Coincidence is often stranger in fact than in fiction. Before he left Mauritius, Captain Woodard ran across three of his old sailors of the open boat and the two years of captivity among the Malays. They had been wrecked on another China voyage, and were in distress for lack of clothes and money. Their old chief mate, now a prosperous shipmaster, with a share in the profits of the voyage, outfitted them handsomely and left them with dollars in their pockets. In later years Captain David Woodard traded to Batavia, and met more than one Malay who had seen him or had listened to fabulous tales of his prowess during his long durance in the jungles and mountains of Celebes. In 1804 this splendid adventurer of the old merchant marine was able to retire from the sea with an independent income. Near Boston he bought a farm and lived on it, and this was the proper way to cast anchor, for such is the ambition of all worthy mariners when they cease to furrow the blue sea. CHAPTER VI CAPTAIN PADDOCK ON THE COAST OF BARBARY The veterans of the Revolution of ’76, who had won a war for freedom, were still young men when American sailors continued to be bought and sold as slaves for a few dollars a head on the farther side of the Atlantic. It was a trade which had flourished during the colonial period, and was unmolested even after the Stars and Stripes proclaimed the sovereign pride and independence of this Union of States. Indeed, while hundreds of American mariners were held in this inhuman bondage, their Government actually sent to the Dey of Algiers a million dollars in money and other gifts, including a fine new frigate, as humble tribute to this bloody heathen pirate in the hope of softening his heart. It was the bitterest touch of humiliation that this frigate, the _Crescent_, sailed from the New England harbor of Portsmouth, whose free tides had borne a few years earlier the brave keels of John Paul Jones’s _Ranger_ and _America_. The Christian nations of Europe deliberately granted immunity to these nests of sea-robbers in Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli in order that they might prey upon the ships and sailors of weaker countries and destroy their commerce. This ignoble spirit was reflected in a speech of Lord Sheffield in Parliament in 1784. “It is not now probable that the American States will have a very free trade in the Mediterranean. It will not be to the interest of any of the great maritime powers to protect them from the Barbary States. If they know their interests, they will not encourage the Americans to be ocean carriers. That the Barbary States are advantageous to maritime powers is certain.”