E. Keble Chatterton

“ The occupation of a pirate was deemed no less worthy than a man who gained his living by fishing on the sea or hunting on land. Just as in the Elizabethan age we find the sons of some of the best English families going to sea on a roving expedition to capture Spanish treasure ships, so in classical times the Mediterranean pirates attracted to their ships adventurous spirits from all classes of society, from the most patrician to the most plebeian: the summons of the sea was as irresistible then as later on. ”

“ PIRACY IN THE EARLY TUDOR TIMES
The kind of man who devotes his life to robbery at sea is not the species of humanity who readily subjects himself to laws and ordinances. You may threaten him with terrible punishments, but it is not by these means that you will break his spirit. He is like the gipsy or the vagrant: he has in him an overwhelming longing for wandering and adventure. ”

“ PAUL JONES, PIRATE AND PRIVATEER
We come now to consider the exploits of another historical character whose life and adventures will ever be of unfailing interest on both sides of the Atlantic. And yet, perhaps, this amazing Scotsman is to-day better known in America than in Great Britain. Like many another before him he rose from the rank of ordinary seaman to become a man that was to be had in great fear if not respect. His fame has been celebrated in fiction, and very probably many a story of which he has been made the hero had no foundation in fact. ”

“ It is not so much the greed for gain which prompts the pirate, any more than the land tramp finds his long marches inspired by wealth. But some impelling blind force is at work within, and so not all the treaties and agreements, not all the menaces of death could avail to keep these men from pursuing the occupation which their fathers and grandfathers had for many years been employed in.
Therefore piracy was quite as bad in the sixteenth century as it had been in the Middle Ages. The dwellers on either side of the English Channel were ever ready to pillage each other’s ships and property. ”

“ But even in the most villainous criminal there is always at least one small trait of human nature left, and it is often surprising how this manifests itself when circumstances had seemed to deny its very existence. It was so in the case of this pirate captain. Everything so far had indicated the most unmitigated bully and murderer without one single redeeming feature of any sort whatever. And yet, in spite of all the vain entreaties of Lumsden for mercy, the pirate showed that the last spark of human kindness was not yet quenched. ”

“ But the judge pointed out that even if Gibbs had not actually done the deed, he was there strongly instigating the murderers on without stretching out a hand to save them. “It is murder as much to stand by and encourage the deed as to stab with a knife, strike with a hatchet or shoot with a pistol. It is not only murder in law, but in your own feelings and in your own conscience.” So spoke the judge, and he who had spent a life of licence and piracy, marked by murders with only occasional legitimate fighting, was condemned to the scaffold. ”

“ A distinguished British admiral remarked the other day that it was his experience that the best naval officers were usually those who as boys were most frequently getting into disfavour for their adventurous escapades. It is, at any rate, still true that unless the man or boy has in him the real spirit of adventure, the sea, whether as a sport or profession, can have but little fascination for him.
International law and the growth of navies have practically put an end to the profession of piracy, though privateering would doubtless reassert itself in the next great naval war. ”

“ In the whole history of piracy there figure some remarkably clever and consummate seamen. Like many another criminal they had such tremendous natural endowments that one cannot but regret that they began badly and continued. The bitterest critic of this Moslem monster cannot but admire his abnormal courage, resource; his powers of organisation and his untameable determination. The pity of it all is that all this should have been wasted in bringing misery to tens of thousands, in dealing death and robbery and pillage. ”

“ It is as impossible to explain the growth of piracy as it is to define precisely the call of the sea. A man is born with a bias in favour of the sea or he is not: there is no possibility of putting that instinct into him if already he has not been endowed with that attitude. So also we know from our own personal experience, every one of us, that whilst some of our own friends fret and waste in sedentary pursuits, yet from the time they take to the sea or become explorers or colonisers they find their true métier. The call of the sea is the call of adventure in a specialised form. ”

“ And all this time, while the captain himself was diminishing the number of Moslems and simultaneously adding to the number of Englishmen by the arrival of the Torbay ship, Rawlins, in the most impudent manner, was going about the ship winning every one except the Turkish soldiers over to his side. One knows not which to admire most: his wonderful courage or his consummate skill. For had he made one single error in reposing confidence in the wrong man, the death of the Englishman would have been both certain and cruel. ”

“ The boat which had been lowered from the schooner was quickly rowed alongside the brig, and nine or ten men, ferocious of appearance and well-armed with knives, cutlasses and muskets, now leapt aboard. It was obvious before they had left the schooner’s deck that these were desperate pirates, such as had many a dark, cruel deed to their consciences. With no wasting of formality they at once took charge of the brig and ordered Lumsden, Smith, the ship’s carpenter, and also a Captain Cowper who was travelling as a passenger, to proceed on board the schooner without delay. ”

“ Andrea Doria had defeated the Turks at Patras and in the Dardanelles. Like the policy of the corsairs, after each victory the Christian admiral employed the infidel captives to work at the oars of his galleys. Thus it was that the Sultan of Turkey—Solyman the Magnificent—realising that the Christian admiral was draining the best Turkish seafaring men, determined to invite Kheyr-ed-din to help him against Andrea Doria. So one of the Sultan’s personal guard was dispatched to Algiers requesting Barbarossa to come to Constantinople and place himself at the head of the Ottoman navy. ”

“ Every one knows how easily a sound carries on the sea, especially by night, so the utmost care was to be exercised lest a pirate hovering about might have the rich merchant ship’s presence betrayed to her avaricious ears. ”

