onviction was strengthened that
that which had so profoundly interested the writer, would not be altogether
indifferent to others. For some inscrutable reason the deeds of sea-robbers
have always possessed a fascination denied to those of their more numerous
brethren of the land; and in the case of the Sea-wolves of the sixteenth
century we are dealing with the very aristocrats of the profession.
Circumstances over which they had no control flung the Moslem population of
Southern Spain on to the shores of Northern Africa: to revenge themselves
upon the Christian foe by whom this expropriation had been accomplished was
natural to a warrior race; and those who heretofore had been land-folk pure
and simple took to piracy as a means of livelihood. It is of the deeds of
these men that this book treats; of their marvellous triumphs, of their
apparently hopeless defeats, of the manner in which they audaciously
maintained themselves against the principalities and the powers of
Christendom always hungering for their destruction.

The quality which Napoleon is said to have ascribed to the British
Infantry, "of never knowing when they were beaten," seems to have also
characterised the Sea-wolves; as witness the marvellous recuperation of
Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa when expelled from Tunis by Charles V.; and the
escape of Dragut from the island of Jerba when apparently hopelessly
trapped by the Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria. All through their history the
leaders of the Sea-wolves show the resourcefulness of the real seamen that
they had become by force of circumstances, and it was they who in the age
in which they dwelt showed what sea power really meant. Sailing through the
Mediterranean on my way to Malta in the spring of this year, as the good
ship fared onwards I passed in succession all those lurking-places from
which the Moslem Corsairs were wont to burst out upon their prey. Truly it
seemed as if

"The spirits of their fathers might start from every wave,"

and in imagination one pictured the rush of the pirate galley, with its
naked slaves straining at the oar of their taskmasters, its fierce,
reckless, beturbaned crew clustered on the "rambades" at the bow and stern.
It might be that they would capture some hapless "round-ship," a
merchantman lumbering slowly along the coast; or again they might meet with
a galley of the terrible Knights of St. John or of the ever-redoubtable
Doria. In either case the Sea-wolves were equal