rightened the underwriters so that in London the
insurance against capture ran up to the ruinous premium of sixty per
cent. The Lisbon and the Dutch packets fell victims, and insurance of
boats plying between Dover and Calais went to ten per cent. Englishmen
began to feel that England was blockaded! We are not so familiar as we
ought to be with the interesting record of all these audacious and
brilliant enterprises, conducted with dare-devil recklessness by men who
would not improbably have been hanged both as pirates and as traitors,
had fortune led to their capture at this moment of British rage and
anxiety.[47]

[Note 47: In fact, Conyngham, being at last captured, narrowly
escaped this fate.]

All this cruising was conducted under the auspices of Franklin. To him
these gallant rovers looked for instructions and suggestions, for money
and supplies. He had to issue commissions, to settle personal
misunderstandings, to attend to questions of prize money, to soothe
unpaid mutineers, to advise as to the purchase of ships, and as to the
enterprises to be undertaken; in a word, he was the only _American
government_ which these independent sailors knew. The tax thus laid upon
him was severe, for he was absolutely without experience in such
matters.

There was one labor, however, in this connection, which properly fell
within his department, and in this his privateersmen gave him abundant
occupation. It was to stand between them and the just wrath and fatal
interference of the French government. Crude as international law was in
those days, it was far from being crude enough for the strictly
illegitimate purposes of these vikings. What they expected was to buy,
equip, man, and supply their vessels in French ports, to sail out on
their prize-taking excursions, and, having captured their fill, to
return to these same ports, and there to have their prizes condemned, to
sell their booty, to refit and re-supply, and then to sally forth again.
In short, an Englishman would have been puzzled to distinguish a
difference between the warlike ports of America and the neutral ports of
France, save as he saw that the latter, being nearer, were much the more
injurious. But de Vergennes had no notion of being used for American
purposes in this jeopardizing style. He did not mean to have a war with
England, if he could avoid it; so he gave to the harbor masters orders
which greatly annoyed and surprised the American captains,
"extraordi