It’s a long story, but of powerful interest. The short of the matter is that the Carolinas had fostered pirates for her own interest until in time they became a menace. From the middle of the sixteen-hundreds the Southern provinces had been the outfitting grounds of a shoal of privateers who under royal commissions threshed the waters of the Spanish Main for Monsieur le Roy, as the French were called, or the Dons of Spain. These letters-of-marque lads really protected the baby colonies from those two voracious wolves for quite a while, but naturally if business in the legitimate line of their letters slacked up, they were prone to mistake the ensign of St. George for that of the Fleur-de-lys, and thus kept their hands in practice by despoiling friends as well as foes. Far too often they crossed too easily the thin line which separated a privateer from a pirate, so that in something less than half a century Charles Town, which had trembled at the French and Spanish invasions, now was equally fearful of the guns of the erstwhile protectors, the pirates. English navigation laws, which had delivered the provinces, bound hand and foot, into the hard fists of the English merchants, did not a little to promote piracy, for the sea robbers came to town with holds crammed full of all sorts of merchandise and peddled it to the colonists less the duties and imposts, and so made one of the cheapest markets in the world. Their customers all along the coast met them gladly and made no bones of the traffic, until the black flag threatened to monopolize the whole commerce, when the community awoke to the circumstance that there was a price in the cheap bazaar after all. Consider that Blackbeard, a month or so before he took the Act of Grace, had “salvaged” no less than twenty-seven ships--nearly a ship a day--and you have a measure of the situation; add, too, this, that Blackbeard was but one of many, and you will understand why Jamaica, for instance, wailed to the home Government that it was ruined. North and South Carolina had not formally divided at that time, though the distinction of names was used; Governor Eden ruled wickedly in the North; Governor Johnson ruled justly and wisely in the South. IV The vicinity where Blackbeard made his establishment was well chosen for his job. When one knew the channels between the low, sandy islands which lay all about the inlet one could run in and careen the ship, lay by and swagger alongshore, and when one got ready to abjure his oath and swing off on the plundering account again, one could intercept two lines of commerce,--the coastwise from New England to the West Indies and the provinces, and that from the provinces to the north, to the West Indies and to the mother country. Blackbeard knew his business.