In the days when the Virgins were a haven for pirates the bodies of men hanging in chains and surrounded by carrion crows were almost an essential part of the waterside landscape in all seaports, and attracted no more attention than an illuminated advertisement on Broadway does at the present time. No doubt the country people who came to town for a holiday or to do their marketing, stared with bulging eyes at the rotting corpses swaying in the wind and pointed them out to their young hopefuls as awful examples of the end they would come to if they ran away to become sea-rovers, just as to-day our country cousins stare and gape at the sights of the metropolis. And unquestionably the denizens of the ports snickered and made rude jokes about the “rubes” and “bumpkins” who were such “jays” as to stare at a pirate’s body in chains. But such a fate overtook the buccaneers only when, by some mischance, they forgot themselves and overstepped the bounds of propriety; for as a rule they had a peculiar sense of patriotism—although men without a country, legally—and seldom troubled persons or ships of the land of their birth. And as long as they confined their activities to harassing hereditary enemies, even though official peace might have been established, their countrymen put tongues in cheeks, figuratively speaking, and let well enough alone. Indeed, from a diplomatic and economic point of view it was not a bad plan to have a score or two of corsairs preying on a competitor nation’s commerce, or within call in case of war. No small proportion of the buccaneer ships were fitted out and partly owned by law-abiding and highly respectable gentlemen and merchants who would have become apoplectic with righteous indignation if any one had dared assume that they were even morally in sympathy with piracy. Many of the buccaneers were exceedingly interesting characters, and the pity is that, aside from Esquemelling and one or two others, they had no chroniclers, no biographers to leave us a true account of their lives, to give us a real insight into their natures, their ideals, and their aims, and to thrill us with their adventures. A few have become famous, have lived on in history and legend; but doubtless many more, whose careers were far more thrilling and whose characters were far more interesting, have been completely forgotten. Now and then some bit of tradition, some fragment of story makes us wish we knew more of them. It is hard to imagine a swashbuckling, blood-spilling pirate, spending his leisure hours in writing poetry, but it was no other than Foster, a pirate who served under Morgan and whom the famous Sir Harry one time rebuked for his ruthlessness, that penned “Sonnyettes of Love,” which, although they may not be good verse, are certainly more intelligible than much of our modern poetry, and express delightful and tender sentiments.