gainst those
stronger and fiercer men who were not honest.

After the things the pirates seized from merchant vessels were once
stolen they were altogether lost. Almost never did any owner apply for
them, for it would be useless to do so. The stolen goods and merchandise
lay in the storehouses of the pirates, seemingly without any owner
excepting the pirates themselves.

The governors and the secretaries of the colonies would not dishonor
themselves by pirating upon merchant vessels, but it did not seem so
wicked after the goods were stolen--and so altogether lost--to take a
part of that which seemed to have no owner.

A child is taught that it is a very wicked thing to take, for instance,
by force, a lump of sugar from another child; but when a wicked child
has seized the sugar from another and taken it around the corner, and
that other child from whom he has seized it has gone home crying, it
does not seem so wicked for the third child to take a bite of the sugar
when it is offered to him, even if he thinks it has been taken from some
one else.

It was just so, no doubt, that it did not seem so wicked to Governor
Eden and Secretary Knight of North Carolina, or to Governor Fletcher of
New York, or to other colonial governors, to take a part of the booty
that the pirates, such as Blackbeard, had stolen. It did not even seem
very wicked to compel such pirates to give up a part of what was not
theirs, and which seemed to have no owner.

In Governor Eden's time, however, the colonies had begun to be more
thickly peopled, and the laws had gradually become stronger and stronger
to protect men in the possession of what was theirs. Governor Eden was
the last of the colonial governors who had dealings with the pirates,
and Blackbeard was almost the last of the pirates who, with his banded
men, was savage and powerful enough to come and go as he chose among the
people whom he plundered.

Virginia, at that time, was the greatest and the richest of all the
American colonies, and upon the farther side of North Carolina was
the province of South Carolina, also strong and rich. It was these two
colonies that suffered the most from Blackbeard, and it began to be
that the honest men that lived in them could endure no longer to be
plundered.

The merchants and traders and others who suffered cried out loudly for
protection, so loudly that the governors of these provinces could not
help hearing them.

Governor Eden was petitio