parent methods; for while the buccaneers were content to prey upon the
Spaniards alone, the marooners reaped the harvest from the commerce of
all nations.

So up and down the Atlantic seaboard they cruised, and for the fifty
years that marooning was in the flower of its glory it was a sorrowful
time for the coasters of New England, the middle provinces, and the
Virginias, sailing to the West Indies with their cargoes of salt fish,
grain, and tobacco. Trading became almost as dangerous as privateering,
and sea captains were chosen as much for their knowledge of the
flintlock and the cutlass as for their seamanship.

As by far the largest part of the trading in American waters was
conducted by these Yankee coasters, so by far the heaviest blows, and
those most keenly felt, fell upon them. Bulletin after bulletin came
to port with its doleful tale of this vessel burned or that vessel
scuttled, this one held by the pirates for their own use or that one
stripped of its goods and sent into port as empty as an eggshell from
which the yolk had been sucked. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and
Charleston suffered alike, and worthy ship owners had to leave off
counting their losses upon their fingers and take to the slate to keep
the dismal record.

"Maroon--to put ashore on a desert isle, as a sailor, under pretense of
having committed some great crime." Thus our good Noah Webster gives us
the dry bones, the anatomy, upon which the imagination may construct a
specimen to suit itself.

It is thence that the marooners took their name, for marooning was
one of their most effective instruments of punishment or revenge. If a