Page:Paine--Lost ships and lonely seas.djvu/282

242 they doused one another with buckets of claret and good French brandy as they ran roaring around the deck.

Bottled liquors were opened by whacking off the necks with cutlasses. They pelted one another with cheeses, and emptied the tubs of butter to slide in. One of these sportive pirates dressed himself in the captain's shore-going black suit and his best hat and wig, strutted among his comrades until they drenched him with claret, and then chucked the wardrobe overboard. You will be gratified to learn that "this man, named Kennedy, ended his career in Execution Dock."

Of the two other pirate ships then in the river of Sierra Leone one was British and the other French. The English commander was one of the brave and resourceful sea-rogues of his era, a fighting seaman in whom survived the spirit of those desperate adventurers of the seventeenth century who followed Morgan to Panama and hunted the stately Spanish galleons with Hawkins and Dampier in the waters of the Pacific. This was the famous Captain Davis, who would sooner storm a fort or take a town at the head of a landing party than to loot a helpless merchantman. He had attempted to combine forces with these other pirates at Sierra Leone and had been formally elected admiral in a council