ty of booty in the Island of Plate (so named
because of the tremendous dividend there declared) that it had to be
measured in quart bowls, being too considerable to be counted.

Courage and daring, no matter how mad and ungodly, have always a
redundancy of vim and life to recommend them to the nether man that lies
within us, and no doubt his desperate courage, his battle against the
tremendous odds of all the civilized world of law and order, have had
much to do in making a popular hero of our friend of the black flag. But
it is not altogether courage and daring that endear him to our hearts.
There is another and perhaps a greater kinship in that lust for wealth
that makes one's fancy revel more pleasantly in the story of the
division of treasure in the pirate's island retreat, the hiding of his
godless gains somewhere in the sandy stretch of tropic beach, there to
remain hidden until the time should come to rake the doubloons up
again and to spend them like a lord in polite society, than in the most
thrilling tales of his wonderful escapes from commissioned cruisers
through tortuous channels between the coral reefs.

And what a life of adventure is his, to be sure! A life of constant
alertness, constant danger, constant escape! An ocean Ishmaelite, he
wanders forever aimlessly, homelessly; now unheard of for months, now
careening his boat on some lonely uninhabited shore, now appearing
suddenly to swoop down on some merchant vessel with rattle of musketry,
shouting, yells, and a hell of unbridled passions let loose to rend and
tear. What a Carlislean hero! What a setting of blood and lust and flame
and rapine for such a hero!

Piracy, such as was practiced in the flower of its days--that is, during
the early eighteenth century--was no sudden growth. It was an evolution,
from the semi-lawful buccaneering of the sixteenth century, just as
buccaneering was upon its part, in a certain sense, an evolution from
the unorganized, unauthorized warfare of the Tudor period.

For there was a deal of piratical smack in the anti-Spanish ventures
of Elizabethan days. Many of the adventurers--of the Sir Francis Drake
school, for instance--actually overstepped again and again the bounds
of international law, entering into the realms of de facto piracy.
Nevertheless, while their doings were not recognized officially by the
government, the perpetrators were neither punished nor reprimanded for
their excursions against Spanish commerce