, being a
good navigator or "sea-artist," was compelled by the pirates to lend them
his services. Others, again, were in privateer ships, which carried on a
legitimate warfare against the shipping of hostile countries, under a
commission or letter of marque.

Often the very commission or letter of marque carried about so jealously
by some shady privateer was not worth the paper it was written on, nor the
handful of dubloons paid for it. One buccaneer sailed about the South
Seas, plundering Spanish ships and sacking churches and burning towns,
under a commission issued to him, for a consideration, by the Governor of
a Danish West India island, himself an ex-pirate. This precious document,
adorned with florid scrolls and a big, impressive seal, was written in
Danish. Someone with a knowledge of that language had an opportunity and
the curiosity to translate it, when he found that all it entitled the
bearer to do was to hunt for goats and pigs on the Island of Hispaniola,
and nothing more.

When, at the conclusion of hostilities, peace was declared, the crew of a
privateer found it exceedingly irksome to give up the roving life, and
were liable to drift into piracy. Often it happened that, after a long
naval war, crews were disbanded, ships laid up, and navies reduced, thus
flooding the countryside with idle mariners, and filling the roads with
begging and starving seamen. These were driven to go to sea if they could
find a berth, often half starved and brutally treated, and always
underpaid, and so easily yielded to the temptation of joining some vessel
bound vaguely for the "South Sea," where no questions were asked and no
wages paid, but every hand on board had a share in the adventure.

The buccaneers were a great source of piracy also. When a war was on hand
the English Government was only too glad to have the help of these daring
and skilful seamen; but when peace was declared these allies began to lead
to international complications, and means had to be taken to abolish them,
and to try and turn them into honest settlers in the islands. But when a
man has for years lived the free life, sailed out from Jamaica a pauper,
to return in six weeks or less with, perhaps, a bag of gold worth two,
three, or four thousand pounds, which he has prided himself on spending in
the taverns and gambling-hells of Port Royal in a week, how can he settle
down to humdrum uneventful toil, with its small profits? Thus he goes back
"on t