The Pirates Whos Who | Page 3

"brethren of the coast."
To write a whole history of piracy would be a great undertaking, but a very interesting one. Piracy must have begun in the far, dim ages, and perhaps when some naked savage, paddling himself across a tropical river, met with another adventurer on a better tree-trunk, or carrying a bigger bunch of bananas, the first act of piracy was committed. Indeed, piracy must surely be the third oldest profession in the world, if we give the honour of the second place to the ancient craft of healing. If such a history were to include the whole of piracy, it would have to refer to the Phoenicians, to the Mediterranean sea-rovers of the days of Rome, who, had they but known it, held the future destiny of the world in their grasp when they, a handful of pirates, took prisoner the young Julius C?sar, to ransom him and afterwards to be caught and crucified by him. The Arabs in the Red Sea were for many years past-masters of the art of piracy, as were the Barbary corsairs of Algiers and Tunis, who made the Mediterranean a place of danger for many generations of seamen. All this while the Chinese and Malays were active pirates, while the Pirate coast of the Persian Gulf was feared by all mariners. Then arose the great period, beginning in the reign of Henry VIII., advancing with rapid strides during the adventurous years of Queen Elizabeth, when many West of England squires were wont to sell their estates and invest all in a ship in which to go cruising on the Spanish Main, in the hope of taking a rich Spanish galleon homeward bound from Cartagena and Porto Bello, deep laden with the riches of Peru and Mexico.
Out of these semi-pirate adventurers developed the buccaneers, a ruffianly, dare-devil lot, who feared neither God, man, nor death.
By the middle of the eighteenth century piracy was on the wane, and practically had died out by the beginning of the nineteenth, the final thrust that destroyed it being given by the American and English Navies in the North Atlantic and West Indian Seas. But by this time piracy had degenerated to mere sea-robbing, the days of gallant and ruthless sea-battles had passed, and the pirate of those decadent days was generally a Spanish-American half-breed, with no courage, a mere robber and murderer.
The advent of the telegraph and of steam-driven ships settled for ever the account of the pirates, except in China, when even to this day accounts reach us, through the Press, of piratical enterprises; but never again will the black, rakish-looking craft of the pirate, with the Jolly Roger flying, be liable to pounce down upon the unsuspecting and harmless merchantman.
The books devoted to the lives and exploits of buccaneers and pirates are few. Indeed, but two stand out prominently, both masterpieces of their kind. One, "The Bucaniers of America, or a True Account of the Most Remarkable Assaults Committed of Late Years upon the Coasts of the West Indies," etc., was written by a sea-surgeon to the buccaneers, A.O. Exquemelin, a Dutchman, and was published at Amsterdam in 1679.
Many translations were made, the first one in English being published in 1684 by William Crooke, at the Green Dragon, without Temple Bar, in London. The publication of this book was the cause of a libel action brought by Sir Henry Morgan against the publisher; the buccaneer commander won his case and was granted ￡200 damages and a public apology. In this book Morgan was held up as a perfect monster for his cruel treatment to his prisoners, but although Morgan resented this very much, the statement that annoyed him much more was that which told the reader that Morgan came of very humble stock and was sold by his parents when a boy, to serve as a labourer in Barbadoes.
The greatest work on pirates was written in 1726 by Captain Charles Johnson. The original edition, now exceedingly rare, is called "A General History of the Pyrates, from Their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the Present Time," and is illustrated by interesting engravings.
Another edition, in 1734, is a handsome folio called "A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen," etc., "To which is added a Genuine Account of the Voyages and Plunders of the Most Notorious Pyrates," and contains many full-page copperplates by J. Basire and others. The pirates are given only a share in the pages of this book, but it has some very fine engravings of such famous pirates as Avery, Roberts, Low, Lowther, and "Blackbeard."
The third edition of the "History of Pirates," of 1725, has a quaint frontispiece, showing the two women pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, in action with their swords drawn,