time freebooting assumed all of the routine of a regular
business. Articles were drawn up betwixt captain and crew, compacts were
sealed, and agreements entered into by the one party and the other.

In all professions there are those who make their mark, those who
succeed only moderately well, and those who fail more or less entirely.
Nor did pirating differ from this general rule, for in it were men who
rose to distinction, men whose names, something tarnished and rusted by
the lapse of years, have come down even to us of the present day.

Pierre Francois, who, with his boatload of six-and-twenty desperadoes,
ran boldly into the midst of the pearl fleet off the coast of
South America, attacked the vice admiral under the very guns of two
men-of-war, captured his ship, though she was armed with eight guns and
manned with threescore men, and would have got her safely away, only
that having to put on sail, their mainmast went by the board, whereupon
the men-of-war came up with them, and the prize was lost.

But even though there were two men-of-war against all that remained of
six-and-twenty buccaneers, the Spaniards were glad enough to make terms
with them for the surrender of the vessel, whereby Pierre Francois and
his men came off scot-free.

Bartholomew Portuguese was a worthy of even more note. In a boat manned
with thirty fellow adventurers he fell upon a great ship off Cape
Corrientes, manned with threescore and ten men, all told.

Her he assaulted again and again, beaten off with the very pressure of
numbers only to renew the assault, until the Spaniards who survived,
some fifty in all, surrendered to twenty living pirates, who poured upon
their decks like a score of blood-stained, powder-grimed devils.

They lost their vessel by recapture, and Bartholomew Portuguese
barely escaped with his life through a series of almost unbelievable
adventures. But no sooner had he fairly escaped from the clutches of the
Spaniards than, gathering together another band of adventurers, he fell
upon the very same vessel in the gloom of the night, recaptured her when
she rode at anchor in the harbor of Campeche under the guns of the fort,
slipped the cable, and was away without the loss of a single man. He
lost her in a hurricane soon afterward, just off the Isle of Pines; but
the deed was none the less daring for all that.

Another notable no less famous than these two worthies was Roch
Braziliano, the truculent Dutchman who c