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"We have done our best, Paddy, we can do no more," exclaimed Jack, as he and Terence found themselves standing side by side, with their hands secured and lashed to the mainmast. Needham and the rest of the people who were able to move were treated in the same way. "Why, my friend, you were very nearly captured by these picaroons," they heard Don Diogo remark to the other Spanish captain.
And in the forecastle were thirty British seamen with hearts of oak, raging to be loosed with weapons in their hands. Peering into the gray smother of sea and sky, Captain Jonathan Wellsby licked his lips hungrily as he said to himself: "Not now, but if the storm abates and we float through the night, these lousy picaroons shall dance to another tune." JACK COCKRELL was seasick.
'I have had to do, said Saxon, as we rode onwards, 'with many gentry of this sort, with Albanian brigands, the banditti of Piedmont, the Lanzknechte and Freiritter of the Rhine, Algerine picaroons, and other such folk. Yet I cannot call to mind one who hath ever been able to retire in his old age on a sufficient competence.
You can't have a ship like a chapel though she would. Oh, bless you, she would, even when we're beating off these picaroons." I was sitting on the afterhatch, and leaning my head on my arms. "Feel bad? Do you? Handled you like a bag of shavings. Well, the boys got their monkey up, hammering the Dagos. Here you, Mike, go look along the deck, for a double-barrelled pistol. Move yourself a bit.
They were ravaged by bands of robbers called Picaroons, whose audacity reached such a height that they opposed in large bodies the forces sent for their suppression by the government.
Followed upon its ending, a chanting as goldenly sonorous. Wild, peremptory, triumphant. It was like a mustering shouting to adventurous stars, buglings to buccaneering winds, cadenced beckonings to restless ranks of viking waves, signaling to all the corsairs and picaroons of the elemental. A cosmic call to slay!
You may take my word for't, this place is just such another as, to my knowledge, formerly were the islands of Sark and Herm, between the smaller and the greater Britain; such as was the Poneropolis of Philip in Thrace; islands of thieves, banditti, picaroons, robbers, ruffians, and murderers, worse than raw-head and bloody-bones, and full as honest as the senior fellows of the college of iniquity, the very outcasts of the county gaol's common-side.
That we are to drive from the land the King's Governor, Council, Burgesses and trainbands; sweep into the bay Sir William Berkeley and Colonel Verney, and all those gold-laced planters who dined with him the other day? That we are to take possession of the colony as picaroons do of a vessel, and hoisting our flag, a crutch surmounted by a ball and chain on a ground sable, proclaim a republic?"
"Yes, there is a square patch on her mizen-topsail to repair a hole which I doubt not an enemy's shot had made, as she was showing her heels in the fashion the picaroons always do, unless they hope to make a prize of some unwary merchantman." The commander, on hearing this, took the telescope. "Yes," he said.
It also suggested the possibility that she might be carrying an exceptionally- rich freight, it sometimes happening that the skipper of such a ship, especially if he chanced to be a man of daring and courage, preferred to take his chance of making the voyage alone rather than risk being cut off from the convoy by the swarm of privateers and picaroons that hovered upon its skirts almost from the moment of its sailing to that of its arrival.
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