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By a letter from my son, I hear that there are still some picarooning villains infesting those seas, but they generally attack smaller fry than the Ouzel Galley.
"Yes, dat we will," echoed Bambo, flourishing a heavy handspike over his head, with a vehemence which showed that age had not impaired his vigour. "We will treat dem as we did dem picarooning villains in de Vest Indies, ven you led de boarders, massa Boz, eh!" "And you followed close at my side, and saved my life, Bambo," cried Uncle Boz.
Upon rejoining her, we made sail and hauled to the wind, in the hope of finding some picarooning craft hanging on to the skirts of the convoy; but although we hovered in the wake of the latter until the very last of them had disappeared beneath the southern horizon, our hopes were vain; and, finally, I decided to bear up for the Navidad, or Ship Bank, proceed through the Sea of Hayti as far as the entrance of the Windward Channel, and then, if still unsuccessful in my search for traces of the pirate, to work my way back to the Atlantic by the Crooked Island Passage, exploring some of the cays in Austral Bay on the way, they seeming to me to afford considerable facilities for the establishment of a pirate depot.
"I doubted indeed whether I should have been able to bring the vessel home," he continued. "We had a narrow escape of being captured by a picarooning craft which swept alongside us during a calm.
"They are not likely to attempt running through the passage without waiting for our convoy," observed the first lieutenant to Norman Foley. "Besides the French, the Bahamas still swarm with picarooning rascals, who are ever on the look-out for merchant craft, and would not scruple to lay aboard any they fancy they can overcome."
We know that we must run all risks, but I cannot bear the thought of what might happen should we be captured by a picarooning privateer, for most of them are but little better than pirates." He said this in a low voice, aside, to the stranger, intending that Norah should not hear him.
"All very well, sir," he observed, "when you get to the eastward of the islands, but you'll find out that you'll have to run the gauntlet of the enemy's cruisers, for they're pretty thick in these seas; and, in addition, there are not a few picarooning, piratical rascals who don't pretend even to be privateers, and boldly hoist the black flag, and rob and murder all they can capture."
Things had come to a pretty pass, as he observed, when a young lady couldn't take a walk by herself without the risk of being carried off by a party of filibustering squireens, quite as bad in their way as the picarooning rascals in the West Indies and on the Spanish Main, who had often in days of yore given him so much anxiety not that they ever had caught him, for he was too much on his guard, though he had been chased well-nigh a score of times; and he intended to be on his guard now, and, as he hoped, with the same success.
She may be a man-of-war cruiser, or an enemy's privateer, or an honest trader; but were she that, I don't see why she should be standing this way, unless she thinks the wind will shift, and she wishes to get a good offing from Cape de Verde. Or else she may be one of the picarooning craft which we have heard of on this coast, although it has never been my ill luck to fall in with them."
"Little doubt about our doing that," said the master. "Judging by the reports, the enemy's ship is not a heavy one a brig or sloop at the most or she may be one of those picarooning craft often found cruising in these seas." The last remark was heard by Norman Foley, who had just then joined the speakers.
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