It is to be presumed that the devil fell heir to Blackbeard's treasure, inasmuch as Lieutenant Maynard and his men fairly cut the pirate and his crew to pieces. Turn we now from such marauders as this to that greater generation of buccaneers, so called, who harried the Spanish treasure fleets and towns in the West Indies and on the coasts of the Isthmus and South and Central America. During the period when Port Royal, Jamaica, was the headquarters and recruiting station for these picturesque cut-throats, and Sir Henry Morgan was their bright, particular star, there is the testimony of an eye-witness and participant to show that the blood-stained gold seldom tarried long enough with its owners to permit of burying it, and that they bothered their wicked heads very little about safeguarding the future. Captain Bartholomew Roberts, that "tall, black man, nearly forty years old, whose favorite toast was 'Damnation to him who ever lives to wear a halter,'" was snuffed out in an action with a King's ship, and the manner of his life and melodramatic quality of his death suggest that he be mentioned herein as worthy of a place beside Blackbeard himself. Roberts has been overlooked by buried treasure legend, and this is odd, for he was a figure to inspire such tales. His flamboyant career opened in 1719 and was successful until the British man-of-war _Swallow_ overhauled him on the African coast. His biographer, Captain Charles Johnson, writing while the episode was less than a decade old and when the facts were readily obtainable, left us this fine picture of the fight: "Roberts himself made a gallant figure at the time of the engagement, being dressed in a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain round his neck, with a diamond cross hanging to it, a sword in his hand, and two pair of pistols hanging at the end of a silk sling flung over his shoulder (according to the fashion of the pirates). He is said to have given his orders with boldness and spirit; coming, according to what he had purposed, close to the man of war, received her fire, and then hoisted his black flag[7] and returned it; shooting away from her with all the sail he could pack.... But keeping his tacks down, either by the wind's shifting or ill steerage, or both, he was taken aback with his sails, and the _Swallow_ came a second time very nigh to him. He had now perhaps finished the fight very desperately if Death, who took a swift passage in a grapeshot, had not interposed and struck him directly on the throat.