harbour dues a percentage of
one tenth of all spoils brought into the bay, and who profited further
by commissions upon money which he was desired to convert into bills of
exchange upon France.

A trade that might have worn a repellent aspect when urged by greasy,
half-drunken adventurers, boucan-hunters, lumbermen, beach-combers,
English, French, and Dutch, became a dignified, almost official form of
privateering when advocated by the courtly, middle-aged gentleman who
in representing the French West India Company seemed to represent France
herself.

Moreover, to a man--not excluding Jeremy Pitt himself, in whose blood
the call of the sea was insistent and imperative--those who had escaped
with Peter Blood from the Barbados plantations, and who, consequently,
like himself, knew not whither to turn, were all resolved upon joining
the great Brotherhood of the Coast, as those rovers called themselves.
And they united theirs to the other voices that were persuading Blood,
demanding that he should continue now in the leadership which he had
enjoyed since they had left Barbados, and swearing to follow him loyally
whithersoever he should lead them.

And so, to condense all that Jeremy has recorded in the matter, Blood
ended by yielding to external and internal pressure, abandoned himself
to the stream of Destiny. "Fata viam invenerunt," is his own expression
of it.

If he resisted so long, it was, I think, the thought of Arabella Bishop
that restrained him. That they should be destined never to meet again
did not weigh at first, or, indeed, ever. He conceived the scorn with
which she would come to hear of his having turned pirate, and the scorn,
though as yet no more than imagined, hurt him as if it were already a
reality. And even when he conquered this, still the thought of her was
ever present. He compromised with the conscience that her memory kept so
disconcertingly active. He vowed that the thought of her should continue
ever before him to help him keep his hands as clean as a man might in
this desperate trade upon which he was embarking. And so, although he
might entertain no delusive hope of ever winning her for his own, of
ever even seeing her again, yet the memory of her was to abide in his
soul as a bitter-sweet, purifying influence. The love that is never to
be realized will often remain a man's guiding ideal. The resolve
being taken, he went actively to work. Ogeron, most accommodating of
governors, advanced