The spirit of adventure and of gain grew on them mightily. At first they contented themselves with an illicit trade at the unguarded ports of quiet, half-deserted islands like Hispaniola, where they could get hides and tallow, smoked beef and salted pork, in exchange for goods smuggled in from Europe. But they did not long stop at that. The exciting risks and notable profits of the business made it grow like a story of adventure. The ranks of the lawless traders filled more and more with every sort of reckless adventurer and every sort of unquiet spirit who found the ordinary world stale and longed for a change of luck, as well as with hosts of common thieves and natural outlaws. Such men, finding themselves inevitably consorting, felt their comradeship, helped one another when they could, and made a common cause of robbing Spain, calling themselves “Brethren of the Coast.” They took possession, as their numbers increased, of the little twin islands of St. Christopher and Nevis for rendezvous and headquarters, and fortified distant Tortuga for a stronghold; and their power grew apace through all the seventeenth century, until no Spanish ship was safe on the seas though she carried the flag of an admiral, and great towns had either to buy them off or submit to be sacked at their pleasure. They mustered formidable fleets and counted their desperate seamen by the thousands. [Illustration: CHARLESTON, FROM THE HARBOR, 1742] They were most numerous, most powerful, most to be feared at the very time the English colony was begun at Charleston (1670). All the English sea-coast at the south, indeed, was theirs in a sense. They were regulars, not outlaws, when France or Holland or England was at war with Spain, for the great governments did not scruple to give them letters of marque when they needed their assistance at sea. English buccaneers had helped Sir William Penn take Jamaica for Cromwell in 1655. And when there was no war, the silent, unwatched harbors of the long American sea-coast were their favorite places of refuge and repair. New Providence, England’s best anchorage and most convenient port of rendezvous in the Bahamas, became their chief place of welcome and recruiting. The coming of settlers did not disconcert them. It pleased them, rather. The settlers did not molest them,—had secret reasons, as they knew, to be glad to see them. There were the English navigation laws, as well as the Spanish, to be evaded, and the goods they brought to the closed markets were very cheap and very welcome,—and no questions were asked. They were abundantly welcome, too, to the goods they bought. For thirty years their broad pieces of gold and their Spanish silver were almost the only currency the Carolinas could get hold of. Governors winked at their coming and going,—even allowed them to sell their Spanish prizes in English ports. Charleston, too, and the open bays of Albemarle Sound were