THERE have been differences of opinion among the learned -and even among the learned in the law as to what constituted a pirate. The good old phrase, hostis humani generis, does not help us in the least. Enemy of the human race "is neither a definition nor as much as a description of a pirate, but a rhetorical invective to show the odiousness of that crime." As a rhetorical invective it has been found applicable to North American publishers, South American revolutionists, and London omnibus-drivers, who were in the opinion of some, and for various reasons, obnoxious to terms of abuse. It provided a plausible excuse for severe measures when it was applied to John Golding, Thomas Jones, John Ryan, Darby Collins, Richard Shivers, Patrick Quidley, John Slaughter, and Constantine de Hartley in 1696. They were all tried and condemned, and some of them were executed as pirates. Yet they argued in their petition to Parliament, not without force, that they were no pirates. All were natives of Ireland, and they served their lawful king, James II. They had shared in the capitulation of Limerick, and had followed their master into exile together with thousands of loyal Englishmen, Scots, and Irishmen. Their brother loyalists served the King over the water on land, and were treated when

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captured as enemies. Were they to be punished as common criminals because they fought with his commission on the sea? It was a nice question. Dr Oldish, King's Advocate, when directed by the Admiralty to prosecute them had refused, for he said that they had due authority from sovereign who was competent to levy war. The Doctor spoke at his peril. Nor is it easy to understand his point of view. He obeyed the Government of William and Mary. When pointedly asked by the Lords of the Council what he thought of the abdication of James II., he replied that this was "an odious ensnaring question," but that he thought of the abdication as the Lords of the Council did, "for since it is voted it binds at least in England." The Doctor would have run with the hare and have hunted with the hounds if he could, would have accepted the Revolution Settlement for business reasons, and would yet have helped the cause of the true King. His subtle distinctions proved but broken reeds to Golding and the others. Yet we know they were only pirates because it pleased the revolutionary powers so to name them. history of the naval cavaliers and Jacobites has not as yet been thoroughly investigated. Rupert and Holmes, Strickland and Lloyd, Cammock and Forrester, might be called pirates,

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but only in the most flagrant way of rhetorical invective. Many gentlemen of honour and spirit, partisans of lost causes, patriots who would not yield to conquest, have taken to the sea from of old. There were the pirates whom Pompey suppressed, and there was his Own son Sextus. They had had predecessors, and have not lacked followers. But it is not of them we think when we speak of the pirate. It is of the broken man and the downright freebooter, who will live by force on the industry of "such as pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions." They They have been numerous, and they have, undesignedly, played no inconsiderable part in the history of colonisation and, after a sort, civilisation. The founders of the once wealthy French colony in San Domingo were purely piratical. It is not at all necessary to go back to Ulysses in order to find a pirate who was by common consent a gentleman. Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, the Admiral of the Parliament in the Great Civil War, was, during all his early life, an investor in piracy. The generation in which he was born had small scruple on that point. Gentlemen who were boys when the more fortunate Elizabethan adventurers were gaining wealth and honour by plundering Spaniards could not readily renounce the hope that they could make the world their oyster-to be opened with a boarding-pike. When James I. made peace with Spain, and obstacles were

put in the way of expeditions from England to the Spanish Main, some betook themselves to Algiers and Salee. One of the Verneys pirated from Algiers, and died in hospital at Messina. A more fortunate hero of the same type was Sir Henry Manwaring. This gentleman, presumably one of the Kentish stock of the name, ended by holding official posts under King James. Piracy was not then a trade from which there was no honourable issue. Governments were weak and navies were small. When piracy became intolerably active, ably active, a spasmodic attempt was made to suppress it; and to make the work the easier to do, pardon was offered to all who would come in by a certain date. When Sir William Monson was sent to clear the pirates out of the Orkneys, the Hebrides, and from the coast of Ireland, in 1608, he found no difficulty in recruiting known pirates who took the King's pardon, and from poachers became gamekeepers. Irish gentlemen entertained piratical visitors. Men of business in London sent agents to buy the plundered goods. Captain Manwaring was a leading member of this piratical society. At a later date he too came in on a proclamation, and proved his repentance by drawing up an account of the then existing pirate world. It still survives in a neatly-written manuscript in the British Museum, with a profusely loyal and grateful dedication to King James. At that time the headquarters of

the pirates were at Salee, and they were an international body. They ranged as far north as Iceland and out to the Canaries. They hung about the west and south coasts of Ireland, and were a pest in the very British Channel. Manwaring was employed in Dover Castle, and it is to be supposed that he was the Sir Henry who wrote the first treatise on seamanship (not, of course, the first on navigation) which we possess in English. It was dedicated to the favourite Buckingham when he was Lord Admiral, and just before his murder at Portsmouth. It was printed under the title 'The Seaman's Dictionary' some twenty years later, and reached a second edition. Sir Henry, we see, made a good end. His career helps to show that to be a pirate was not to be beyond redemption, and to have been a pirate was not to be disgraced for life in the seventeenth century.

