llen short of a
million and a half of dollars. Computing it at this reasonable figure,
the various prizes won by Henry Morgan in the West Indies would stand
as follows: Panama, $1,500,000; Porto Bello, $800,000; Puerto del
Principe, $700,000; Maracaibo and Gibraltar, $400,000; various
piracies, $250,000--making a grand total of $3,650,000 as the vast
harvest of plunder. With this fabulous wealth, wrenched from the
Spaniards by means of the rack and the cord, and pilfered from his
companions by the meanest of thieving, Capt. Henry Morgan retired from
business, honored of all, rendered famous by his deeds, knighted by
the good King Charles II, and finally appointed governor of the rich
island of Jamaica.

Other buccaneers followed him. Campeche was taken and sacked, and even
Cartagena itself fell; but with Henry Morgan culminated the glory of
the buccaneers, and from that time they declined in power and wealth
and wickedness until they were finally swept away.

The buccaneers became bolder and bolder. In fact, so daring were their
crimes that the home governments, stirred at last by these outrageous
barbarities, seriously undertook the suppression of the freebooters,
lopping and trimming the main trunk until its members were scattered
hither and thither, and it was thought that the organization was
exterminated. But, so far from being exterminated, the individual
members were merely scattered north, south, east, and west, each
forming a nucleus around which gathered and clustered the very worst
of the offscouring of humanity.

The result was that when the seventeenth century was fairly packed
away with its lavender in the store chest of the past, a score or more
bands of freebooters were cruising along the Atlantic seaboard in
armed vessels, each with a black flag with its skull and crossbones at
the fore, and with a nondescript crew made up of the tags and remnants
of civilized and semicivilized humanity (white, black, red, and
yellow), known generally as marooners, swarming upon the decks below.

Nor did these offshoots from the old buccaneer stem confine their
depredations to the American seas alone; the East Indies and the
African coast also witnessed their doings, and suffered from them, and
even the Bay of Biscay had good cause to remember more than one visit
from them.

Worthy sprigs from so worthy a stem improved variously upon the parent
methods; for while the buccaneers were content to prey upon the
Spani