From his house on Thames Street the old captain was borne to his last resting place in the burying-ground upon the Common. It was the most impressive funeral the town had witnessed. All the people turned out to see the long procession, and to take part in it. The privateering exploits of his early life were again retold, the innumerable legal battles of his later days were again recounted. Full of strife and tumult were the centuries in which his life had been passed, stormy and passionate his own career had been. He was perhaps the last, he was certainly the most successful, of the old sea captains who, as English subjects, had sailed forth from Narragansett Bay to make war as privateersmen upon the foes of Great Britain. But among those who followed his corpse to its final resting place were men who in less than a decade were to sail out from Bristol harbor in a little private armed vessel whose success as a privateer was to surpass his wildest imaginings, a vessel that was to collect from English merchants a tribute many times exceeding that which he had exacted from the enemies of England. The story of that vessel will be told in the last chapter of this book. Potter was most noted for his raid upon the coast of French Guiana of which an account follows. He was captain of a typical American privateer when Narragansett Bay was noted throughout the Colonies as a nursery of privateersmen. Rhode Island furnished more privately armed vessels for the service of the mother country during the eighteenth century than did any other American Colony. From the year 1700 to the Revolution at least one hundred and eighty such ships sailed out from its ports. They were long and narrow, crowded with seamen for their more speedy handling, and manœuvered with a skill that placed the slower ships of the French and Spaniards entirely at their mercy. They carried long guns which enabled them to disable their adversaries at a distance, thus preventing their enemies from inflicting any damage in return. Because built for speed they were of light construction. A broadside from a man-of-war would have gone crashing through their hulls and sent them at once to the bottom of the sea, but the seamanship of their captains always kept them out of reach of such a broadside. Their greatest danger was from the gales that drove them upon a rocky coast. Then no skill of their captains could save them. Their slight frames were quickly broken to pieces, sometimes with the loss of every man on board. The Prince Charles of Lorraine was wrecked upon the rocks of Seaconnet Point not long after the voyage herein described.