d out of
the harbor one night, and after he was sailing safely on the rolling sea
he stood upon the quarter-deck and proclaimed himself a pirate. It might
not be supposed that this was necessary, for the seventy men on board
his ship were all desperate cutthroats, of various nationalities, whom
he had found in the little port, and who knew very well what was
expected of them when they reached the sea. But if Stede Bonnet had not
proclaimed himself a pirate, it is possible that he might not have
believed, himself, that he was one, and so he ran up the black flag,
with its skeleton or skull and cross-bones, he girded on a great
cutlass, and, folding his arms, he ordered his mate to steer the vessel
to the coast of Virginia.

Although Bonnet knew so little about ships and the sea, and had had no
experience in piracy, his men were practised seamen, and those of them
who had not been pirates before were quite ready and very well fitted to
become such; so when this green hand came into the waters of Virginia he
actually took two or three vessels and robbed them of their cargoes,
burning the ships, and sending the crews on shore.

This had grown to be a common custom among the pirates, who, though
cruel and hard-hearted, had not the inducements of the old buccaneers to
torture and murder the crews of the vessels which they captured. They
could not hate human beings in general as the buccaneers hated the
Spaniards, and so they were a little more humane to their prisoners,
setting them ashore on some island or desert coast, and letting them
shift for themselves as best they might. This was called marooning, and
was somewhat less heartless than the old methods of getting rid of
undesirable prisoners by drowning or beheading them.

As Bonnet had always been rather conventional in his ideas and had
respected the customs of the society in which he found himself, he now
adopted all the piratical fashions of the day, and when he found himself
too far from land to put the captured crew on shore, he did not hesitate
to make them "walk the plank," which was a favorite device of the
pirates whenever they had no other way of disposing of their prisoners.
The unfortunate wretches, with their hands tied behind them, were
compelled, one by one, to mount a plank which was projected over the
side of the vessel and balanced like a see-saw, and when, prodded by
knives and cutlasses, they stepped out upon this plank, of course it
tipped up, and