Page:Daring deeds of famous pirates; true stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers (1917).djvu/179

 in it every opportunity to indulge both personal and national hatred of the foreigner; to enjoy a series of fine adventures, and then to return home with an accumulation of glory and prizes. Side by side with this—and well illustrating the tone of the age—smuggling had become an almost irrepressible national evil.

In the history of smuggling you not infrequently found that the preliminary steps to this dishonest livelihood were as follows: First, the man was employed as an honest fisherman; then, finding this did not pay him, he became a privateer, or else in the King's service serving on board a Revenue cutter. Then, being more anxious for wealth, he threw in his lot with the very men he had been chasing, and became either an out-and-out smuggler or else a pirate. For, as has been insisted on more than once in previous chapters, the line of demarcation between privateering and piracy, though perfectly visible to lawyers, was not always sufficiently strong to keep the roving seaman within the limitations of legal livelihood. In a word, as it is always difficult suddenly to break a habit, and as this immense body of seamen had so long been accustomed to earning their money by attacking other ships, so in an age that had but little respect for what was lawful, it was really not surprising that dozens of ships put to sea as downright pirates or else as acknowledged smugglers. In this present volume we are concerned only with the first of these two classes.

Typical of the period was a notorious Captain Avery, whose doings became known throughout Europe. There was nothing petty in these eighteenth-century corsairs. They had in them the attributes which go to making a great admiral, they were born rulers of men, they were good strategists, hard fighters, brave and valorous, daring and