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,