How amiable an apparition to behold oozing up over your bulwarks some fine morning! No wonder the Atlantic, where it slaps the West Indian beaches on the one side and the shores of the Carolinas on the other, whispered his name with fear.
It was going to be a big job for the forces of law and order to snare this bird.
II
January, 1718, was the happy month for the Carolinas. Then it was that Blackbeard, coming from the West Indies by way of New England and the North Atlantic provinces, chose to make his hole at Ocracoke Inlet, on Pamlico Sound, North Carolina.
Not that Blackbeard came with his hat-matches lit and his beard glorious for strife, and his cutlass speaking sudden, certain death. Oh, my, no! Far indeed would this supposition be from the fact, for Blackbeard had come to Carolina to turn over a new leaf; to leave the wicked practices which had made him king of the wicked Indies; to forswear the black flag; generally to amend his way; particularly to take the Act.
“Taking the Act” was a joke beloved by all the best pirates. It was specially good after a profitable plunder cruise; useful, too, in a way, for it gave one a chance to spend one’s salt-water money without having to fight somebody every five minutes. To take the Act was the only way a hard-working pirate could get a vacation.
The thing worked something like this: George the First, of England, at about this time was having trouble with the Swedes, and in consequence the British fleet was all tucked away up in the Baltic; he was troubled, too, by the merchants of London and the colonies, who were getting rather pert about this matter of pirate depredations.
Being completely at sea in more ways than one, the British Admiralty fell back to the old pardon business that they had tried in Captain Kidd’s time, and which had been so successful that less than twenty years later the sorry scheme was dragged forth again.
Taking the technical peelings off, the meat of the matter was that if within a year from the date of the proclamation any pirate should surrender himself to any one of the king’s colonial governors and swear to renounce his criminal courses, all the past should be forgiven and forgotten. The weakness of the plan, of course, was that a man you could not catch would not care much about your pardon. And still another,—that the word of a pirate could poorly compare with a bond.
But the boys liked this Act of Grace as it was called, and some had even been known to abide quite consistently with its terms. The leading men of the business, of course, could not be expected to take it too seriously.