Book of Pirates | Page 5

energy with which these hardy mariners braved the mysterious, unknown
terrors of the great unknown ocean that stretched away to the sunset, there in faraway
waters to attack the huge, unwieldy, treasure-laden 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 each other; 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 practiced, and, once indulged, no lust seems
stronger than that of shedding blood and practicing 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
forever. 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 vigor, 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.
{signature Howard Pyle His Mark}

Howard Pile's Book of Pirates

Chapter I
BUCCANEERS AND MAROONERS OF THE SPANISH MAIN
JUST above the northwestern shore of the old island of Hispaniola--the Santo Domingo
of our day--and separated from it only by a narrow channel of some five or six miles in
width, lies a queer little hunch of an island, known, because of a distant resemblance to
that animal, as the Tortuga de Mar, or sea turtle. It is not more than twenty miles in

length by perhaps seven or eight in breadth; it is only a little spot of land, and as you look
at it upon the map a pin's head would almost cover it; yet from that spot, as from a center
of inflammation, a burning fire of human wickedness and ruthlessness and lust overran
the world, and spread terror and death throughout the Spanish West Indies, from St.
Augustine to the island of Trinidad,