Indeed it was in the seventeenth century that piracy properly so called reached its height. It was the age of Avery alias Bridgeman, of "Thomas Too, William Maze, John Ireland, Thomas Wake, and others who were," so the Secretary of State was assured from New England, "all of them known as pirates, and had made several piratical voyages from which they had returned with great wealth." Then flourished, for a space, Captain William Kidd, who, more by luck than good guidance, has become a name for a

pirate. The rise, progress, and fall of these persons makes part of the history of the politics, diplomacy, colonisation, and law of their time. The navies of Holland, France, and England had grown strong enough to police the seas of Europe, but were not yet able to enforce order on the other side of the Atlantic and in the East. The Sir Henry Manwarings of the years after 1650, or thereabouts, had to go farther abroad than Salee and the mouth of the Channel. A vast field lay open to them. Beginning in New England, it ran south to the West Indies and the Spanish Main, across the Atlantic by the Cape to Madagascar, then on to the coast of Malabar and the Red Sea, with an immense projecting space which began at the south of Ceylon and spread by Sumatra to the China Seas. It is true that it behoved the pirate to go cautiously when he was to the east of Ceylon and in or beyond the Straits of Malacca, for then he had to be on his guard against the Dutch East India Company. The Oostindiaansche Maatschappij was at the summit of its power, was well armed, vigilant, and extremely expeditive in its ways with trespassers on its preserve. Therefore the pirate preferred to keep to the Spanish Main, to the coast of Malabar and the Red Sea.

Here everything was in his favour. There was trade well worth plundering. No controlling force existed to check him. Spain was utterly feeble. England, France, and Holland

were tolerant of lawlessness which helped them to a profitable contraband trade in the Spanish possessions in America. The British colonies were restricted in their trade by the Navigation Laws and the monopoly of the East India Company. They resented both. There were no Admiralty Courts in the Plantations or at the ports of the East India Company. At the end of the seventeenth century, too, it was fighting with its rival the New Company, and was striving to suppress interlopers by force. In these favourable circumstances piracy flourished. It was not an affair of mere criminals preying on lawful trade. It was a regular business, which had its headquarters, its exchange and mart, and its capitalists, in New England. Piratical voyages were openly organised at Boston or at New York. They sailed to Malabar and the Red Sea. In those waters there were no royal ships to check them. Trade was largely conducted in "Moorish" vessels belonging to native merchants, manned by native crews, but commanded by Europeans. The

"free trader" from New England plundered them by preference, though without prejudice to the plunder of European ships when occasion served. Then he went back to Boston or New York, wound up the transactions of the voyage, and divided the spoil. Incidental piracy would be practised at the expense of weak vessels of all nations, on the way out and back, when occasion served.

But the main purpose was always to levy contributions on African villages-particularly on the Gold Coast-and to rob the Moorish ships. Goods were taken as a matter of course, but ready money and gold dust were preferred. The pirates were men of principle too. They argued that there was no sin in robbing the heathen. Darby Mullens, who stood in the dock with Kidd, told the Court that he had never heard there was any wickedness in plundering the "enemies of Christ." There was some apparent shrewdness in the calculation that African negroes and Moorish traders would not be able to make their complaints heard in Europe. Yet this was precisely the most fatal of all the mistakes of the pirates. In the meantime this life of free living, easy robbery, and tolerably certain profit, was irresistibly delectable to unruly spirits.

John or Henry Avery or Every or Bridgeman, whom Esmond called the redoubted Captain Avory, who was the hero of a biography by Defoe and was the original of Captain Singleton, was the "flower and pattern of all bold mariners" of this kidney. He said he was a man of fortune, and must seek his fortune. Man of fortune did not mean to Avery what it appears to signify. He was officier de fortune, as the French used to say-one whose lot it was to sail down the wind and peck at fortune. In 1694 he was mate of the Charles II., a large ship, as ships then went, which was ly

ing at Corunna (our ancestors called it the Groyne), together with her consort the James. The Spaniards had brought their affairs to such a pass that their own shipping was destroyed. So, jealous as they were of allowing foreigners to approach their "Indies," they were compelled to hire foreigners to carry their treasure and to guard their coasts. They were at war with France and on bad terms with the Dutch. The Dutch island of Curaçao was an active depot of the contraband trade, which embittered the life of the Council of the Indies. De lo mal lo menos -of the bad, the least-is a sound Spanish maxim, and for the time being the Englishman was a less pestilent foreigner than the Hollander. The Charles II. and the James were hired and brought to Corunna. As usual the Spanish Government was short of money, and no funds could be found to pay wages and advances. The ships could not sail till the payments were made, and therefore lay in the harbour with idle crews. Avery found work for them to do. At his instigation the majority of the crew of the Charles II., reinforced by a boatful of men from the James, seized the vessel, cut the cable, and ran to sea. The pirates, for that they were by the single fact of their seizure of the Charles II., did not behave ill to the few among her crew who refused to join in their venture. We hear of threats to shoot the recalcitrant, but though pistols were spoken none were used.

Gibson, the captain of the Charles II., was ill in his cabin. He and some seventeen of the crew who remained faithful were allowed to escape in a boat. They were even provided with a bucket to bale her. Avery listened with patience to the reproaches of Captain Gibson, and he interfered firmly on behalf of honest men who were threatened by his own rogues with the confiscation of their kits.

The man was indeed a pirate captain of history who bears some resemblance to the pirate captain of romance. He was not quite the only one, for he had a worthy follower in the showy and valiant Bartholomew Roberts, who was slain in fight with Sir Chaloner Ogle near Cape Lopez on the west coast

of Africa in 1724. Roberts had the makings of a socialist. If Avery had been born a century earlier he might have been a minor Elizabethan hero. No tale of cruelty is told of him, nor do we hear that he cheated his brother water-thieves after the model provided by Sir Henry Morgan the Buccaneer. He kept his authority, and resolutely took his double share as captain. Maze, Too, and so forth, are mere names. Kidd we know, but he was an arrant blockhead, and withal a ruffian, who in later times and as a merchant skipper would have found his way to jail for some piece of violence to his men or fraud on his employer. Avery would always have been an adventurer, but it was not inevitable that he should have