Here the curtain falls. I for one should like to hear more incidents of this astonishing cruise of the derelict _Polly_ and also to know what happened to Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger after they reached the port of Boston. Probably they went to sea again, and more than likely in a privateer to harry British merchantmen, for the recruiting officer was beating them up to the rendezvous with fife and drum, and in August of 1812 the frigate _Constitution_, with ruddy Captain Isaac Hull walking the poop in a gold-laced coat, was pounding the _Guerrière_ to pieces in thirty minutes, with broadsides whose thunder echoed round the world. “Ships are all right. It is the men in them,” said one of Joseph Conrad’s wise old mariners. This was supremely true of the little brig that endured and suffered so much, and among the humble heroes of blue water by no means the least worthy to be remembered are Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger, able seaman, and Moho, the Indian cook. CHAPTER II HOW THE SCHOONER _EXERTION_ FELL AMONG THIEVES This is the story of a very shabby set of rascals who wrecked and plundered an honest little merchant vessel a hundred years ago and disgraced the profession of piracy. In truth, even in the heyday of the black flag and the Spanish Main, most pirates were no better than salt-water burglars who would rather run than fight. The glamour of romance has been kinder to them than they deserved. Their vocation had fallen to a low ebb indeed in the early part of the nineteenth century, when they still infested the storied waters of the Caribbean and struggled along, in some instances, on earnings no larger than those of a minister or school-teacher of to-day. Ambitious young men had ceased to follow piracy as a career. The distinguished leaders had long since vanished, most of them properly hanged in chains, and it was no longer possible to become a William Kidd, a Captain Ned England, or a Charles Vane. The schooner _Exertion_, Captain Barnabas Lincoln, sailed from Boston, bound to Trinidad, Cuba, on November 13, 1821, with a crew consisting of Joshua Brackett, mate; David Warren, cook; and Thomas Young, George Reed, and Francis De Suze as able seamen. There was nothing in the cargo to tempt a self-respecting pirate; no pieces of eight or doubloons or jewels, but flour, beef, pork, lard, butter, fish, onions, potatoes, apples, hams, furniture, and shooks with a total invoiced value of eight thousand dollars. In this doleful modern era of the high cost of living, such a cargo would, of course persuade almost any honest householder to turn pirate if he thought there was a fighting chance of stowing all these valuables in his cellar.