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Then and there the woman, nearly seventy years of age, who governed despotically the half of a small island, while the other half was in the possession of a man whose mother she had slain, and of a people who hated the English more than they hated the Spaniards or the French a queen with some three millions of loyal but most turbulent subjects in one island, and with about half-a-million ferocious rebels in another requiring usually an army of twenty thousand disciplined soldiers to keep them in a kind of subjugation, with a revenue fluctuating between eight hundred thousand pounds sterling, and the half of that sum, and with a navy of a hundred privateersmen disclosed to the French envoy a vast plan for regulating the polity and the religion of the civilized world, and for remodelling the map of Europe.
This occupied us until the boat returned, with a very civil request from the captain of the Speedy, that I would do him the favour to pay him a visit, bringing with me the ship's papers. As this was what no belligerent had a right to demand, though privateersmen constantly did it, I could comply or not.
As before, the privateersmen were ready for their foe, and when they came within range opened fire upon them, first with the long gun and then with the lighter cannon; but the British rowed on with steady strokes, for they were seamen accustomed to victory over every European foe, and danger had no terrors for them.
Genet, his head turned by his reception, resented the strict neutrality enforced by the administration, tried to compel it to recede, endeavoured to secure the exit of privateersmen in spite of their prohibition, and ultimately in fury appealed to the people against their government.
To France it became a haven for privateers, the bane of England's commerce in the Channel and the North Sea. As the French sea power waned, England in treaty after treaty exacted the dismantling of the works of Dunkirk, which it may be said in passing was the home port of the celebrated Jean Bart and other great French privateersmen.
She had somewhat the look of a Dutchman, to my eye, and if so she would probably afford very respectable pickings to a crew of hard-working privateersmen like ourselves.
"It's more likely, sir, that some of the privateersmen have got ashore on planks and empty casks, and are prowling about in the weeds, watching our boats. Three or four of them would be too much for you, Captain Cuffe, as the scoundrels all carry knives as long as ship's cutlasses." "I suppose your notion may be true; and I shall have to give it up.
This was not an uncommon line of development for the early privateersmen; and, indeed, it was not unusual to find navy officers, temporarily without commands, taking a cruise or two as privateers, until Congress should provide more ships for the regular service a system which did not tend to make a Congress, which was niggardly at best, hasten to provide public vessels for work which was being reasonably well done at private expense.
Cuffe had no great veneration for privateersmen, nor was his estimate of their morality at all unreasonable, when he inferred that one who served with gain for his principal object would not long hesitate about purchasing his own life by the betrayal of a secret like that he now asked.
In several notable instances the privateersmen tried conclusions with ships that flew the royal ensign, and got the better of them. The hero of an uncommonly brilliant action of this sort was Captain George Geddes of Philadelphia, who was entrusted with the Congress, a noble privateer of twenty-four guns and two hundred men.
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