for two hundred years and more, the notes whereof are not a little attuned to the history of his deeds written by honest John Esquemeling, the first English edition of which is here edited.
If, as some assert, the popularity of a book is to be estimated according to the number of editions through which it passes, the history of Captain Sir Henry Morgan has, at least in past few generations, been very dear to English-speaking people.
At least this is true of the Esquemeling history; the first English edition was printed under date of 1684—about the time that the hero of it was a State prisoner standing his trial for levying war against Spain, contrary to his Majesty’s express orders, and for the doing of those deeds of conquest for which he had once been honoured. Upon the title page of the quaint old volume is given briefly and concisely the bibliography of the history to its then condition. That it was originally written in Dutch, thence translated into Spanish by Alonso de Bonne-Maison, and now faithfully rendered into English for the first time.
More particularly, the Dutch history from which the Spanish translation was taken is a work published at Amsterdam in 1678, entitled, “De Americaensche Zee Roovers.” A number of other translations beside the Spanish and English accounts were made cotemporarily with other European languages, the best known of which is, perhaps, the French “Histoire des Aventuriers qui se sont signaley dans les Indies,” published originally in 1686. Another French edition, considerably enlarged and appearing in four volumes, was published in 1775.
In each new translation and each new edition the original narrative was expanded by additional matter. A year or two after the appearance of the earliest English edition—that of 1684—a second appeared in the same general form with the first, but with a supplement treating of the adventures of Captain Sharp, Sawkins, Coxon, and others on the coasts of the South Sea from the journal kept by Mr. Basil Ringrose. Both of these two editions are now of considerable rarity, and, being rather better printed than cotemporary volumes of the kind, and being, besides, well and interestingly illustrated by portraits of the more prominent freebooters, curious maps and quaint plates, they are in considerable esteem with collectors of old books. Of the two the second edition is the more valued because of the additional matter and maps, but for ordinary literary purposes the first edition is, perhaps, more preferable. The whole value of the history culminates and centres with Captain Morgan, and that part treating of the adventures of Captain Sparks and the others is not only dull, protracted, and prosy, but excessively tedious. Accordingly for the present purposes it has been deemed better to adhere to the scheme of the first edition, which is in reality a history of Captain Morgan’s expeditions, rather than to unnecessarily extend the volume upon the lines more usually followed.
From these two earlier editions has sprung a host of successors. The second—that containing the adventures of Captain Sharp, Sawkins, Coxon, and others—with some further additions was reprinted in Walker’s “British Classics” (12mo, 1810), besides which the history has appeared in a score of cheaper forms adapted to more popular reading and far too obscure and too numerous to trace and follow.
In the edition here presented some few changes have been made, some of the long and tedious bits of description have been omitted, but as a whole the history of Captain Morgan and his fellow buccaneers stands almost exactly as originally told by the English translation of the Spanish translation of the Dutch Buccaneer Pirate Story.
It was about 1680-5 that the English Government, as was shown in the case of Sir Henry Morgan and others, seriously took in hand the suppression of freebooting. Morgan was only one of many punished for having at one time or another levied private war upon Spain. Then came the Peace of Ryswick between France and Spain, which gave the finishing blow to buccaneering as a semi-legal venture; henceforth nothing remained but open piracy to those bold spirits, too active in the ferment of their passions to be contained by the bottle of law. Both France and England joined in stamping out freebooting, and for a little while it seemed as if they had succeeded—but it was only for a little while.
Filibustering and semi-piracy had become too much a part of the life of the West Indies, and was too thoroughly congenial to those who sought escape from the restraints of civilization to be thus easily put an end to. It was only the stem of buccaneering that had been lopped away by the sword of the law; from the roots sprung a new and more vigorous offshoot—the flower of Piracy itself. Under the new order it was no longer Spain alone that suffered, but the lawful commerce of all nations that became the prey of these ocean wolves. During the early eighteenth century the Spanish main and adjacent waters swarmed with pirate crafts, and the fame of their deeds forms a chapter of popular history that may almost take rank with that which tells of Robin Hood, Friar Rush, Schinderhannes, and other worthies of the like kidney of a more or less apocryphal nature.
