one, that drove Peter Blood to seek
an anchorage at Tortuga. He insists at considerable length, and with a
vehemence which in itself makes it plain that an opposite opinion was
held in some quarters, that it was no part of the design of Blood or of
any of his companions in misfortune to join hands with the buccaneers
who, under a semi-official French protection, made of Tortuga a lair
whence they could sally out to drive their merciless piratical trade
chiefly at the expense of Spain.

It was, Pitt tells us, Blood's original intention to make his way to
France or Holland. But in the long weeks of waiting for a ship to convey
him to one or the other of these countries, his resources dwindled and
finally vanished. Also, his chronicler thinks that he detected signs of
some secret trouble in his friend, and he attributes to this the abuses
of the potent West Indian spirit of which Blood became guilty in those
days of inaction, thereby sinking to the level of the wild adventurers
with whom ashore he associated.

I do not think that Pitt is guilty in this merely of special pleading,
that he is putting forward excuses for his hero. I think that in those
days there was a good deal to oppress Peter Blood. There was the thought
of Arabella Bishop--and that this thought loomed large in his mind we
are not permitted to doubt. He was maddened by the tormenting lure of
the unattainable. He desired Arabella, yet knew her beyond his reach
irrevocably and for all time. Also, whilst he may have desired to go to
France or Holland, he had no clear purpose to accomplish when he reached
one or the other of these countries. He was, when all is said, an
escaped slave, an outlaw in his own land and a homeless outcast in any
other. There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly
alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity. And so,
considering the adventurous spirit that once already had sent him
a-roving for the sheer love of it, considering that this spirit was
heightened now by a recklessness begotten of his outlawry, that his
training and skill in militant seamanship clamorously supported the
temptations that were put before him, can you wonder, or dare you blame
him, that in the end he succumbed? And remember that these temptations
proceeded not only from adventurous buccaneering acquaintances in the
taverns of that evil haven of Tortuga, but even from M. d'Ogeron, the
governor of the island, who levied as his