At last even England and France, after secretly favoring the buccaneers, became roused to the necessity of controlling them, and it was with this object in view that a certain Captain William Kidd was fitted out at private expense toward the end of the seventeenth century, and armed with King William’s commission for seizing pirates and making reprisals, England being at war with France. Just why it was, nobody has explained, but Captain Kidd spent his time in loitering around the coast of Africa, where no pirates were to be found, until he grew quite disheartened, and, fearing to be dismissed by his employers and to be “mark’d out for an unlucky man,” he started a little pirate business for himself, in which he gained more of a certain kind of fame than any of the rest; for popular tradition supposes him to have hoarded his booty and buried it. “Captain Kidd’s treasure” has been sought for until the whole eastern coast of the United States is honeycombed with diggings for it; but probably he had eaten and drunk it up before 1701, when he was captured and executed in England. About this time, however, and without his valuable aid, the combined naval forces of all the nations interested in the commerce of the New World broke the power of the buccaneers, and their depredations ceased. Their story is one of the wildest, most romantic, and most terrible in the history of the world. [Illustration: “In revel and carousing We gave the New Year housing, With wreckage for our firing, And rum to heart’s desiring.” ] The trade of piracy was carried on during the eighteenth century in the region of the West Indies by unorganized bands of desperados who had all the faults and none of the greatness of the men they succeeded, and who received little attention from the world at large. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Barataria pirates came into notice on the coast of Louisiana, taking the place of the buccaneers, but in a much smaller way. Their leaders, Pierre and John Lafitte, carried on business quite openly in New Orleans; and their settlements on the marshy islands along the coast, and their “temple,” to which persons came out from the city to buy goods, were open secrets. But in the War of 1812, although the British tried to buy their services, they redeemed themselves by standing true to the American government, which had just been trying to exterminate them, and so they won public pardon and an added glamour of romance. For the same reasons as those in the case of other island systems, the East Indies have always been infested with pirates, whose light, swift vessels run in and out of the intricate channels among the dangerous coral reefs, where government cruisers dare not follow, while the people on shore sympathize more with the pirates than with the police.