A piratin’ so bold.
An’ wounded in the arm I got,
An’ then a pretty blow;
Come home to find Poll’s flowed away,
Yo, ho, with the rum below!
It was in the early part of the eighteenth century, two hundred years ago, when the merchant voyager ran as great a risk of being taken by pirates as he did of suffering shipwreck. Within a brief period flourished most of the picturesque scoundrels who have some claim to distinction. Blackbeard terrified the Atlantic coast from Boston to Charleston until a cutlass cut him down in 1717. He was a most satisfactory figure of a theatrical pirate, always strutting in the center of the stage, and many others who came later were mere imitations. Robert Louis Stevenson was able to imagine nothing better than Blackbeard’s true sea-journal, written with his own wicked hand, which contained such fascinating entries as this:
Such a day, rum all out;—our company somewhat sober;—a damned confusion amongst us! Rogues a-plotting—great talk of separation—so I look sharp for a prize. Took one with a great deal of liquor on board;—so kept the company drunk, damned drunk, then all things went well again.
Captain Avery was plundering the treasure-laden galleons of the Great Mogul off the coast of Madagascar in 1718, and was reported to have stolen a daughter of that magnificent potentate as his bride, while “his adventures were the subject of general conversation in Europe.” The flamboyant career of Captain Bartholomew Roberts began in 1719, that “tall, dark man” whose favorite toast was “Damnation to him who lives to wear a halter,” and who always wore in action a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain and diamond cross around his neck, a sword in his hand, and two pairs of pistols hanging at the ends of a silk sling flung over his shoulder.
In this same year Captain Ned England was taking his pick of the colonial merchantmen which were earning a respectable livelihood in the slave-trade of the Guinea coast. He displayed his merry and ingenious spirit by ordering his crew to pelt to death with broken rum-bottles a captured shipmaster whose face and manners displeased him. Mary Read, the successful woman pirate, was then in the full tide of her exploits and notably demonstrated that a woman had a right to lead her own life. When her crew presumed to argue with her, she pistoled them with her own fair hand, and neatly killed in a duel a rash gentleman pirate who had been foolish enough to threaten her lover. When asked why she preferred a vocation so hazardous, Mary Read replied that “as to hanging, she thought it no great hardship, for were it not for that every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so infest the seas and men of courage would starve.”
It was in the same period that the bold Captain John Quelch of Marblehead stretched hemp, with five of his comrades, and a Salem poet was inspired to write: