Page:Daring deeds of famous pirates; true stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers (1917).djvu/17

 a nation made to suppress piracy, it revived and prospered, we can only answer that, quite apart from the lust of wealth, there was at the back of it all that love of adventure, that desire for exciting incident, that hatred of monotonous security which one finds in so many natures. A distinguished British admiral remarked the other day that it was his experience that the best naval officers were usually those who as boys were most frequently getting into disfavour for their adventurous escapades. It is, at any rate, still true that unless the man or boy has in him the real spirit of adventure, the sea, whether as a sport or profession, can have but little fascination for him.

International law and the growth of navies have practically put an end to the profession of piracy, though privateering would doubtless reassert itself in the next great naval war. But if you look through history you will find that, certainly up to the nineteenth century, wherever there was a seafaring nation there too had flourished a band of pirates. Piracy went on for decade after decade in the Mediterranean till at length it became unbearable, and Rome had to take the most serious steps and use the most drastic measures to stamp out the nests of hornets. A little later you find another generation of sea-robbers growing up and acting precisely as their forefathers. Still further on in history you find the Barbarian corsairs and their descendants being an irrepressible menace to Mediterranean shipping. For four or five hundred years galleys waylaid ships of the great European nations, attacked them, murdered their crews and plundered the Levantine cargoes. Time after time were these corsairs punished: time after time they rose again. In vain did the fleets of southern Christian Europe or the ships of Elizabeth or the Jacobean navy go forth to quell them. Algiers and Tunis were veritable plague-spots in