not more open to them than New York and Philadelphia and Providence, and even now and again the ports of Massachusetts. They got no small part of their recruits from among the lawless and shiftless men who came out of England or Virginia to the Carolinas for a new venture in a new country where law was young. Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, came out in 1698 to be Governor General of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, specially instructed to stamp out the piracy of the coasts; but he found it no light task. His predecessor in the government of New York, Benjamin Fletcher, had loved the Brethren of the Coast very dearly: they had made it to his interest to like them; and the merchants of New York, as of the other seaport towns, were noticeably slow to see the iniquity of the proscribed business. Lord Bellomont bitterly complained that the authorities of Rhode Island openly gave notorious pirates countenance and assistance. Mr. Edward Randolph, whose business it was to look after the King’s revenues, declared in his anger that North Carolina was peopled by nobody but smugglers, runaway servants, and pirates. South Carolina, fortunately, had seen the folly of harboring the outlaws by the time Lord Bellomont set about his suppression in the north. Not only had her population by that time been recruited and steadied by the coming in of increasing numbers of law-abiding and thrifty colonists to whom piracy was abhorrent, but she had begun also to produce great crops of rice for whose exportation she could hardly get ships enough, and had found that her whilom friends the freebooters did not scruple to intercept her cargoes on their way to the profitable markets of Holland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal. She presently began, therefore, to use a great pair of gallows, set up very conspicuously on “Execution Dock” at Charleston, for the diligent hanging of pirates. But the coast to the northward still showed them hospitality, and Lord Bellomont made little headway at New York,—except that he brought the notorious Captain Kidd to justice. William Kidd, a Scotsman, had made New York his home, and had won there the reputation of an honest and capable man and an excellent ship captain; but when he was given an armed vessel strongly manned, and the King’s commission to destroy the pirates of the coast, the temptation of power was too great for him. He incontinently turned pirate himself, and it fell to Lord Bellomont to send him to England to be hanged. [Illustration: LORD BELLOMONT]