that £100 was his "sweat's worth.” They gave him something better than perishable riches, for they told him that the sum would serve to apprentice him when he reached home, and so put him in a fair way to become a useful member of a ship's company.

He had no oppor

been a criminal. A journal of nothing, was allowed £100. his cruise in the Charles II. His thoughtful elders considwould be worth having, but in ered the absence of illuminating details we can only know that it followed the orthodox pattern -to the Red Sea for booty and then to New England for a market. Avery and his men prospered. At Perim they met other skimmers of the sea who were out "on the same account." They plundered the tunity to act on this excellent Moorish ships and divided the advice, for in New Providence spoil. The great Mogul he was robbed of his money ship, which they named the by John Sparkes, a full-share Gunsway, was & noble man, who cowed him by dire prize. She carried a lady threats. a lady threats. Sparkes would have of the imperial family who done better to leave the boy was on pilgrimage to Mecca alone, for in October 1697 with her suite, and a grand Middleton played him a rebooty of ready money and turn match which was abjewels. The pirates behaved solutely final. He appeared with the decency of Spanish as witness for the Crown in bandoleros in the days before the trial which Sparkes did the Napoleonic invasion cor- not foresee, not foresee, and he did as rupted their manners. They much as any man to fix took the ready money, the the noose round the bully's jewels, some goods of small neck. When the plunder of bulk and high value, and a the Gunsway was cheerfully certain amount of necessary divided at the capstan, the tackle. Then they let the "Session of oyer and terminer great Mogul ship go on her in the jurisdiction of the Adway to Surat. Their "voyage miralty was still in the was made," and they could dim and distant future. The divide the gold and jewels at Charles II. was sailed to New the capstan's head before sail- England, and pratique was ing to New England with the obtained in the usual way. A captured goods. The partition purse was made up for the was made according to the Governor of New Providencecustom of the sea. To Avery £40 from Avery, and pro rata a double share; to the prime from the others. Then they seamen a full share per man— scattered. The wiser or more to wit, £1000; to others who lucky remained in America to were not complete sailor men drink their money away, and such sums as the leaders chose no doubt in many cases to drift to give them. Philip Middle- back to piracy and reach the ton, who shipped as a boy, predestined gallows at the last. and therefore as knowing Others, Avery being among

them, came to the old coun- Government felt that something try, where & sad surprise must be done; and nothing awaited them. We are told could be more just or more by Captain Johnston, the his- practical than to bring as torian of the pirates, that many of Avery's men as could Avery was cheated out of be detected and arrested to some jewels he had secreted Execution Dock. The great by Quakers at Bristol, and majority escaped, but a suffidied in obscurity of hunger. cient number to serve as a It is very likely. He saw no warning and a sacrifice was harm in robbing the heathen, secured. It appears to the and there may have been modern mind a mere matter Quakers who thought it no of course that the concluding sin to deprive the enemies of steps should have been swiftly the human race of unlawful taken, and the prisoners forgains. Obscurity and hunger warded rapidly to Execution are for the rest, the common Dock. The seventeenth cenfate of the adventurer who tury had apparently not made has missed his great coup, its mind up on the question of or has chosen his coup un- piracy, for when the members wisely. of Avery's crew who were captured, Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William May, William Bishop, James Lewis, and John Sparkes, were brought to trial at the Old Bailey for the taking of the Gunsway, they were acquitted. Dr Newton, King's Advocate, harangued the jury in vain, insisting to them not only on the enormity of piracy in general, but on the urgent necessity for stopping piracy in the Red Sea, in the interest of the East India Company and of the trade of London, and also in view of the power of the "Great Mogul and the natural inclination of the Indians to revenge." There was no doubt as to the facts. Dawson pleaded guilty, but the jury, as a certain judge worded it in a similar case, said he was a liar, and acquitted them. Lord Chief Justice Holt, an eminently fair - minded man, pronounced the verdict a disgrace. It was, fortunately for

For in truth the taking of the great Mogul ship was a hideous blunder. Native piracy was common on the coast of Malabar, and continued to be so till Rear-Admiral Watson and Colonel Clive suppressed Angria. European piracy was no new thing in those seas, but so far it had been borne as an unavoidable dispensation. When, however, it grew so bad that a great ship in which the Court of Delhi was interested was taken and pillaged, the nuisance was found to be intolerable. The Great Mogul at Delhi could do nothing on the sea, in England, or New England. Yet

there was one thing he could do. He could beat the pirates on the back of the East India Company; and that he did. The loud clamours of the Company were heard at home, and the Eastern trade suffered. Therefore the City and the

nuisance was so serious that Crown and Company really did exert themselves, and the fine cruising round Perim came to an end. Some of the pirates retired from the sea and settled in Madagascar, where they blackmailed the natives, exchanged cattle, wood, and water for gunpowder and ardent spirits with passing merchant ships, and lived in a paradise of sluttish and drunken ease. These were the Kings of Madagascar, whose fame is not wholly extinct. The fortune of the King of Madagascar, which is supposed to be deposited in the Bank of England, is a continental equivalent for our own "Spanish treasure”—a swindle which makes a periodical appearance. The pirates who kept the

sent him with a crew who better than he was. But the shipped "no pay no purchase -that is to say that they were to get nothing except what they could win, and the utmost they could win would be their share of one-fourth of whatever they could recover from the pirates. And then they affected an indignant horror on hearing that he had turned pirate. What else did they expect? They were warned at the beginning of his cruise that he had put into Boston and had completed his complement with notorious pirates who would certainly make their profit in the East per fas aut nefas, and that he could not keep such men honest even if he had wished to play the game. Kidd was indeed a blockhead and a ruffian, but he was not without excuse if he thought that the great gentlemen who sent him out expected him to bring them back something to their advantage, which he might recover from the pirates if he could, but must not fail to find somewhere. At the close of his life he vexed the soul of Paul Lorraine, the ordinary of Newgate, by reflecting on others, and by refusing to confess his own sins. He really had some cause to complain of the Whig grandees who put him in a position where honesty was impossible, and then showed an indecent alacrity in agreeing that he deserved to be hanged.

The first men-of-war who were sent out when Kidd's doings began to be heard of in London were not much

sea and the new recruits had to confine themselves to the west coast of Africa, the West Indies, and Spanish Main, to hang about on the outskirts of the slave trade of the South Sea Company. Bartholomew Roberts was the Avery of this generation. Roberts, a not unsympathetic person, was what Mr Simon Tappertit would have been if he could. Beyond all doubt Sim knew Johnson's ' History of the Pirates,' and was familiar with the plate which gives the portrait of Roberts, standing sword in hand, adorned with a noble periwig, before a seascape full of ships, flying his pirate banner, which was a picture of himself. Roberts, one gathers, was wont to wax eloquent about the wrongs of