But, nevertheless, though the fame of these two worthies is so pre-eminent, there are others only second to them in renown—others whose names and deeds have also been chronicled by Captain Johnson, the famous historian of scoundreldom. Captain Bartholomew Roberts, for instance, if he may not have had the fortune to be so famous as the two above-mentioned worthies, yet, in his marvellous escapes and deeds of daring, he well deserves to stand upon the same pedestal of renown. And Captain Avery, though his history is, perhaps, more apochryphal in its nature, nevertheless there is sufficient stamina of trust in the account of his exploits to grant him also place with his more famous brothers, for the four together—Black-beard, Kid, Roberts, and Avery—form a galaxy the like of which is indeed hard to match in its own peculiar brilliancy.
IX.
Through circumstances the hunter name of buccaneers was given to the seventeenth-century pirates and freebooters; the term “marooners” was bestowed upon those who followed the same trade in the century succeeding. The name has in itself a terrible significance. The dictionary tells us that to maroon is to put ashore as upon a desert island, and it was from this that the title was derived.
These later pirates—the marooners—not being under the protection of the West Indian governors, and having no such harbour for retreat as that, for instance, of Port Royal, were compelled to adopt some means for the disposal of prisoners captured with their prizes other than taking them into a friendly port.
Occasionally such unhappy captives were set adrift in the ship’s boats—with or without provisions, as the case might be. A method of disposing of them maybe more convenient, certainly more often used, was to set them ashore upon some desert coast or uninhabited island, with a supply of water perhaps, and perhaps a gun, a pinch of powder, and a few bullets—there to meet their fate, either in the slim chance of a passing vessel or more probably in death.
Nor was marooning the fate alone of the wretched captives of their piracy; sometimes it was resorted to as a punishment among themselves. Many a mutinous pirate sailor and not a few pirate captains have been left to the horrors of such a fate, either to die under the shrivelling glare of the tropical sun upon some naked sandspit or to consume in the burning of a tropical fever amid the rank wilderness of mangroves upon some desert coast.
Hence the name marooners.
X.
As the marooners followed the buccaneers in actual fact, so should they follow them in the history that treats of West Indian freebooters.
Nor is it merely a matter of correctness of form to add the more unusual histories the four famous pirates here incorporated. There is another, a deeper, a more humanitarian reason for such a sequel. For is not the history of the savage outlawry of the marooners a verisemblance of the degeneration, the quick disintegration of humanity the moment that the laws of God and man are lifted? The Tudor sea-captains were little else than legalized pirates, and in them we may see that first small step that leads so quickly into the smooth downward path. The buccaneers, in their semi-legalized piracy, succeeded them as effect follows cause. Then as the ultimate result followed the marooners—fierce, bloody, rapacious, human wild beasts lusting for blood and plunder, godless, lawless, the enemy of all men but their own wicked kind.