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Captain Misson and his crew sink the Winchelsea, an English ship lost in the West Indies at the end of August, 1707, and they barely escape from Admiral Wager's fleet which fought a famous battle there in 1708. Even the name of Misson's ship, the Victoire; was undoubtedly familiar to Defoe as the vessel commanded by the famous French corsair, Cornil Saus.
The corsair seeing his opponent's trouble and his inability to follow him, made haste with his few remaining men to extinguish the fire on board his ship. Having quenched it, he set his foresail, which was still left.
The church was crowded with worshippers on the eve of the feast of the patron, when the fires which the villagers who had assembled there had lighted near the entrance, where they were bivouacking for the night, attracted the attention of a Barbary corsair, then cruising off the island, and guided him to the spot unobserved.
"I wish" said he, "to be a corsair." It would have been interesting to know how many of a following he would have had from sedate academic circles had he been given his heart's desire and had sailed down the Clyde with the raw head and bloody bones showing on the black flag that flew at his mast-head.
"The saints will do their work if we do ours," Gerald remarked; "and we had best do as large a share as possible. What is the number of your crew, captain?" "Nineteen men altogether." "And there are thirty soldiers, and six male passengers in the cabin," Gerald said; "so we muster fifty-four. That ought to be enough to beat off the corsair."
On the 7th June, while chasing a Barbary corsair, a Christian slave, who happened to be at the helm, ran the corsair on board the Dutch vice-admiral, and immediately he and other slaves took the opportunity of leaping on board to escape from slavery.
Oscar was very angry when he heard the story, but he generously acquitted his brother of all blame in the matter, and declared that he would pay back the boy who had thus taken advantage of his weakness. He knew the offender, from Ralph's description, and from the name of his sled, which was the "Corsair."
They answered their own question, and said that he was a lawless man, a corsair: were there not good seamen and valiant men-at-arms like the Bashas Zay and Himeral, who should be preferred before him; this man who had come from the ends of the earth, and of whom nobody knew anything good? Again, could he be trusted?
Neither he nor his people were one whit the better for the change, and, as far as vassalage was concerned, they would in all probability, in the state of religious feeling at the time, have sooner been subordinate to the Moslem corsair than to the Christian King.
But this particular defect of the place is not Manfred's fault, since the city was razed to the ground by the Turks in 1620, and then built up anew; built up, says Lenormant, according to the design of the old city. Perhaps a fear of other Corsair raids induced the constructors to adhere to the old plan, by which the place could be more easily defended.
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