Book of Pirates | Page 4

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 of vim
and 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 endear 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 doubloons 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 forever 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 practiced in the flower of its days--that is, during the early eighteenth
century--was no sudden growth. It was an evolution, from the semilawful 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 of

de facto piracy. 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 twelvescore 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 tublike
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