Buccaneers and pirates of our coastsStockton, Frank R.
History
Buccaneers and pirates of our coasts
Stockton, Frank R.
Buccaneers -- Juvenile literature; Pirates -- Juvenile literature
The pirates left on the island were eventually taken off by a
buccaneering vessel, but L'Olonnois had now reached the end of the
string by which the devil had allowed him to gambol on this earth for so
long a time. On the shores where he had now landed he did not find
prosperous villages, treasure houses, and peaceful inhabitants, who
could be robbed and tortured, but instead of these he came upon a
community of Indians, who were called by the Spaniards, Bravos, or wild
men. These people would never have anything to do with the whites. It
was impossible to conquer them or to pacify them by kind treatment. They
hated the white man and would have nothing to do with him. They had
heard of L'Olonnois and his buccaneers, and when they found this
notorious pirate upon their shores they were filled with a fury such as
they had never felt for any others of his race.
These bloody pirates had always conquered in their desperate fights
because they were so reckless and so savage, but now they had fallen
among thoroughbred savages, more cruel and more brutal and pitiless than
themselves. Nearly all the buccaneers were killed, and L'Olonnois was
taken prisoner. His furious captors tore his living body apart, piece by
piece, and threw each fragment into the fire, and when the whole of this
most inhuman of inhuman men had been entirely consumed, they scattered
his ashes to the winds so that not a trace should remain on earth of
this monster. If, in his infancy, he had died of croup, the history of
the human race would have lost some of its blackest pages.
Chapter XVI
A Pirate Potentate
Sometime in the last half of the seventeenth century on a quiet farm in
a secluded part of Wales there was born a little boy baby. His father
was a farmer, and his mother churned, and tended the cows and the
chickens, and there was no reason to imagine that this gentle little
baby, born and reared in this rural solitude, would become one of the
most formidable pirates that the world ever knew. Yet such was the case.
The baby's name was Henry Morgan, and as he grew to be a big boy a
distaste for farming grew with him. So strong was his dislike that when
he became a young man he ran away to the seacoast, for he had a fancy to
be a sailor. There he found a ship bound for the West Indies, and in
this he started out on his life's career. He had no money to pay his
passage, and he therefore followed the usual custom of those days and
sold himself for a term of three years to an agent who was taking out a
number of men to work on the plantations. In the places where these men
were enlisted they were termed servants, but when they got to the new
world they were generally called slaves and treated as such.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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