Amid such scenes Coppinger pursued his unlawful impulses without check or restraint. Strange vessels began to appear at regular intervals on the coast, and signals were duly flashed from the headlands to lead them into the safest creek or cove. If the ground-sea were too strong to allow them to run in, they anchored outside the surf, and boats prepared for that service were rowed or hauled to and fro, freighted with illegal spoil. Amongst these vessels, one, a full-rigged schooner, soon became ominously conspicuous. She bore the name of the Black Prince, and was the private property of the Dane, built to his own order in a dockyard of Denmark. She was for a long time the chief terror of the Cornish Channel. Once with Coppinger on board, when under chase, she led a revenue cutter into an intricate channel near the Gull Rock, where, from knowledge of the bearings, the Black Prince escaped scathless, while the king’s vessel perished with all on board. In those times, if any landsman became obnoxious to Coppinger’s men, he was either seized by violence or by craft, and borne away handcuffed to the deck of the Black Prince; where, to save his life, he had to enrol himself, under fearful oaths, as one of the crew. In 1835, an old man of the age of ninety-seven related to the writer that, when a youth, he had been so abducted, and after two years’ service had been ransomed by his friends with a large sum. “And all,” said the old man, very simply, “because I happened to see one man kill another, and they thought I should mention it.” Amid such practices ill-gotten gold began to flow and ebb in the hands of Coppinger. At one time he chanced to hold enough money to purchase a freehold farm bordering on the sea. When the day of transfer arrived, he and one of his followers appeared before the astonished lawyer with bags filled with various kinds of foreign coin. Dollars and ducats, doubloons and pistoles, guineas--the coinage of every foreign country with a seaboard--were displayed on the table. The man of law at first demurred to such purchase-money; but after some controversy, and an ominous oath or two of “that or none,” the lawyer agreed to take it by weight. The document bearing Coppinger’s name is still extant. His signature is traced in stern, bold, fierce characters, as if every letter had been stabbed upon the parchment with the point of a dirk. Underneath his autograph, also in his own writing, is the word “Thuro.”[93]