him removed, had he been a touch less haughty, overbearing, unused to conciliating or pleasing those whose service he desired. He made enemies, and was at last ousted by them. [Illustration: GOVERNOR SPOTSWOOD’S EXPEDITION TO THE BLUE RIDGE] [Illustration: COLONEL RHETT AND THE PIRATE STEDE BONNET] Some of the best qualities of the soldier and administrator came out in him in the long struggle to put the pirates down once and for all. Queen Anne’s War had turned pirates into privateers and given pause to the stern business for a little, but it began again in desperate earnest when the war was over and peace concluded at Utrecht. It was officially reported by the secretary of Pennsylvania in 1717 that there were still fifteen hundred pirates on the coasts, making their headquarters at the Cape Fear and at New Providence in the Bahamas, and sweeping the sea as they dared from Brazil to Newfoundland. But the day of their reckoning was near at hand. South Carolina had cleared her own coasts for a little at the beginning of the century, but the robbers swarmed at her inlets again when the Indian massacres had weakened and distracted her, and the end of the war with France set many a roving privateersman free to return to piracy. The crisis and turning-point came in the year 1718. That year an English fleet crossed the sea, took New Providence, purged the Bahamas of piracy, and made henceforth a stronghold there for law and order. That same year Stede Bonnet, of Barbadoes, a man who had but the other day held a major’s commission in her Majesty’s service, honored and of easy fortune, but now turned pirate, as if for pastime, was caught at the mouth of the Cape Fear by armed ships under redoubtable Colonel Rhett, who had driven the French out of Charleston harbor thirteen years ago, and was taken and hanged on Charleston dock, all his crew having gone before him to the ceremony. “This humour of going a-pyrating,” it was said, “proceeded from a disorder in his mind, which had been but too visible in him some time before this wicked undertaking; and which is said to have been occasioned by some discomforts he found in a married state”; but the law saw nothing of that in what he had done. While Bonnet awaited his condemnation, Edward Thatch, the famous “Blackbeard,” whom all the coast dreaded, went a like just way to death, trapped within Ocracoke Inlet by two stout craft sent against him out of Virginia by Colonel Spotswood. And so, step by step, the purging went on. South Carolina had as capable a governor as Virginia in Robert Johnson; and the work done by these and like men upon the coasts, and by the English ships in the West Indies, presently wiped piracy out. By 1730 there was no longer anything for ships to fear on those coasts save the Navigation Acts and stress of sea weather. [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF THE PIRATE EDWARD THATCH]