Three months after he lost his companion Philip Ashton found a small canoe which had drifted on the island beach. In this fragile craft he made his way to another island where he found a company of buccaneers who chased him through the woods with a volley of musketry. Re-embarking in his canoe he headed for the western end of this island and later reached Roatan where he lived alone for seven months longer. Here he was discovered and hospitably cared for by a number of Englishmen who had fled from the Bay of Honduras in fear of an attack by Spaniards. These refugees had planted crop and were living in what seemed to Philip Ashton as rare comfort. “Yet after all,” he said of them, “they were bad society, and as to their common conversation there was but little difference between them and pirates.”
At length this colony of outlaws was attacked and disbanded by a ship’s company of pirates headed by Spriggs who had thrown off his allegiance to Low and set up in the business of piracy for himself with a ship of twenty-four guns and a sloop of twelve.
Ashton evaded their clutches and with one Symonds, who had also fled from the attack of Spriggs, made his way from one island to another until he was fortunate enough to find a fleet of English merchant vessels under convoy of the Diamond man-of-war bound for Jamaica. They touched at one of these islands near the Bay of Honduras to fill their water casks and it was there that Ashton found the Salem brigantine commanded by Captain Dove.
The journal says in conclusion: “Captain Dove not only treated me with great civility and engaged to give me a passage home but took me into pay, having lost a seaman whose place he wanted me to supply.
“We sailed along with the Diamond, which was bound for Jamaica, in the latter end of March, 1725, and kept company until the first of April. By the providence of Heaven we passed safely through the Gulf of Florida, and reached Salem Harbor on the first of May, two years, ten months and fifteen days after I was first taken by pirates; and two years, and two months, after making my escape from them on Roatan island. That same evening I went to my father’s house, where I was received as one risen from the dead.”
CHAPTER IV
THE PRIVATEERSMEN OF ’76
Privateering has ceased to be a factor in civilized warfare. The swift commerce destroyer as an arm of the naval service has taken the place of the private armed ship which roamed the seas for its own profit as well for its country’s cause. To-day the United States has a navy prepared both to defend its own merchant vessels, what few there are, and to menace the trade of a hostile nation on the high seas.
When the War of the Revolution began, however, Britannia ruled the seas, and the naval force of the Colonies was pitifully feeble. In 1776 there were only thirty-one Continental cruisers of all classes in commission and this list was steadily diminished by the ill-fortunes of war until in 1782 only seven ships flew the American flag, which had been all but swept from the ocean. During the war these ships captured one hundred and ninety-six of the enemy’s craft.
On the other hand, there were already one hundred and thirty-six privateers at sea by the end of the year 1776, and their number increased until in 1781 there were four hundred and forty-nine of these private commerce destroyers in commission. This force took no fewer than eight hundred British vessels and made prisoners of twelve thousand British seamen during the war. The privateersmen dealt British maritime prestige the deadliest blow in history. It had been an undreamt of danger that the American Colonies should humble that flag which “had waved over every sea and triumphed over every rival,” until even the English and Irish Channels were not safe for British ships to traverse. The preface of the Sailor’s Vade-Mecum, edition of 1744, contained the following lofty doctrine which all good Englishmen believed, and which was destined to be shattered by a contemptible handful of seafaring rebels:
“That the Monarchs of Great Britain have a peculiar and Sovereign Authority upon the Ocean, is a Right so Ancient and Undeniable that it never was publicly disputed, but by Hugo Grotius in his Mare Liberum, published in the Year 1636, in Favour of the Dutch Fishery upon our Coasts; which Book was fully Controverted by Mr. Selden’s Mare Clausum, wherein he proves this Sovereignty from the Laws of God and of Nature, besides an uninterrupted Fruition of it for so many Ages past as that its Beginning cannot be traced out.”