Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/160

 furnished with the Queen's letter to "burn, plunder, and destroy," they too frequently exercised that calling; and if ever England was justified in claiming the "Dominion of the Narrow Seas," she had at no period of her history greater claims to it than when these freebooters, in vessels of every kind, poured forth from her ports, and scoured the English Channel like a flock of locusts—an eternal disgrace to the name they bore, and to the flag under which they had been launched for peaceful purposes upon the ocean.