The Project Gutenberg EBook of Peak's Island, by Ford Paul

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Title: Peak's Island
A Romance of Buccaneer Days

Author: Ford Paul

Release Date: August 23, 2008 [EBook #26410]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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PEAK'S ISLAND

A ROMANCE
OF
BUCCANEER DAYS

BY
FORD PAUL

PORTLAND, MAINE
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR
1892

PRESS OF BROWN THURSTON CO., PORTLAND

DEDICATED TO
Cora Caroline Clifford
AS A SMALL TRIBUTE OF GREAT LOVE
BY THE AUTHOR

FORD PAUL

CHAPTER I.

Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean roll;
. . . . . . Upon the watery plain.
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When for a moment like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

SEPTEMBER 27, 1607.

Dead bodies everywhere. The ocean, lashed to fury by the gale of
yesterday, came booming and hissing upon the beach in great breakers
white with foam; each billow as it dashed upon the jagged and broken
rocks bore in its terrible embrace still more human victims, or some
portion of the two unlucky ships that were fast breaking up. One wedged
in between two rocks with just sufficient play to allow of its heaving
from side to side, with every wave that struck it. The other and much
larger vessel, the Queen Elizabeth, a fine British ship, which had
sailed from England freighted with a cargo of general merchandise for
the colony of Virginia, went crashing up against the cruel stone teeth
of the cliff which overhung and projected into the angry sea; dismasted,
her bulwarks and rigging torn away she floated out into deeper water
only to be driven back again upon the rocks, by the violence of the wind
and the rapidly incoming tide.

Another crash and another, the forecastle carried a