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It was, he reflected, as though the sheep had gone and the goats had come in their stead. Then as the newcomers fell to their task of throwing up rough shanties for shelter upon the rafts it seemed to Will Brent as safe a proposition to embark with them as to be shipwrecked with a crew of pirates.
The loss on the Tawnymores' ship was never known, but there had been such "bloody massacre" aboard her, that two other barques, in Panama Roads, had been too scared to join battle, though they had got under sail to engage. According to Ringrose, the pirates lost eighteen men killed, and twenty-two men wounded, several of them severely.
"To solve the mystery of the eternal hereafter, I imagine," I replied. "I am going to a worse fate than that," she said, with a little shudder. "What do you mean?" "I can only guess," she replied, "since no thern damsel of all the millions that have been stolen away by black pirates during the ages they have raided our domains has ever returned to narrate her experiences among them.
Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself.
But we could not find any weapons or ammunition of any kind; if, therefore, the ship had carried anything of the sort the pirates had cleared the whole of it out of her.
It is possible at first the Spaniards imagined the pirates intended to escape past their stern, for they instantly began backing oars to keep them from getting past, so that the water was all of a foam about them; at the same time they did this they poured in such a fire of musketry that it was a miracle that no more execution was accomplished than happened.
They ain't no more use than so much ballast. Now when we came out here, the lieutenant he says, 'Let's go into Gheriah, and join the pirates there' though according to him they aren't what you may call pirates, being under a king of their own, who has as much right to give them commissions as King George himself.
“Now is your time, lads!” the lieutenant shouted. “Throw yourselves upon them and drive them back!” Although the pirates still fought desperately, knowing that no mercy would be extended them, the steady valour of the sailors was too much for them. At last the pirate captain was cut down by Dimchurch, and with his fall his men entirely lost heart.
The ravine was lighted up as though by enchantment, and the unexpected illumination caused an alarm among the group of pirates, not unlike that of an owl into whose gloomy roosting-place a torch is suddenly intruded. Terror was depicted upon their countenances as they gazed up at the castle.
The enemies of the gallant heroes I have named were apt to call them pirates; but as might made right in most sublunary affairs during those dark and troubled ages of the world's history, they looked upon the roving commissions they had given themselves as perfectly honourable and lawful, and felt no small amount of contempt for the rest of mankind who chose to stay at home at ease by their firesides, while they were ploughing the ocean in search of plunder and glory.
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