“ Men who, after being prisoners for thirty years and less, men who had just come through a night of wild excitement, men who had fought with their arms and sweated hard to get their galley ready for sea, men who even at the last minute had barely escaped being blown into eternity by the Turkish cannon, now halted in their work and made their thanksgiving, whilst most of them hardly could realise that at length they were free men and the time of their tribulation was at an end. ”

“ There is not the slightest doubt of this story of the Exchange being true, but it shows that even in that rather disappointing age which followed on immediately after the defeat of the Armada, there were, at a time when maritime matters were under a cloud, not wanting English seamen of the right stamp, men of courage and action, men who could fight and navigate a ship as in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth. Happily the type of man which includes such sailor characters as Rawlins is not yet dead ”

“ Doria’s ship had not been so much as touched, and yet Barbarossa had not been taken prisoner. That was the last great event in the career of Kheyr-ed-din, and he died in 1548 at Constantinople as one of the wickedest and cruellest murderers of history, the greatest pirate that has ever lived, and one of the cleverest tacticians and strategists the Mediterranean ever bore on its waters. There has rarely [69] lived a human being so bereft of the quality of mercy, and his death was received by Christian Europe with a sigh of the greatest relief. ”

“ So it came to this that crossing and recrossing the Mediterranean there were more big-bellied ships full of richer cargoes and traversing the sea with greater regularity than ever had been in the history of the world. And as there will always be robbers when given the opportunity, either by sea or by land, irrespective of race or time, so when this amount of wealth was now afloat the sea-robber had every incentive to get rich quickly by a means that appealed in the strongest terms to an adventurous temperament. ”

“ When any community has been accustomed for centuries and centuries, either in the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea or the Arabian Sea or the Indian Ocean, to gain their living by sea robbery; when they have made such a careful study of the local navigation and the habits of their potential victims,—it is no easy matter for these men suddenly to relinquish their previous habits and to give up their hard-earned knowledge. ”

“ A pirate who in the heat of the moment, when he is being violently opposed by another, kills his aggressor, is a criminal whom we can understand though not acquit. But a human fiend who, for no particular reason, unnecessarily sheds blood and bereaves women of husbands and children of fathers, is a devil incarnate. Such was Gibbs. ”

“ The combined squadrons of those two historic maritime nations—Great Britain and Holland—had shown that even a race so long accustomed to the sea as the Algerine pirates could not resist for all time. In the history of the world few nations have ever done so much for the development of ships and sea-power as these two northern peoples, and the chance which enabled them to combine forces against a common evil of such antiquity was singularly happy. ”

“ Both sides fought with the same fierceness which had marked their contests in many a previous generation. In the hot, overpowering sun, with the last vestige of breeze vanished away, the gunners blazed away in fine style. Algerine vessels in close proximity to the English fleet burst forth into flames and for a time endangered the wooden walls of England. On both sides frightful slaughter was taking place. The Dey had 500 guns mounted and doing their work to our great loss, but our own men and guns were hurling death into the nest of [222] pirates in a manner that surprised the Algerines. ”

“ It is an amusing fact that if in those days two strange ships met on the high seas, and one of them, hailing the other, inquired if she were a pirate or a trader, the inquiry was neither intended nor accepted as an insult, but a correct answer would follow. It is a little difficult in these modern days of regular steamship routes and powerful liners which have little to fear beyond fog and exceptionally heavy weather, to realise that every merchant ship sailed the seas with fear and trepidation. ”

“ First, the man was employed as an honest fisherman; then, finding this did not pay him, he became a privateer, or else in the King’s service serving on board a Revenue cutter. Then, being more anxious for wealth, he threw in his lot with the very men he had been chasing, and became either an out-and-out smuggler or else a pirate. For, as has been insisted on more than once in previous chapters, the line of demarcation between privateering and piracy, though perfectly visible to lawyers, was not always sufficiently strong to keep the roving seaman within the limitations of legal livelihood. ”

“ There was nothing petty in these eighteenth-century corsairs. They had in them the attributes which go to making a great admiral, they were born rulers of men, they were good strategists, hard fighters, brave and valorous, daring and [175] determined. But as against this they were tyrannical, cruel and brutal; and, as is so frequently the case with all men, the acquisition of wealth ruined them, made them still more overbearing and swollen-headed, so that with no high principles, no lofty aims, they descended by degrees into debauchery and callousness. ”

“ Robbery by sea is certainly one of the oldest professions in the world. I use the word profession advisedly, for the reason that in the earliest days to be a pirate was not the equivalent of being a pariah and an outcast. It was deemed just as honourable then to belong to a company of pirates as it is to-day to belong to the navy of any recognised power. ”

“ When the natives saw this warlike ship in their river, with her guns and her formidable appearance generally, they began to fear she was a man-of-war come to impress men for the Navy. It happened that the noble lord was away from home in London, and when the men-servants at the castle espied what they presumed to be a King’s ship, they begged Lady Selkirk for leave to go and hide themselves lest they might be impressed into the service. A boat was sent from the ship, and a strong body of men landed and marched to the castle, which, to the surprise of all, they surrounded. ”

“ If Moslem piracy had been severely crushed, it was not unable to revive, and, before long, Barbarossa with his veterans was afloat again, looting ships at sea, and carrying off more prisoners to Algiers. For this piracy was like a highly infectious disease. You might think for a time that it was stamped out, that the world had been cleansed of it, but in a short time it would be manifest that the evil was as prevalent as ever. ”