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Updated: June 11, 2025
During the remainder of the year not much was done in of the stadholder or the cardinal, but there was immense damage done to the Dutch shipping by the famous privateersman, Van der Waecken, with his squadron of twelve or fourteen armed cruisers. In vain had the States exerted themselves to destroy the robbers cave, Dunkirk.
For in the days of George Saint Leger piracy was regarded as a perfectly legitimate and honourable trade always provided that the acts of piracy were perpetrated only against the enemies of one's country. A pirate, indeed, in those days, was synonymous with the individual who was termed a privateersman at the time of the Napoleonic wars.
A slaver at the age of seventeen, the ringleader of a mutiny on the African Coast at the age of twenty, a privateersman during the last war with England, the commander of a fire-ship and its sole survivor at twenty-five, with a wild intermediate career of unmixed piracy, until the Rebellion called him to civil service again as a blockade-runner, and peace and a desire for rural repose led him to seek the janitorship of the Doemville Academy, where no questions were asked and references not exchanged: he was, indeed, a fit mentor for our daring youth.
The owners took a certain share of each prize, and the remainder was divided among the officers and crew in certain fixed proportions. How great were the profits accruing to a privateersman in a "run of luck" might be illustrated by two facts set forth by Maclay, whose "History of American Privateers" is the chief authority on the subject.
"Well, Captain Passford, if you fail to comprehend my purpose, it is the fault of your understanding, and not of my plain and explicit declaration, for I assuredly said that I intended to replace the Floridian with the Teaser, or the Bronx as you have named her, though she will not be called by any such nut-cracking name after I get her," replied the daring privateersman, as blandly and pleasantly as though he were planning a picnic.
Among them were the brothers Mathieu and Rene d'Amours and the privateersman Baptiste. Villebon assigned to Baptiste and Rene d'Amours the duty of heading the Indians and opposing the landing of the English. The sketch on the next page, based upon a plan in the archives de la Marine, Paris will serve to give an idea of the general character of Fort Nachouac.
Captain Jonathan Haraden, the finest privateersman of the Revolution, made the rigging for the mainmast at his ropewalk in Brown Street. Joseph Vincent fitted out the foremast and Thomas Briggs the mizzenmast in their lofts at the foot of the Common. When the huge hemp cables were ready for the frigate, the workmen carried them to the shipyard on their shoulders, the parade led by fife and drum.
The shouting came not from the wicked crew of the privateersman, but from the shouting of a vast number of people, most of them mounted on farm and country horses, with some of finer limb and better blood, managed by young fellows having the air of laird's sons or others of some position. None of these had his face bare.
The chief fault of the privateersman was that he sailed and fought for his own gain, but he was never guilty of sinking ships with passengers and crew aboard, and very often he played the gentleman in gallant style. Nothing could have seemed to him more abhorrent and incredible than a kind of warfare which should drown women and children because they had embarked under an enemy's flag.
And where pray, in this terraqueous sublunary sphere I heard that good phrase from a literary exquisite at Bath, and it seems to me comprehensive where, then, on this terraqueous sublunary globe of ours, Sir Adrian Landale, could one expect to find another person ready to lend a privateersman, trading under an irresponsible name, the sum of four thousand pounds, without any other security than his volunteered promise to return it if possible?"
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