Who has not heard tell of Black-beard? Who does not know of the name of the renowned Captain Kid? Who has not heard the famous ballad which tells of his deeds of wickedness?—a rhythmical chant such as has from the beginning of time been most taking to the popular ear:—
“Oh! my name is Captain Kid,As I sailed,As I sailed,Oh! my name is Captain Kid,As I sailed,Oh! my name is Captain Kid,And God’s laws I did forbid,And right wickedly I didAs I sailed.”
“Oh! my name is Captain Kid,As I sailed,As I sailed,Oh! my name is Captain Kid,As I sailed,Oh! my name is Captain Kid,And God’s laws I did forbid,And right wickedly I didAs I sailed.”
“Oh! my name is Captain Kid,
As I sailed,
As I sailed,
Oh! my name is Captain Kid,
As I sailed,
Oh! my name is Captain Kid,
And God’s laws I did forbid,
And right wickedly I did
As I sailed.”
So far as the knowledge of the editor of this work extends no such ballad has been written concerning the doings of that other famous knight of the black flag whose name is no less renowned in the history of his kind—Captain Edward Teach, better known as Black-beard. But, though so far as ballad fame is concerned he is at a disadvantage with the other, Captain Teach standspar excellentin an unique personality of his own. Perhaps there are few figures so picturesque as that suggested in the description of his get-up upon the occasions of public appearances—the plaited beard, the face smeared black with gunpowder, the lighted matches thrust under his hat brim, the burning sparks thereof hanging down about his face. The fiendish grimness of that figure has made fully as much impression upon the clay of the past as even that of Captain Kid, in spite of the celebrated song that emphasizes his fame. But the two together stand head and shoulders above all others of their kidney as the best-known pirates of the early eighteenth century. Even to this day it is safe to say that nowhere along the Atlantic coast of the whole United States, from Maine to Florida, are their names unknown, and that in all that stretch of sea-board there is hardly a lonesome sandy beach but is reputed to have held treasure hidden by the one or the other of them. Each is the hero of half a hundred legends and fantastically exaggerated tales, and it was Captain Kid who buried the treasure that Poe discovered in the delightful romance of “The Gold Bug.”
But, nevertheless, though the fame of these two worthies is so pre-eminent, there are others only second to them in renown—others whose names and deeds have also been chronicled by Captain Johnson, the famous historian of scoundreldom. Captain Bartholomew Roberts, for instance, if he may not have had the fortune to be so famous as the two above-mentioned worthies, yet, in his marvellous escapes and deeds of daring, he well deserves to stand upon the same pedestal of renown. And Captain Avery, though his history is, perhaps, more apochryphal in its nature, nevertheless there is sufficient stamina of trust in the account of his exploits to grant him also place with his more famous brothers, for the four together—Black-beard, Kid, Roberts, and Avery—form a galaxy the like of which is indeed hard to match in its own peculiar brilliancy.
Through circumstances the hunter name of buccaneers was given to the seventeenth-century pirates and freebooters; the term “marooners” was bestowed upon those who followed the same trade in the century succeeding. The name has in itself a terrible significance. The dictionary tells us that to maroon is to put ashore as upon a desert island, and it was from this that the title was derived.
These later pirates—the marooners—not being under the protection of the West Indian governors, and having no such harbour for retreat as that, for instance, of Port Royal, were compelled to adopt some means for the disposal of prisoners captured with their prizes other than taking them into a friendly port.
Occasionally such unhappy captives were set adrift in the ship’s boats—with or without provisions, as the case might be. A method of disposing of them maybe more convenient, certainly more often used, was to set them ashore upon some desert coast or uninhabited island, with a supply of water perhaps, and perhaps a gun, a pinch of powder, and a few bullets—there to meet their fate, either in the slim chance of a passing vessel or more probably in death.
