Page:Daring deeds of famous pirates; true stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers (1917).djvu/213

 fervent spirit of this Paul Jones were not required, and he chafed against the fetters of unemployment. It is true that he offered his services to the Empress of Russia in 1788, but he seems very soon to have gone to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. There was no employmeut for him in the French Navy, and finally he was reduced to abject poverty and ended his days in the year 1792. The reader will doubtless have in mind that less than ten years ago the United States had the body of Paul Jones brought across the Atlantic and re-buried in North America.

It is not quite easy, altogether, to estimate the character of a man so contradictory as Paul Jones. Had he been born in another age and placed in different circumstances, there is no telling how illustrious he might not have become. He was certainly a magnificent seaman and fighting man, but over and above all he was an adventurer. Idolised as a hero both in America and France, he struck terror in Britain. His latest biographer has stated that the skull and crossbones never fluttered from his masthead and that he never sailed with a letter of marque. But that being so it can only be a mere quibble which can save him from being reckoned among the most notorious pirates of history. A pirate is a person who performs acts of piracy. It seems to me that it makes little difference whether he hoists the conventional black pirate flag or not. It is not the flag which makes a pirate, but the deeds and intentions of which he is responsible. And if his biographer is correct in saying that Jones was never commissioned as a privateer, that is still one more proof that in raiding Whitehaven, the coasts of Scotland, Ireland, England; capturing and burning merchant or fishing craft on the seas; taking their crews into bondage,—he was acting without any shred of legality, and therefore a pirate pure and simple.