ards alone, the marooners reaped the harvest from the commerce of
all nations.

So up and down the Atlantic seaboard they cruised, and for the fifty
years that marooning was in the flower of its glory it was a sorrowful
time for the coasters of New England, the middle provinces, and the
Virginias, sailing to the West Indies with their cargoes of salt fish,
grain, and tobacco. Trading became almost as dangerous as
privateering, and sea captains were chosen as much for their
knowledge of the flintlock and the cutlass as for their seamanship.

As by far the largest part of the trading in American waters was
conducted by these Yankee coasters, so by far the heaviest blows, and
those most keenly felt, fell upon them. Bulletin after bulletin came
to port with its doleful tale of this vessel burned or that vessel
scuttled, this one held by the pirates for their own use or that one
stripped of its goods and sent into port as empty as an eggshell from
which the yolk had been sucked. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and
Charleston suffered alike, and worthy ship owners had to leave off
counting their losses upon their fingers and take to the slate to keep
the dismal record.

"Maroon--to put ashore on a desert isle, as a sailor, under pretense
of having committed some great crime." Thus our good Noah Webster
gives us the dry bones, the anatomy, upon which the imagination may
construct a specimen to suit itself.

It is thence that the marooners took their name, for marooning was one
of their most effective instruments of punishment or revenge. If a
pirate broke one of the many rules which governed the particular band
to which he belonged, he was marooned; did a captain defend his ship
to such a degree as to be unpleasant to the pirates attacking it, he
was marooned; even the pirate captain himself, if he displeased his
followers by the severity of his rule, was in danger of having the
same punishment visited upon him which he had perhaps more than once
visited upon another.

The process of marooning was as simple as terrible. A suitable place
was chosen (generally some desert isle as far removed as possible from
the pathway of commerce), and the condemned man was rowed from the
ship to the beach. Out he was bundled upon the sand spit; a gun, a
half dozen bullets, a few pinches of powder, and a bottle of water
were chucked ashore after him, and away rowed the boat's crew back to
the ship, leaving the poor wretch alone to rave a