n our southwest frontier goes about a walking arsenal, ready at
all times to take the laws into his own hands, and scorning to call on
sheriffs or other peace officers for protection against personal injury.
And while the original purpose of this militant, even defiant, attitude is
self-protection, those who are long compelled to maintain it conceive a
contempt for the law, which they find inadequate to guard them, and not
infrequently degenerate into bandits.

It is hardly too much to say that the nineteenth century was already well
into its second quarter before there was a semblance of recognized law
upon the high seas. Pirates and buccaneers, privateers, and the naval
vessels of the times that were little more than pirates, made the lot of
the merchant sailor of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a
precarious one. Wars were constant, declared on the flimsiest pretexts and
with scant notice; so that the sailor putting out from port in a time of
universal peace could feel no certainty that the first foreign vessel he
met might not capture him as spoil of some war of which he had no
knowledge. Accordingly, sailors learned to defend themselves, and the
ship's armory was as necessary and vastly better stocked than the ship's
medicine case. To point a carronade became as needful an accomplishment as
to box the compass; and he was no A.B. who did not know how to swing a
cutlass.

Out of such conditions, and out of the wars which the Napoleonic plague
forced upon the world, sprung the practise of privateering; and while it
is the purpose of this book to tell the story of the American merchant
sailor only, it could not be complete without some account, however brief,
of the American privateersman. For, indeed, the two were one throughout a
considerable period of our maritime history, the sailor turning
privateersman or the privateersman sailor as political or trade conditions
demanded. In our colonial times, and in the earlier days of the nation, to
be a famous privateersman, or to have had a hand in fitting out a
successful privateer, was no mean passport to fame and fortune. Some of
the names most eminent in the history of our country appear in connection
with the outfitting or command of privateers; and not a few of the oldest
fortunes of New England had their origin in this form of legalized piracy.
And, after all, it is the need of the times that fixes the morality of an
act. To-day privateering is dead; not by an