Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/396

376 It was 'hire and salary' to persevere in misconduct. But the Admiral wanted discretion to be a successful conspirator. He could not wait for opportunities; his unquiet nature preferred unquiet means. His business at the Admiralty courts had made him acquainted with a class of men who, under various aspects, would play a great part in the coming half-century. The improvements in navigation which followed the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, the extension of trade, and the increased value in the freightage of merchant vessels, had spread over the seas an abundance of easy booty. The privateers, Spanish, French, English, Scotch, and Flemish, who in time of war learnt the habits of plunder under a show of legality, glided by an easy transition into buccaneers whenever peace withdrew from them their licenses. The richness of the possible spoils, the dash and adventure in the mode of obtaining it, and the doubtful relations of the Courts of Europe to each other, which made the services of such men continually valuable, and secured them the partial connivance of their respective Governments, combined to disguise the infamy of a marauding profession. The pirate of to-day was the patriot of to-morrow, and fleets of adventurers recruited largely from the harbours of Devonshire and Cornwall, twenty and thirty sail together, haunted the mouth of the Channel, pillaging Spanish gold-ships from Panama, French wine-ships from Bordeaux, the rich traders from Antwerp or from their own Thames, with great impartiality, and retired, if pursued, among the dangerous shoals of Scilly, or the