Page:Paine--Lost ships and lonely seas.djvu/274

234 death with broken rum-bottles a captured shipmaster whose face and manners displeased him. Mary Read, the successful woman pirate, was then in the full tide of her exploits and notably demonstrated that a woman had a right to lead her own life. When her crew presumed to argue with her, she pistoled them with her own fair hand, and neatly killed in a duel a rash gentleman pirate who had been foolish enough to threaten her lover. When asked why she preferred a vocation so hazardous, Mary Read replied that "as to hanging, she thought it no great hardship, for were it not for that every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so infest the seas and men of courage would starve."

It was in the same period that the bold Captain John Quelch of Marblehead stretched hemp, with five of his comrades, and a Salem poet was inspired to write:

In 1724 two notorious sea-rovers, Nutt and Phillip, were cruising off Cape Ann within sight of Salem harbor's mouth. They took a sloop commanded by one Andrew Harraden, and thereby caught a Tartar. Harraden and his sailors erupted