No doubt the screams of captive Spanish wives and daughters maltreated by his ruffianly crew furnished the author with inspiration and turned his mind to thoughts of shady Devon lanes or ivy-clad Surrey cottages and buxom, fair-haired, red-cheeked English lassies. But this is mere speculation; all we know is that he was a romantic soul and preferred writing tender effusions of love, in his cramped, painstaking hand, to carousing ashore and making merry with negro wenches. Old Teach, the Blackbeard associated with the castle in St. Thomas, was a most interesting type, a man such as even Poe or Stevenson could not have created out of whole cloth or vivid imagination. Born as Edward Teach, in Bristol, England,—a port, by the way, where many a redoubtable freebooter was recruited,—the youngster in due course of time became a sailor and voyaged, among other places, to the West Indies. To be sure, the heyday of buccaneering was then over, but still, in 1716, there were many freebooters afloat upon the Caribbean. Having heard, in Port Royal and other notorious resorts, glowing tales of the pirate’s life, Edward decided that life aboard a merchantman was a very unattractive and unprofitable one and that piracy was the most promising get-rich-quick scheme. Regardless of his failings, we must admit that young Teach would have won the highest esteem of an efficiency expert (had such beings existed in his day), for he believed implicitly that a thing worth doing at all was worth doing well and bent all his energies to practising his profession in a thorough manner. As an example of the rewards or successes attendant upon application to an idea, Teach was a model, for within a space of two years from the time he announced his intention of turning corsair he could lay undisputed claim to being the world’s greatest pirate. Moreover, the amiable Edward was a firm believer in publicity and in the spectacular. Indeed, he very evidently was far in advance of his time, and to-day he would have brought untold joy to the heart of a film director and would be drawing a far larger income than he ever enjoyed through his chosen career. If ever there was an original of the buccaneer of melodrama and lurid fiction, it must have been Teach; only, no author or playwright would ever dare draw a character as bizarre, repulsive, and hideously ferocious as this Prince of Pirates.