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And Bernard Shaw was not far out when, in the Introduction to Man and Super-Man, he pointed out what amiable honest gentlemen the free-booters who built the Rhine castles were compared with your modern millionaires, newspaper-owners, and political bosses. The robber-baron risked his neck. The robber-baron played a game.
Spain and the Inquisition infected Italy and the Low Countries; France was full of desperate marauding soldiers; Germany nourished robbers and free-booters in every forest. It was the particular delight of Fynes Moryson to run into all these dangers and then devise means of escaping them.
The bridge at Haydon appears to have been the only one for some distance up and down the river in the sixteenth century, for we read of its being barred and chained, on various occasions of marauding troubles in Tynedale, to prevent the free-booters re-crossing the river.
Maze or Mace, as all such pirates, free-booters, and sea-rovers, being either our subjects, or of other nations associated with them, which you shall meet with upon the seas or coasts of America, or upon any other seas or coasts, with all their ships and vessels, and all such merchandizes, money, goods, and wares as shall be found on board, or with them, in case they shall willingly yield themselves; but if they will not yield without fighting, then you are by force to compel them to yield.
And here let me say, that, since of all the bullies, and braggarts, and bravoes, and free-booters, and Hectors, and fish-at-arms, and knight-errants, and moss-troopers, and assassins, and foot-pads, and gallant soldiers, and immortal heroes that swim the seas, the Indian Sword fish is by far the most remarkable, I propose to dedicate this chapter to a special description of the warrior.
Even so they had chanted when the early free-booters burst upon the scene and beheld the valley with its frame-work of mountains and two guardian volcanoes, the Gog and Magog of the table-land. Now again, from the towering column of Montezuma's cypress, to the city marked by spires, the thunder rolled and echoed onward even to the pine-clad cliffs and snow-crowned summits of the rocky giants.
There is any number of these dark-plumed free-booters all about the streets and dwellings, eagerly on the lookout for just such a chance to impose upon thoughtless strangers. They fly in and out of open doors, lighting confidently upon the back of one's chair at mealtime, trying curiously the texture of his coat with their sharp bills. No one molests them or makes them afraid.
The whole scene vividly calls to mind one of those marvellous mountain-retreats in which writers of banditti stories are wont to pitch their heroes' silken tent no more appropriate rendezvous for a band of story-book free-booters could well be imagined.
Then he remembered why this solitary place had become a Golgotha. The hapless von Kerber was disinterring the treasure when the Hadendowa assault began. In all likelihood, had the free-booters ridden boldly up in the first instance, the fight would have ended in less minutes than it had occupied hours.
Nothing being done for a time to check them, they grew rapidly in numbers and audacity, until, as has been stated, the West Indies swarmed with the pests. The men living along the coast found buccaneering so profitable that they gave up their peaceful pursuits and became free-booters of the sea.
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