Page:Daring deeds of famous pirates; true stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers (1917).djvu/87

 service on the coast of Ireland, and wanted pilots." Calles protested that he had declined this invitation, to which the other man was reported to have replied that he would never have such a chance of preferment offered him in England. But though this made a very fine yarn, the authorities were too well aware of Calles's past history to give it too much credence.

"The misery of a Pirate (although many are as sufficient Seamen as any) yet in regard of his superfluity," wrote the founder of Virginia, "you shall finde it such, that any wise man would rather live amongst wilde beasts than them: therefore let all unadvised persons take heed, how they entertaine that quality: and I could wish Merchants, Gentlemen, and all setters forth of ships, not to bee sparing of a competent pay, nor true payment, for neither Souldiers nor Seamen can live without meanes, but necessity will force them to steale: and when they are once entered into that trade, they are hardly reclaimed."

Poverty as well as the love of adventure and the lust for gain had certainly to be reckoned among the incentives to this life. So steadily had the evil grown that on 7th August 1579, Yorke complained to Lord Burghley that the sea had never been so full of pirates, and a Plymouth ship which had set out from St. Malo bound for Dartmouth had been robbed and chased on to the rocks. None the less, the "persons of credit" who had been appointed in every haven, creek or other landing-place round the coast, in order to deal with the evil, were doing their best, and three notable pirates had some time before been arrested and placed in York Castle together with other pirates.

But the practice of piracy, as we have seen, was the peculiar failing of no country exclusively, though in certain parts of the world and in certain centuries pirates were more