was found on his person. In 1772 there was a pirate story less well authenticated which served chiefly as a bone to worry between Tory and Whig. A schooner flying signals of distress was boarded off Chatham, and the single seaman found there, appearing “very much frightened,” said that armed men in four boats had overhauled the craft and murdered the master, mate, and a seaman; himself he had saved by hiding. He supposed the men, he cunningly said, came from a royal cruiser, a story ridiculous on the face of it. At any rate, a royal cruiser, the Lively, under command of Montague, the admiral who had advised the two Truro captains to undertake their whaling voyage to the Falklands, set out in pursuit of a possible pirate, with no result; and the upshot was that the whole story was suspected to be an invention of the survivor to conceal his own guilt. The jury sitting in the case disagreed, and in the fevered state of public opinion, it was used in mutual recriminations by Whig and Tory: the Whigs contending that the English navy had committed the footless outrage, the Tories, more reasonably, that the seaman was a liar and murderer. But controversy could not restore the dead, who had all hailed from Chatham. The Cape, as it reached out for its share in the commerce that developed after the Revolution, was as intimately concerned in pirate adventures off the Spanish Main as it might have been in Cape Cod Bay. By 1822 our shipping was so harried by pirates in those southern seas that the Government sent out armed boats to protect our merchantmen, among them the sloop-of-war Alligator. And a story, in which the Alligator is concerned, typical of many another of the time, is told by one of the last of the old Cape Cod sea-captains who died some twenty years ago. He sailed, as cabin boy, for the Spanish Main in the brig Iris commanded by a Brewster man and carrying a crew of eleven and one passenger. As the Iris neared the Antilles, two suspicious ships were sighted, and suspicion turned to certainty when they hoisted the red flag, put out their “sweeps,” and one pirate made for the Iris, the other for a Yankee schooner Matanzas-bound. The Iris was no clipper, and was quickly brought to by a shot over her bow. The passenger and captain had meantime gone down to the cabin to hide their valuables; and the cabin boy also, he tells us, “went down and took from my chest a little wallet, with some artificial flowers under a crystal on its front, in which were three dollars in paper money and a few coppers. This I hid in the bo’sun’s locker and went on deck again.” The lapse of seventy years had not dimmed his memory of the precious wallet.