suffered alike, and worthy ship owners had to leave off
counting their losses upon their fingers and take to the slate to keep
the dismal record.

"Maroon--to put ashore on a desert isle, as a sailor, under pretense of
having committed some great crime." Thus our good Noah Webster gives us
the dry bones, the anatomy, upon which the imagination may construct a
specimen to suit itself.

It is thence that the marooners took their name, for marooning was
one of their most effective instruments of punishment or revenge. If a
pirate broke one of the many rules which governed the particular band
to which he belonged, he was marooned; did a captain defend his ship to
such a degree as to be unpleasant to the pirates attacking it, he
was marooned; even the pirate captain himself, if he displeased his
followers by the severity of his rule, was in danger of having the same
punishment visited upon him which he had perhaps more than once visited
upon another.

The process of marooning was as simple as terrible. A suitable place was
chosen (generally some desert isle as far removed as possible from the
pathway of commerce), and the condemned man was rowed from the ship to
the beach. Out he was bundled upon the sand spit; a gun, a half dozen
bullets, a few pinches of powder, and a bottle of water were chucked
ashore after him, and away rowed the boat's crew back to the ship,
leaving the poor wretch alone to rave away his life in madness, or to
sit sunken in his gloomy despair till death mercifully released him from
torment. It rarely if ever happened that anything was known of him after
having been marooned. A boat's crew from some vessel, sailing by chance
that way, might perhaps find a few chalky bones bleaching upon the white
sand in the garish glare of the sunlight, but that was all. And such
were marooners.

By far the largest number of pirate captains were Englishmen, for,
from the days of good Queen Bess, English sea captains seemed to have
a natural turn for any species of venture that had a smack of piracy
in it, and from the great Admiral Drake of the old, old days, to the
truculent Morgan of buccaneering times, the Englishman did the boldest
and wickedest deeds, and wrought the most damage.

First of all upon the list of pirates stands the bold Captain Avary, one
of the institutors of marooning. Him we see but dimly, half hidden by
the glamouring mists of legends and tradition. Others who came afterward
outstripped him