Captain Avery was plundering the treasure-laden galleons of the Great Mogul off the coast of Madagascar in 1718, and was reported to have stolen a daughter of that magnificent potentate as his bride, while “his adventures were the subject of general conversation in Europe.” The flamboyant career of Captain Bartholomew Roberts began in 1719, that “tall, dark man” whose favorite toast was “Damnation to him who lives to wear a halter,” and who always wore in action a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain and diamond cross around his neck, a sword in his hand, and two pairs of pistols hanging at the ends of a silk sling flung over his shoulder. In this same year Captain Ned England was taking his pick of the colonial merchantmen which were earning a respectable livelihood in the slave-trade of the Guinea coast. He displayed his merry and ingenious spirit by ordering his crew to pelt to death with broken rum-bottles a captured shipmaster whose face and manners displeased him. Mary Read, the successful woman pirate, was then in the full tide of her exploits and notably demonstrated that a woman had a right to lead her own life. When her crew presumed to argue with her, she pistoled them with her own fair hand, and neatly killed in a duel a rash gentleman pirate who had been foolish enough to threaten her lover. When asked why she preferred a vocation so hazardous, Mary Read replied that “as to hanging, she thought it no great hardship, for were it not for that every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so infest the seas and men of courage would starve.” It was in the same period that the bold Captain John Quelch of Marblehead stretched hemp, with five of his comrades, and a Salem poet was inspired to write: Ye pirates who against God’s laws did fight, Have all been taken which is very right. Some of them were old and others young And on the flats of Boston they were hung. In 1724 two notorious sea-rovers, Nutt and Phillip, were cruising off Cape Ann within sight of Salem harbor’s mouth. They took a sloop commanded by one Andrew Harraden, and thereby caught a Tartar. Harraden and his sailors erupted from the hold into which they had been flung, killed Nutt and Phillip and their officers, tossed the rest of the rascals down below, and sailed into Boston Harbor, where their cargo of pirates speedily furnished another entertainment for the populace that trooped to the row of gibbets on the flats of the town. The old sea-chronicles of New England are filled with episodes of these misfortunes, encounters, and escapes until the marvel grows that the seamen of those quaint brigs, ketches, and scows could be persuaded to set out from port at all. The appalling risk became a habit, no doubt, just as the people of to-day dare to use the modern highway on which automobiles slay many more victims than ever the pirates made to walk the plank.