Nor was marooning the fate alone of the wretched captives of their piracy; sometimes it was resorted to as a punishment among themselves. Many a mutinous pirate sailor and not a few pirate captains have been left to the horrors of such a fate, either to die under the shrivelling glare of the tropical sun upon some naked sandspit or to consume in the burning of a tropical fever amid the rank wilderness of mangroves upon some desert coast.
Hence the name marooners.
As the marooners followed the buccaneers in actual fact, so should they follow them in the history that treats of West Indian freebooters.
Nor is it merely a matter of correctness of form to add the more unusual histories the four famous pirates here incorporated. There is another, a deeper, a more humanitarian reason for such a sequel. For is not the history of the savage outlawry of the marooners a verisemblance of the degeneration, the quick disintegration of humanity the moment that the laws of God and man are lifted? The Tudor sea-captains were little else than legalized pirates, and in them we may see that first small step that leads so quickly into the smooth downward path. The buccaneers, in their semi-legalized piracy, succeeded them as effect follows cause. Then as the ultimate result followed the marooners—fierce, bloody, rapacious, human wild beasts lusting for blood and plunder, godless, lawless, the enemy of all men but their own wicked kind.
Is there not a profitable lesson to be learned in the history of such a human extreme of evil—all the more wicked from being the rebound from civilization?
Thus, in the present volume, it has been deemed best to add as a sequel to the redoubtable narrative of the honest Dutchman Esquemeling, the history, first of Captain Kid—who stood upon a sort of middle ground between the buccaneers and the marooners proper—and then the story of the lives of Black-beard, Roberts, and Avery: roaring, ranting, raving piratesper se.
As a rule it is generally difficult to find any actual data, any tangible history of the popular villain-hero. Now and then the curious collector of such ephemeral trifles gathers together a few chap-book histories of such, but as a rule any positive material passes quickly away and is lost in the oblivion of past things. Their deeds and actions are usually of small moment in the policy of nations, and it is only in popular romance and fiction that their name and fame is embalmed and preserved. But in the case of Kid and of Black-beard, however, and the more famous pirates and notorious rogues of their generation—both land-thieves and water-thieves, land-rats and water-rats—a Pliny has arisen, who has handed down their names and the history of their deeds to the present time—Captain Charles Johnson, who, in the earlier half of the eighteenth century collected and edited numberless chap-book histories of famous pirates and highwaymen.
As in the case of “The History of the Buccaneers,” Johnson’s works have gone through numberless editions, so that if by the quantity of books we measure the popular regard, Black-beard and Kid and Avery with their land-types—Duval, Shepherd, and Jonathan Wild—have a very dear place in the hearts of the people.
The first of these collected histories appeared under place and date, London, 1724,8vo. It was entitled, “General History of the Pyrates of the New Providence,” &c., and appeared again in a second edition of two volumes in 1727. In this history, most quaint and rare, appear the lives both of Black-beard and Kid, and it is now numbered among the more interesting and curious of Americana.
In 1734 was published in folio form “The History of Highwaymen and Pirates,” &c.; but although the history of Black-beard appears in this edition, that of Captain Kid is, for some reason, omitted. In 1742 followed a second edition of this same history, printed from the original plates. Both this and the first edition (some of the copies of which bear the date 1736) are now grown quite rare and curious, being not often met with outside the libraries of the book-collector. From them so numerous a progeny had sprung that, as in the case of “The History of the Buccaneers,” it is almost an impossible task to follow and particularize them. One of the more notable reprints appeared in 1839, another with additions by C. Whitehead in 1840, and again in 1853. These are but a few of a numerous tribe of the grand family in which these popular heroes act their life under the gaze of our far-away time.
To them the reader must turn if he would seek further in the dark passages of such lives as are here presented in the most notorious examples, perhaps, of all.
HOWARD PYLE.
Wilmington, Delaware,November, 1890.