"After pausing a few minutes, he said, 'Captain, I'll not hurt a hair of your head, nor touch your vessel'; and he immediately departed, leaving the owner to pursue his course." There is no disputing the humanity of this American privateer skipper, if the tale be true; but one would be disposed to wonder what his owners said to him about the business. They might want to know what he meant by allowing a Welshman to score off him by means of a pious fraud! A privateer skipper, however religiously disposed, should not put to sea without his sense of humour. "A still more forcible illustration of the humanity of American privateersmen," says Mr. Maclay (page 16), "is had early in 1782, when the private armed sloop _Lively_, Captain D. Adams, of Massachusetts, rescued the officers and crew of the British frigate _Blonde_, which had been wrecked on a barren and desolate island. The treatment which all American prisoners, and especially privateersmen, had received at the hands of the British would have almost justified the commander of the _Lively_ in leaving these shipwrecked mariners to their fate. But the American jack tar is a generous fellow, and nothing appeals so strongly to his compassion as a fellow-seaman in distress, and on this occasion the people of the _Lively_ extended every assistance to their enemies and brought them safely into port." Really, they would have been no better than pirates if they had left them there. There does not appear to be any reason for supposing that American privateersmen were either more or less scrupulous than their British cousins; there was always plunder in view on both sides, and, if plunder could be obtained without fighting, so much the better. The editor of _De Bow's Commercial Review_ (vol. i., page 518, June 1846), in a note appended to an article upon privateering, says: "Privateering constitutes a separate chapter in the laws of nations. Every nation has resorted to this method of destroying the commerce of the enemy, without questioning for a moment their right of doing so. Many have affected to consider it, after all, but legalised piracy, and calculated to blunt the finer feelings of justice and sear the heart to noble sentiments. We are at a loss, ourselves, to understand how the occupation of a mere privateer can be reconciled with any of the higher feelings of our nature: an occupation whose whole end and purpose is pillage upon the high seas and pecuniary gain out of the fiercest bloodshed. The love of country, patriotic self-devotion, and ardour, have no place in such concerns.... It cannot be doubted, that men estimable in other respects have been found in the pursuit of privateering; but exceptions of this kind are rare, and could not, we think, occur again, in the improved moral sense of mankind." With these preliminary remarks, let us now recount the doings of some of the American privateersmen, commencing with Silas Talbot. CAPTAIN--OR COLONEL--SILAS TALBOT