CONTENTS

CHAPTERPAGE
I Introducing Mr. Machiavelli Van Dyck[3]
II The Ship's Company[19]
III The Major—and Others[36]
IV The Log of the Andromeda[50]
V Any Port in a Storm[61]
VI A Sea Change[72]
VII Shore Leave[86]
VIII Into the Primitive[103]
IX The Bully[115]
X The Bones of the Santa Lucia[131]
XI Finders Keepers[144]
XII Bonteck Unloads[159]
XIII The Wind and the Waves Roaring[175]
XIV Hand to Mouth[193]
XV The Merry War[212]
XVI A Marathon and an Ultimatum[235]
XVII Captain Elijah Scores[251]
XVIII Under a Gibbous Moon[266]
XIX The Forward Light[285]

PIRATES' HOPE

I
INTRODUCING MR. MACHIAVELLI VAN DYCK

To those who knew him best and had known him longest, Bonteck Van Dyck, sometime captain of his university eleven, a ball player with the highest batting average on the university nine, a large-lettered star in everything pertaining to athletic accomplishments, and above and beyond this the fortunate—or unfortunate, as one chooses to view it—inheritor of the obese Van Dyck fortune, figured, like the dead kitten discovered on the ash heap by the investigative infant, as "a perfectly good cat, spoiled."