he account" and sails to some prearranged rendezvous of the "brethren
of the coast."

To write a whole history of piracy would be a great undertaking, but a
very interesting one. Piracy must have begun in the far, dim ages, and
perhaps when some naked savage, paddling himself across a tropical river,
met with another adventurer on a better tree-trunk, or carrying a bigger
bunch of bananas, the first act of piracy was committed. Indeed, piracy
must surely be the third oldest profession in the world, if we give the
honour of the second place to the ancient craft of healing. If such a
history were to include the whole of piracy, it would have to refer to the
Phoenicians, to the Mediterranean sea-rovers of the days of Rome, who, had
they but known it, held the future destiny of the world in their grasp
when they, a handful of pirates, took prisoner the young Julius Caesar, to
ransom him and afterwards to be caught and crucified by him. The Arabs in
the Red Sea were for many years past-masters of the art of piracy, as were
the Barbary corsairs of Algiers and Tunis, who made the Mediterranean a
place of danger for many generations of seamen. All this while the Chinese
and Malays were active pirates, while the Pirate coast of the Persian Gulf
was feared by all mariners. Then arose the great period, beginning in the
reign of Henry VIII., advancing with rapid strides during the adventurous
years of Queen Elizabeth, when many West of England squires were wont to
sell their estates and invest all in a ship in which to go cruising on
the Spanish Main, in the hope of taking a rich Spanish galleon homeward
bound from Cartagena and Porto Bello, deep laden with the riches of Peru
and Mexico.

Out of these semi-pirate adventurers developed the buccaneers, a
ruffianly, dare-devil lot, who feared neither God, man, nor death.

By the middle of the eighteenth century piracy was on the wane, and
practically had died out by the beginning of the nineteenth, the final
thrust that destroyed it being given by the American and English Navies in
the North Atlantic and West Indian Seas. But by this time piracy had
degenerated to mere sea-robbing, the days of gallant and ruthless
sea-battles had passed, and the pirate of those decadent days was
generally a Spanish-American half-breed, with no courage, a mere robber
and murderer.

The advent of the telegraph and of steam-driven ships settled for ever the
account of the pirates, except in China, whe