s best known to the English-speaking
world are the buccaneers of the Spanish Main, who flourished exceedingly in
the seventeenth century, and of whom many chronicles exist: principally
owing to the labours of that John Esquemelin, a pirate of a literary turn
of mind, who added the crime of authorship to the ill deeds of a sea-rover.
The Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean in the preceding century did not raise
up a chronicler from among themselves: for not much tincture of learning
seems to have distinguished these desperate fighters and accomplished
seamen, descendants of those Spanish Moslems who had, during the Middle
Ages, lived in a land in which learning and culture had been held in the
highest estimation. Driven from their homes, their civilisation crushed,
their religion banned in that portion of Southern Spain in which they had
dwelt for over seven centuries, cast upon the shores of Northern Africa,
these men took to the sea and became the scourge of the Mediterranean. That
which they did, the deeds which they accomplished, the terror which they
inspired, the ruin and havoc which they wrought, have been set forth in the
pages of this book.

It was the age of the galley, the oar-propelled vessel which moved
independently of the wind in the fine-weather months of the great inland
sea. Therefore to the dwellers on the coast the Sea-wolves were a perpetual
menace; as, when booty was unobtainable at sea, they raided the towns and
villages of their Christian foes. During all the period here dealt with no
man's life, no woman's honour, was safe from these pirates within the area
of their nefarious activities. They held the Mediterranean in fee, they
levied toll on all who came within reach of their galleys and their
scimitars. Places unknown to the geography of the sixteenth century became
notorious in their day, and Christian wives and mothers learned to tremble
at the very names of Algiers and Tunis. From these places the rovers issued
to capture, to destroy, and to enslave: in Oran and Tlemcen, in Tenes,
Shershell, Bougie, Jigelli, Bizerta, Sfax, Susa, Monastir, Jerbah, and
Tripoli they lurked ready for the raid and the foray. At one time all
Northern Africa would thrill to the triumph of the Moslem arms, at another
there would go up the wail of the utterly defeated; but in spite of
alternations of fortune the Sea-wolves abode in the localities of their
choice, and ended in establishing those pirate States which troubled