when the whole of this
most inhuman of inhuman men had been entirely consumed, they scattered
his ashes to the winds so that not a trace should remain on earth of
this monster. If, in his infancy, he had died of croup, the history of
the human race would have lost some of its blackest pages.

Chapter XVI

A Pirate Potentate

Sometime in the last half of the seventeenth century on a quiet farm in
a secluded part of Wales there was born a little boy baby. His father
was a farmer, and his mother churned, and tended the cows and the
chickens, and there was no reason to imagine that this gentle little
baby, born and reared in this rural solitude, would become one of the
most formidable pirates that the world ever knew. Yet such was the case.

The baby's name was Henry Morgan, and as he grew to be a big boy a
distaste for farming grew with him. So strong was his dislike that when
he became a young man he ran away to the seacoast, for he had a fancy to
be a sailor. There he found a ship bound for the West Indies, and in
this he started out on his life's career. He had no money to pay his
passage, and he therefore followed the usual custom of those days and
sold himself for a term of three years to an agent who was taking out a
number of men to work on the plantations. In the places where these men
were enlisted they were termed servants, but when they got to the new
world they were generally called slaves and treated as such.

When young Morgan reached the Barbadoes he was resold to a planter, and
during his term of service he probably worked a good deal harder and was
treated much more roughly than any of the laborers on his father's farm.
But as soon as he was a free man he went to Jamaica, and there were few
places in the world where a young man could be more free and more
independent than in this lawless island.

Here were rollicking and blustering "flibustiers," and here the young
man determined to study piracy. He was not a sailor and hunter who by
the force of circumstances gradually became a buccaneer, but he
deliberately selected his profession, and immediately set to work to
acquire a knowledge of its practice. There was a buccaneer ship about to
sail from Jamaica, and on this Morgan enlisted. He was a clever fellow
and very soon showed himself to be a brave and able sailor.

After three or four voyages he acquired a reputation for remarkable
coolness in emergencies, and showed an ability to take adva