THE REVOLUTION 83 



acter of the "good old times." The pirates who coursed up and 

 down our coasts — and they were exactly like other pirates the 

 world over — could have given lessons in ingenious, cold-blooded 

 cruelty to the North American Indian : they could have given les- 

 sons in deliberate, abysmal vice to the most perverted cliques in 

 ancient Sodom. If you think that I exaggerate, go back to the 

 old narratives written originally in Dutch and French and 

 Portuguese, and translated into English in the 17th Century. 

 If to-day you were to print the whole, true stories of some of 

 their exploits, you would have to defy the laws of the United 

 States of America. And, as more than one tale set down by 

 some lucky survivor bears witness, the days of piracy overlapped 

 by a wide margin the days of American whaling. 



In the 18th Century the word ''pirate" meant privateers as 

 well as sea-robbers, and, for the matter of that, there was some- 

 times no great difference between them. The slow ''blubber- 

 hunters," cruising back and forth across the whaling grounds, 

 were easily found and taken. It was not uncommon to have 

 news that one or another of the whaling vessels was thus lost. 



There is a story of one such adventure, in April, 1771, that 

 turned out more fortunately. " Two Nantucket whaling-sloops, 

 commanded respectively by Isaiah Chadwick and Obed Bunker, 

 were lying at anchor in the harbour of Abaco, when a ship ap- 

 peared off the mouth of the harbor with her signals set for as- 

 sistance. With that readiness to aid distressed shipmates 

 which has ever been a distinguishing trait of American whale- 

 men, one of the captains with a boat's crew made up of men 

 from each sloop hastened to render such help as was in their 

 power. The vessel's sde reached, the captain immediately 

 boarded her to find what was desired, and much to his surprise 

 had a pistol presented to his head by the officer in command, 

 with a peremptory demand that he should pilot the ship into 

 the harbor. He assured the commander that he was a stranger 

 there, but that there was a man in his boat who was acquainted 

 with the port. The man was called and persuaded in the same 

 manner in which the captain had been. The argument used to 

 demonstrate the prudence of his compliance with the request 



