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Like Washington again, he seemed to lose almost every battle and yet was never conquered. The first successes of the Dutch were gained by the "sea beggars," freebooters who captured Spanish ships and sold them in Protestant England. Finally they seized the town of Brille and made it their headquarters.
Farther to the south, moreover, the corsairs established themselves in Phoenice, the most flourishing town of Epirus; partly voluntarily, partly by constraint, the Epirots and Acarnanians entered into an unnatural symmachy with the foreign freebooters; the coast was insecure even as far as Elis and Messene.
Martin's couple of lances had expanded into a corps of free companions, the most truculent, the most obedient, the most rapacious in Christendom. Never were freebooters more formidable to the world at large, or more docile to their chief, than were the followers of General Schenk. Never was a more finished captain of highwaymen. He was a man who was never sober, yet who never smiled.
Then Demetrius knelt down before all his men, and kissed the hem of her robe, and swore that he would devote himself and all that was his to her service, until she and Quintus Drusus should meet, with no foe to come between; so swore all the pirates after their captain, and thus it was Cornelia entered into her life on the ship of the freebooters.
Led by the Indian Pedro, the freebooters struck across country, picked up the trail behind Nombre de Dios, marched by night, hid by day, Indian scouts sending back word when a Spaniard was seen, the English scudding to ambush in the tangled woods. Twelve days and nights they marched. At ten in the morning of February 11, they were on the Great Divide. Pedro led Drake to the top of the hill.
The old Dons have faded into the gray mists of a dead past. The early Argonauts have lived out the fierce fever of their wild lives. To the old individual freebooters, a new order of great corporate monopolies and gigantic rough-hewn millionaires succeeds. There is always some hand on the people's throat in California. Yet the star of hope glitters.
When before had Spain, expressly or by implication, admitted that the East and West Indies were not her private property, and that navigators to those regions, from other countries than her own, were not to be chastised as trespassers and freebooters? Yet the liberty of the Netherlands was acknowledged in terms which convinced the world that it was thenceforth an established fact.
"It is true I did know it, and was afraid that if the news got abroad in the settlement, some of our poor neighbors might be tempted to commit crime," answered Mrs. Gray. "We never had so large an amount of money in the house before, and its presence troubles me greatly; but I never dreamed that we had anything to fear from an organized band of freebooters."
The next day a still larger ambuscade was laid, which, fortunately for the freebooters, was discovered and dispersed in time, the fleeing Spaniards leaving their horses behind. Two days later New Segovia was reached. Here the buccaneers expected a severe engagement, and hoped to gain a supply of provisions. In both they were mistaken; the inhabitants had decamped, carrying all food with them.
The ground on which they had attacked the pirates was so favorable that one hundred men would have been fully sufficient to have destroyed the whole troop of freebooters. The latter availed themselves of the inconceivable negligence of the Spaniards in not taking more effectual measures for the defence of such an important pass.
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