No sooner had England become distracted at home by the civil war of the first Pretender and by the rupture with Charles XII. of Sweden, than the pirates of Barbary issued from their secret haunts, and greatly interrupted every branch of her maritime commerce. In the West Indies, too, the losses sustained by the ravages of the piratical buccaneers became so extensive that the most serious complaints were preferred against the Admiralty for tolerating the grievance, the result being a proclamation offering a reward of 100_l._ head-money for every captain, 40_l._ for a lieutenant down to a gunner, 30_l._ for an inferior officer, and 20_l._ for every private captured: more than this, any pirate who delivered up his captain or commander was entitled upon his conviction to a reward of 200_l._[202] [Sidenote: State of British merchant shipping, temp. George I.] War, as we have too frequently seen, is a terrible obstacle to all industrial pursuits, and to no branch of commerce—however much a certain class of shipowners may have realised by having their vessels employed as government transports—is it a greater source of lasting injury than to the mercantile marine. This branch of industry, indeed, suffered not merely by the war itself, but by the hordes of privateers, buccaneers, and pirates which, up to the close of the last century, infested the seas whenever war was declared, thus interrupting legitimate commerce, and plundering wherever they had an opportunity, either by land or sea, too often with little regard whether the property they plundered was that of a friend or a foe. In the early part of the reign of George I. these marauders were almost as daring and as lawless as the pirates had been during the reign of Elizabeth and of the Henrys, and none more so than an Englishman named Roberts, who, in three vessels armed as frigates, the largest mounting forty guns, and commanded by himself, desolated the coasts of Africa and the West India Islands, plundering the ships of his own country with as little remorse as he did those of any other nation. [Sidenote: South Sea Company, 1710.]