Page:Daring deeds of famous pirates; true stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers (1917).djvu/244

 CHAPTER XXI

THE STORY OF AARON SMITH

If the expression had not been used already so many thousand times, one might well say of the following story that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Had you read the yarn which is here to be related you would, at its conclusion, have remarked that it was certainly most interesting and exciting, but it was too exaggerated, too full of coincidences, too full of narrow escapes ever to have occurred in real life. But I would assure the reader at the outset that Smith's experiences were actual and not fictional, and that his story was carefully examined at the time by the High Court of Admiralty. The prelude, the climax and the conclusion of this drama with its exciting incidents, its love interest and its happy ending; the romantic atmosphere, the picturesque characters, the colours and the symmetry of the narrative are so much in accord with certain models such as one used to read in mere story-books of one's boyhood, that it is well the reader should be fully assured that what is here set forth did in very truth happen. In some respects the narrative reads like pages from one of Robert Louis Stevenson's novels, and yet though I have, by the limits of the space at my disposal, been compelled to omit many of the incidents which centred around Smith and his pirate associates, yet the facts which are set forth