what they were
pleased to term commissions to all who would plunder the Spaniard. The
Spaniards retaliated by giving commissions to all who would plunder
anyone else. The marauder who victimised the Spaniard was sure of a
market, and a refuge in Jamaica. The other marauder who was prepared to
feed upon English, Dutch, or French, was sure of a welcome in Cuba. When
Governments suddenly took to being virtuous, a sense of wrong inflamed
the minds of the men who had hitherto been allowed to live in recognised
lawlessness. Captain Kidd, for example, manifestly thought that Lord
Bellomont and the other gentleman who sent him out to Madagascar to
cruise against the pirates, were only assuming a decent excuse for a
little speculation in piracy on their own account. The freebooters who
settled at Providence, in the Bahamas, were really to be pardoned for
not realising that the happy days of Governor Moddiford at Jamaica were
over. When they were made to understand that there were to be no more of
these cakes and ale, the majority, under the command of Captain
Jennings, promptly came in. Captain Jennings was the owner of an estate
in Jamaica, and he brought a comfortable little sum back with him from
his piratical adventures. The residue, who probably had no comfortable
sum to bring with them, did not come in, and as they were given to
understand that they would certainly be hanged if caught, they took in
self-defence to giving no quarter. So at the end of the great war, the
powers who had encouraged privateering while the fighting lasted,
without inquiring too closely how far the privateer confined his
operations to the enemy only without plundering the neutral, became
suddenly very strict. Then the men whom they had allowed to become
hardened to a life of pillage took refuge in downright piracy. These men
were the _Pescadores del Puerto Escondido_ who enlightened the pages of
Michael Scott. The Spaniards tolerated them as the English Governors of
Jamaica had once encouraged the Buccaneers. It was not until a combined
vigorous effort of the English and the United States navies had driven
them off the sea, and till they had begun to support themselves by
plundering plantations, that the Captains-General of Cuba took them in
hand.

Now, in all this life, floating as it did between the honest and the
dishonest, there was room for something more human than the be-sashed,
velvet-jacketed, crimson-capped, and long-knifed heroes of Mic