wanders forever aimlessly, homelessly; now unheard of for months, now
careening his boat on some lonely uninhabited shore, now appearing
suddenly to swoop down on some merchant vessel with rattle of musketry,
shouting, yells, and a hell of unbridled passions let loose to rend and
tear. What a Carlislean hero! What a setting of blood and lust and flame
and rapine for such a hero!

Piracy, such as was practiced in the flower of its days--that is, during
the early eighteenth century--was no sudden growth. It was an evolution,
from the semi-lawful buccaneering of the sixteenth century, just as
buccaneering was upon its part, in a certain sense, an evolution from
the unorganized, unauthorized warfare of the Tudor period.

For there was a deal of piratical smack in the anti-Spanish ventures
of Elizabethan days. Many of the adventurers--of the Sir Francis Drake
school, for instance--actually overstepped again and again the bounds
of international law, entering into the realms of de facto piracy.
Nevertheless, while their doings were not recognized officially by the
government, the perpetrators were neither punished nor reprimanded for
their excursions against Spanish commerce at home or in the West Indies;
rather were they commended, and it was considered not altogether a
discreditable thing for men to get rich upon the spoils taken from
Spanish galleons in times of nominal peace. Many of the most reputable
citizens and merchants of London, when they felt that the queen failed
in her duty of pushing the fight against the great Catholic Power,
fitted out fleets upon their own account and sent them to levy good
Protestant war of a private nature upon the Pope's anointed.

Some of the treasures captured in such ventures were immense,
stupendous, unbelievable. For an example, one can hardly credit the