Since the age of the discoverers, the harbor of St. Thomas has welcomed the craft of the sea-going nations of Europe--craft sometimes black of prow and sinister in design. Father Labat recounts the tale of a French privateer, Legendre the Blond, who on an autumn day in 1695 ran into the harbor at Charlotte Amalie, robbed the Brandenburgh warehouse of 24,000 riksdollars (about $13,000), and relieved the employees, from director-general to humblest clerk, of everything except the shirts they wore. Accomplices of French privateers, with the connivance of authorities at St. Thomas, once sent a warning that enabled a robber fleet to reach France with a sum equivalent to $400,000 stolen on the British island of New Granada to enrich the war chest of Louis XIV. In April, 1699, there arrived a notorious “rover of the sea” at the harbor gate of St. Thomas. “Well outside gun range,” he hove to, and asked refuge from the pursuit of English ships. It was none other than Captain Kidd that begged this hospitality, and a governor of less tolerant ideas than some others that had represented Denmark refused him admission. Later, when the pirate secretly disposed of his ill-gained cargo to island traders, part of it--tens of bales of fine muslin valued at 12,000 pieces of eight--was stored in a St. Thomas warehouse. Captain Kidd departed for New York, and from there was sent to England for trial on the charge of piracy. The taller of the two towers on the hills behind Charlotte Amalie is the traditional stronghold of Black Beard Edward Teach, “one of the realest, blackest and bloodiest pirates that ever graced the Spanish Main. He came to his own at the cutlass of his Majesty’s Lieutenant Maynard in the year 1718.” Forty-five bays on the coast of St. Thomas and thirty inlets that indent the shore of St. John were in those days a well-considered aid to the dark dealings of men and ships.