at home or in the West Indies;
rather were they commended, and it was considered not altogether a
discreditable thing for men to get rich upon the spoils taken from
Spanish galleons in times of nominal peace. Many of the most reputable
citizens and merchants of London, when they felt that the queen failed
in her duty of pushing the fight against the great Catholic Power,
fitted out fleets upon their own account and sent them to levy good
Protestant war of a private nature upon the Pope's anointed.

Some of the treasures captured in such ventures were immense,
stupendous, unbelievable. For an example, one can hardly credit the
truth of the "purchase" gained by Drake in the famous capture of the
plate ship in the South Sea.

One of the old buccaneer writers of a century later says: "The Spaniards
affirm to this day that he took at that time twelvescore tons of
plate and sixteen bowls of coined money a man (his number being then
forty-five men in all), insomuch that they were forced to heave much of
it overboard, because his ship could not carry it all."

Maybe this was a very greatly exaggerated statement put by the author
and his Spanish authorities, nevertheless there was enough truth in it
to prove very conclusively to the bold minds of the age that tremendous
profits--"purchases" they called them--were to be made from piracy. The
Western World is filled with the names of daring mariners of those old
days, who came flitting across the great trackless ocean in their little
tublike boats of a few hundred tons burden, partly to explore unknown
seas, partly--largely, perhaps--in pursuit of Spanish treasure:
Frobisher, Davis, Drake, and a score of others.

In this left-handed war against Catholic Spain many of the adventurers
were, no doubt, stirred and incited by a grim, Calvinistic, puritanical
zeal for Protestantism. But equally beyond doubt the gold and silver and
plate of the "Scarlet Woman" had much to do with the persistent energy
with which these hardy mariners braved the mysterious, unknown terrors
of the great unknown ocean that stretched away to the sunset, there in
faraway waters to attack the huge, unwieldy, treasure-laden galleons
that sailed up and down the Caribbean Sea and through the Bahama
Channel.

Of all ghastly and terrible things old-time religious war was the most
ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous
cruelty of those times. Generally death was the least penalty