Page:Daring deeds of famous pirates; true stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers (1917).djvu/124

 Rammetham Rise, but his real name was Henry Chandler, and it was through him that Goodale became master of the Nicholas. They resolved that as there were so many English prisoners they should have only English slaves for their crew and only English and Dutch renegadoes as their gunners, but for soldiers they took also Moslems on board.

One of the saddest aspects of this Turkish piracy is the not infrequent mention of men who either from fear or from love of adventure had denied their religion and nationality to become renegades. It is easy enough to criticise those who were made so to act by compulsion and heartrending tortures, such as placing a man flat on the ground and then piling weights on to the top of his body till life's breath was almost crushed out of him: or thrashing him without mercy till he would consent to become a Moslem. The ideal man, of course, will in every instance prefer martyrdom to saving his life by the sacrifice of principles. But when the matter is pressed home to us as individuals we may well begin to wonder whether we should have played the man, as some of our ancestors did, or whether we should, after much torturing, have succumbed to the temptation of clinging to life at the critical moment. Of those renegades some were undoubtedly thorough-paced rascals, who were no credit to any community, but mere worthless men without a spark of honour. Such as these would as soon become Moslems as Christians, provided it suited their mode of life. But it was the knowledge of the sufferings of the other English prisoners which, with the loss of ships and merchandise, caused the Government repeatedly to send out those punitive expeditions. One would have thought that the only effective remedy would have been to have left a permanent Mediterranean squadron