witness whereof we have caused the great seal of England to be affixed to these presents. Given at our court at Kensington, the 26th. day of January, 1695, and in the 7th. year of our reign.” Of all of which the sum is that Commander Kidd, in his private man-of-war, is to catch Tom Too and the rest of them wherever he could find them, bring them to justice and render a careful account of their ships and cargoes. The ostensible aim is to protect the American colonies; actually it is to exterminate piracy wherever discovered. English-speaking folk have been as much a part of the sea as the white spume of the waves. Like their element, too, they have made for good and ill. The by-product of England’s maritime effort was the sea-rover, a creature often as skilled, unfearing and enterprising as his brother who went up and down the highways of the ocean on more lawful occasions. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century piracy gave to the world that villainous, but picturesque, aggregation of maritime felons which has so much fascination for people who never grow too old to enjoy vicarious adventure: Too, Ireland, Wake, Low, Davis, Lewis, England, Blackbeard, Avery, Gow, Quelch and other bold quarter-deck--usually the other fellow’s quarter-deck--strutters, including, notably, the subject of our present observations. These ungentlemen gleaned in three principal regions: Africa, the East and West Indies, with an occasional flyer down Brazil way. Under the black flag, we shall presently see something of all these places; just now we are engaged with the East Indies. Coming and going, and sometimes lingering, they bothered the “plantations” all the way from Charleston to Boston, so that the total scope of piracy was sweeping and widely embracing. India was pouring out richly its products of field and loom, plantation and cottage, and was drawing hungrily in from Arabia, Europe, Africa, everywhere, the things nature or economic circumstance denied her. The carriers of this mighty movement of materials were usually rather insignificant craft called grabs, pinks, galiots, sloops and what-not; affairs of one mast, a couple of men, a boy and about sixteen ounces of cargo. These were coasters; a larger vessel plied to the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea under charter of Moors, Armenians and other swart merchants. Bumping these lesser fry out of the way, however, were the comparatively impressive ships of the expanding European trading companies--Dutch, Swedish, Austrian and so on--and preeminently the English East India Company, destined to grow great enough eventually to swallow India herself,--old John Company.