frontier. After each vessel had been rifled of everything worth
possessing, and then scuttled, the admiral would order the crews to be,
thrown overboard at once, or, if he chanced to be in a merry mood, would
cause them to be fastened to the cabin floor, or nailed crossways on the
deck and then would sail away leaving ship and sailors to sink at
leisure. The States gave chase as well as they could to the miscreant--
a Dutchman born, and with a crew mainly composed of renegade
Netherlanders and other outcasts, preying for base lucre on their
defenceless countryman--and their cruisers were occasionally fortunate
enough to capture and bring in one of the pirate ships. In such cases,
short shrift was granted, and the buccaneers were hanged without mercy,
thirty-eight having been executed in one morning at Rotterdam. The
admiral with most of his vessels escaped, however, to the coast of Spain,
where his crews during the autumn mainly contrived to desert, and where
he himself died in the winter, whether from malady, remorse, or
disappointment at not being rewarded by a high position in the Spanish
navy.

The war was in its old age. The leaf of a new century had been turned,
and men in middle life had never known what the word Peace meant.
Perhaps they could hardly imagine such a condition. This is easily said,
but it is difficult really to picture to ourselves the moral constitution
of a race of mankind which had been born and had grown up, marrying and
giving in marriage, dying and burying their dead, and so passing on from
the cradle towards the grave, accepting the eternal clang of arms, and
the constant participation by themselves and those nearest to them in the
dangers, privations, and horrors of siege and battle-field as the
commonplaces of life. At least, those Netherlanders knew what fighting
for independence of a foreign tyrant meant. They must have hated Spain
very thoroughly, and believed in the right of man to worship God