RIT OF MANLY SPORT AND ADVENTURE
WHICH HAS MADE THE ANGLO-SAXON
PEOPLE A RACE OF WORLD CONQUERORS.
MAY THEY NEVER
RETROGRADE!

_Thanks are due the Librarian of Congress, and particularly to Mr.
Roberts of the Department of Prints, for numerous courtesies extended
to the author during the compilation of this volume._

PREFACE

MY DEAR BOYS:--The sea stretches away from the land,--a vast sheet of
unknown possibilities. Now gray, now blue, now slate colored, whipped
into a thousand windrows by the storm, churned into a seething mass of
frothing spume and careening bubbles, it pleases, lulls, then
terrorizes and dismays. Perpetually intervening as a barrier between
peoples and their countries, the wild, sobbing ocean rises, falls and
roars in agony. It is a stoppage to progress and contact between races
of men and warring nations.

In the breasts of all souls slumbers the fire of adventure. To
penetrate the unknown, to there find excitement, battle, treasure, so
that one's future life can be one of ease and indolence--for this men
have sacrificed the more stable occupations on land in order to push
recklessly across the death-dealing billows. They have battled with
the elements; they have suffered dread diseases; they have been
tormented with thirst; with a torrid sun and with strange weather;
they have sorrowed and they have sinned in order to gain fame,
fortune, and renown. On the wide sweep of the ocean, even as on the
rolling plateau of the once uninhabited prairie, many a harrowing
tragedy has been enacted. These dramas have often had no
chronicler,--the battle was fought out in the silence of the watery
waste, and there has been no tongue to tell of the solitary conflict
and the unseen strife.

Of sea fighters there have been many: the pirate, the fillibusterer,
the man-of-warsman, and the privateer. The first was primarily a
ruffian and, secondarily, a brute, although now and again there were
pirates who shone by contrast only. The fillibusterer was also engaged
in lawless fighting on the sea and to this service were attracted the
more daring and adventurous souls who swarmed about the shipping ports
in search of employment and pelf. The man-of-warsman was the
legitimate defender of his country's interests and fought in the open,
without fear of death or imprisonment from his own people. The
privateersman--a combination of all three--was the