If the expression had not been used already so many thousand times, one might well say of the following story that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Had you read the yarn which is here to be related you would, at its conclusion, have remarked that it was certainly most interesting and exciting, but it was too exaggerated, too full of coincidences, too full of narrow escapes ever to have occurred in real life. But I would assure the reader at the outset that Smith’s experiences were actual and not fictional, and that his story was carefully examined at the time by the High Court of Admiralty. The prelude, the climax and the conclusion of this drama with its exciting incidents, its love interest and its happy ending; the romantic atmosphere, the picturesque characters, the colours and the symmetry of the narrative are so much in accord with certain models such as one used to read in mere story-books of one’s boyhood, that it is well the reader should be fully assured that what is here set forth did in very truth happen. In some respects the narrative reads like pages from one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels, and yet though I have, by the limits of the space at my disposal, been compelled to omit many of the incidents which centred around Smith and his pirate associates, yet the facts which are set forth have been taken from contemporary data and can be relied upon implicitly. The story opens in the year 1821, and the hero is an English seaman named Aaron Smith. In the month of June, Smith departed from England and embarked on the merchant ship _Harrington_, which carried him safely over the Atlantic to the West Indies. Subsequent events induced him to resign his billet on that vessel, and as he found that the West Indian climate was impairing his health, he made arrangements to get back home to England. Being then at Kingston in the island of Jamaica, he interviewed the captain of the British merchant ship _Zephyr_ and was appointed first mate. The _Zephyr_, like many of the ships of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was rigged as a brig, that is to say with square sails on each of her two masts, with triangular headsails and a quadrilateral sail abaft the second mast much like the mainsail of a cutter-rigged craft. Brigs nowadays are practically obsolete, but at the time we are speaking of they were immensely popular in the merchant service and for carrying coals from Newcastle-on-Tyne to London.