of Captain Michael Driver
of Salem. In 1759 he was in command of the schooner Three Brothers,
bound to the West Indies on his lawful business. Jogging along with
a cargo of fish and lumber, he was taken by a privateer under British
colors and sent into Antigua as a prize. Unable to regain either his
schooner or his two thousand dollar cargo, he sadly took passage for
home. Another owner gave him employment and he set sail in the schooner
Betsy for Guadaloupe. During this voyage, poor man, he was captured and
carried into port by a French privateer. On the suggestion that he might
ransom his vessel on payment of four thousand livres, he departed for
Boston in hope of finding the money, leaving behind three of his sailors
as hostages.

Cash in hand for the ransom, the long-suffering Captain Michael Driver
turned southward again, now in the schooner Mary, and he flew a flag
of truce to indicate his errand. This meant nothing to the ruffian
who commanded the English privateer Revenge. He violently seized the
innocent Mary and sent her into New Providence. Here Captain Driver
made lawful protest before the authorities, and was set at liberty with
vessel and cargo--an act of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty Court
of the Bahamas.

Unmolested, the harassed skipper managed to gain Cape Francois and
rescue his three seamen and his schooner in exchange for the ransom
money. As he was about to depart homeward bound, a French frigate
snatched him and his crew out of their vessel and threw them ashore at
Santiago, where for two months they existed as ragged beachcombers until
by some judicial twist the schooner was returned to them. They worked
her home and presented their long list of grievances to the colonial
Government of Massachusetts, which duly forwarded them--and that was
the end of it. Three years had been spent in this catalogue of
misadventures, and Captain Driver, his owners, and his men were helpless
against such intolerable aggression. They and their kind were a prey to
every scurvy rascal who misused a privateering commission to fill his
own pockets.

Stoutly resolved to sail and trade as they pleased, these undaunted
Americans, nevertheless, increased their business on blue water until
shortly before the Revolution the New England fleet alone numbered six
hundred sail. Its captains felt at home in Surinam and the Canaries.
They trimmed their yards in the reaches of the Mediterranean and
the North Sea or bar