be
bought and sold as merchandise. It belonged to the dark ages with
piracy and witchcraft, better forgotten than recalled, save for
its potent influence in schooling brave seamen and building
faster ships for peace and war.

These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survival amid dangers
so manifold as to make their hardihood astounding. It was not
merely a matter of small vessels with a few men and boys daring
distant voyages and the mischances of foundering or stranding,
but of facing an incessant plague of privateers, French and
Spanish, Dutch and English, or a swarm of freebooters under no
flag at all. Coasts were unlighted, charts few and unreliable,
and the instruments of navigation almost as crude as in the days
of Columbus. Even the savage Indian, not content with lurking in
ambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records of the
First Church of Salem contain this quaint entry under date of
July 25, 1677: "The Lord having given a Commission to the Indians
to take no less than 13 of the Fishing Ketches of Salem and
Captivate the men . . . it struck a great consternation into all
the people here. The Pastor moved on the Lord's Day, and the
whole people readily consented, to keep the Lecture Day following
as a Fast Day, which was accordingly done . . . . The Lord was
pleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast Day which was
looked on as a gracious smile of Providence. Also there had been
19 wounded men sent into Salem a little while before; also a
Ketch sent out from Salem as a man-of-war to recover the rest of
the Ketches. The Lord give them Good Success."

To encounter a pirate craft was an episode almost commonplace and
often more sordid than picturesque. Many of these sea rogues were
thieves with small stomach for cutlasses and slaughter. They were
of the sort that overtook Captain John Shattuck sailing home from
Jamaica in 1718 when he reported his capture by one Captain
Charles Vain, "a Pyrat" of 12 guns and 120 men who took him to
Crooked Island, plundered him of various articles, stripped the
brig, abused the crew, and finally let him go. In the same year
the seamen of the Hopewell related that near Hispaniola they met
with pirates who robbed and ill-treated them and carried off
their mate because they had no navigator.

Ned Low, a gentleman rover of considerable notoriety, stooped to
filch the stores and gear from a fleet of fourteen poor fishermen
of Cape Sable. He had a sense of dramatic values, however, and
frequently brandished his pistols on deck, besides which, as set
down by one of his prisoners, "he had a young child in Boston for
whom he entertained such tenderness that on every lucid interval
from drinking and revelling, I have seen him sit down and weep
plentifully."

A more satisfying figure was Thomas Pounds, who was taken by the
sloop Mary, sent after him from Boston in 1689. He was discovered
in Vineyard Sound, and the two vessels fought a gallant action,
the pirate flying a red flag and refusing to strike. Captain
Samuel Pease of the Mary was mortally wounded, while Pounds, this
proper pirate, strode his quarter-deck and waved his naked sword,
crying, "Come on board, ye dogs, and I will strike YOU
presently." This invitation was promptly accepted by the stout
seamen from Boston, who thereupon swarmed over the bulwark and
drove all hands below, preserving Thomas Pounds to be hanged in
public.

In 1703 John Quelch, a man of resource, hoisted what he called
"Old Roger" over the Charles--a brigantine which had been
equipped as a privateer to cruise against the French of Acadia.
This curious flag of his was described as displaying a skeleton
with an hour-glass in one hand and "a dart in the heart with
three drops of blood proceeding from it in the other." Quelch led
a mutiny, tossed the skipper overboard, and sailed for Brazil,
capturing several merchantmen on the way and looting them of rum,
silks, sugar, gold dust, and munitions. Rashly he came sailing
back to Marblehead, primed with a plausible yarn, but his men
talked too much when drunk and all hands were jailed. Upon the
gallows Quelch behaved exceedingly well, "pulling off his hat and
bowing to the spectators," while the somber Puritan merchants in
the crowd were, many of them, quietly dealing in the merchandise
fetched home by pirates who were lucky enough to steer clear of
the law.

This was a shady industry in which New York took the more active
part, sending out supplies to the horde of pirates who ravaged
the waters of the Far East and made their haven at Madagascar,
and disposing of the booty received in exchange. Governor
Fletcher had dirtied his hands by protecting this commerce and,
as a result, Lord Bellomont was named to succeed him. Said
William III, "I send you, my Lord, to New York, because an honest
and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down, and because
I believe you to be such a man."

Such were the circumstances in which Captain William Kidd,
respectable master mariner in the merchant service, was employed
by Lord Bellomont, royal Governor of New York, New Hampshire, and
Massachusetts, to command an armed ship and harry the pirates of
the West Indies and Madagascar. Strangest of all the sea tales of
colonial history is that of Captain Kidd and his cruise in the
Adventure-Galley. His name is reddened with crimes never
committed, his grisly phantom has stalked through the legends
and literature of piracy, and the Kidd tradition still has magic
to set treasure-seekers exploring almost every beach, cove, and
headland from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if truth were
told, he never cut a throat or made a victim walk the plank. He
was tried and hanged for the trivial offense of breaking the head
of a mutinous gunner of his own crew with a wooden bucket. It was
even a matter of grave legal doubt whether he had committed one
single piratical act. His trial in London was a farce. In the
case of the captured ships he alleged that they were sailing
under French passes, and he protested that his privateering
commission justified him, and this contention was not disproven.
The suspicion is not wanting that he was condemned as a scapegoat
because certain noblemen of England had subscribed the capital to
outfit his cruise, expecting to win rich dividends in gold
captured from the pirates he was sent to attack. Against these
men a political outcry was raised, and as a result Captain Kidd
was sacrificed. He was a seaman who had earned honorable
distinction in earlier years, and fate has played his memory a
shabby trick.

It was otherwise with Blackbeard, most flamboyant of all colonial
pirates, who filled the stage with swaggering success, chewing
wine-glasses in his cabin, burning sulphur to make his ship seem
more like hell, and industriously scourging the whole Atlantic
coast. Charleston lived in terror of him until Lieutenant
Maynard, in a small sloop, laid him alongside in a
hammer-and-tongs engagement and cut off the head of Blackbeard to
dangle from the bowsprit as a trophy.

Of this rudely adventurous era, it would be hard to find a seaman
more typical than the redoubtable Sir William Phips who became
the first royal Governor of the Massachusetts Colony in 1692.
Born on a frontier farm of the Maine coast while many of the
Pilgrim fathers were living, "his faithful mother," wrote Cotton
Mather, "had no less than twenty-six children, whereof twenty-one
were sons; but equivalent to them all was William, one of the
youngest, whom, his father dying, was left young with his mother,
and with her he lived, keeping ye sheep in Ye Wilderness until he
was eighteen years old." Then he apprenticed himself to a
neighboring shipwright who was building sloops and pinnaces and,
having learned the trade, set out for Boston. As a ship-carpenter
he plied his trade, spent his wages in the taverns of the
waterside and there picked up wondrous yarns of the silver-laden
galleons of Spain which had shivered their timbers on the reefs
of the Bahama Passage or gone down in the hurricanes that beset
those southerly seas. Meantime he had married a wealthy widow
whose property enabled him to go treasure-hunting on the Spanish
main. From his first voyage thither in a small vessel he escaped
with his life and barely enough treasure to pay the cost of

<<Previous | Back to Page 1 | Next>>