at Portland, Maine, 1837, and
largely reprinted from Captain Charles Johnson's "General History of
the Pyrates of the New Providence," etc., first edition, London, 1724.
His second edition of two volumes, published in 1727, contained the
lives of Kidd and Blackbeard. "The Pirates' Own Book," while largely
indebted to Captain Johnson's work, contains a great deal of material
concerning other noted sea rogues who flourished later than 1727.

[2] "As to Clive, there was no limit to his acquisitions but his own
moderation. The treasury of Bengal was thrown open to him. There were
piled up, after the usage of Indian princes, immense masses of coin,
among which might not seldom be detected the florins and byzants with
which, before any European ship had turned the Cape of Good Hope, the
Venetians purchased the stuffs and spices of the East. Clive walked
between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and
was at liberty to help himself."--Macauley.

CHAPTER II

CAPTAIN KIDD IN FACT AND FICTION

Doomed to an infamy undeserved, his name reddened with crimes he never
committed, and made wildly romantic by tales of treasure which he did
not bury, Captain William Kidd is fairly entitled to the sympathy of
posterity and the apologies of all the ballad-makers and alleged
historians who have obscured the facts in a cloud of fable. For two
centuries his grisly phantom has stalked through the legends and
literature of the black flag as the king of pirates and the most
industrious depositor of ill-gotten gold and jewels that ever wielded
pick and shovel. His reputation is simply prodigious, his name has
frightened children wherever English is spoken, and the Kidd tradition,
or myth, is still potent to send treasure-seekers exploring and
excavating almost every beach, cove, and headland between Nova Scotia
and the Gulf of Mexico.

Fate has played the strangest tricks imaginable with the memory of this
seventeenth century seafarer who never cut a throat or made a victim
walk the plank, who was no more than a third or fourth rate pirate in
an era when this interesting profession was in its heyday, and who was
hanged at Execution Dock for the excessively unromantic crime of
cracking the skull of his gunner with a wooden bucket.

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[Illustration: Captain Kidd burying his Bible.]

Carousing at Old Calabar River. (From _The Pirates'