Other buccaneers followed him. Campeche was taken and sacked, and even
Cartagena itself fell; but with Henry Morgan culminated the glory of
the buccaneers, and from that time they declined in power and wealth and
wickedness until they were finally swept away.

The buccaneers became bolder and bolder. In fact, so daring were their
crimes that the home governments, stirred at last by these outrageous
barbarities, seriously undertook the suppression of the freebooters,
lopping and trimming the main trunk until its members were scattered
hither and thither, and it was thought that the organization was
exterminated. But, so far from being exterminated, the individual
members were merely scattered north, south, east, and west, each forming
a nucleus around which gathered and clustered the very worst of the
offscouring of humanity.

The result was that when the seventeenth century was fairly packed away
with its lavender in the store chest of the past, a score or more
bands of freebooters were cruising along the Atlantic seaboard in armed
vessels, each with a black flag with its skull and crossbones at the
fore, and with a nondescript crew made up of the tags and remnants of
civilized and semicivilized humanity (white, black, red, and yellow),
known generally as marooners, swarming upon the decks below.

Nor did these offshoots from the old buccaneer stem confine their
depredations to the American seas alone; the East Indies and the African
coast also witnessed their doings, and suffered from them, and even the
Bay of Biscay had good cause to remember more than one visit from them.

Worthy sprigs from so worthy a stem improved variously upon the