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Updated: June 5, 2025
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.
Our pinnace being hauled up in the tackles, we immediately let her down, but unfortunately the plug was out, and the hands which had jumped into her being raw, she almost filled with water, which caused such confusion that the canoe got on board before we got off. Our hands then went to demand Ferrow, but the privateersmen got out their arms and would not suffer us to board them.
Though the enemy outnumbered the privateersmen, and carried heavier metal, yet the "Dolphin" went gallantly into the fight, and after a severe battle succeeded in taking both vessels. Great was the astonishment of the British at being thus snapped up by a Yankee privateer almost under the guns of the Rock of Gibraltar.
The work had gone on without interruption for weeks, and never slowly, but there were times when it went with a lilt and a laugh; when laborers heaved at a hoisting tackle with a Yo-ho, like privateersmen who have just sighted a sail; when, with all they could do, results came too slowly, and the hours flew too fast. And so it was that Christmas night; Charlie Bannon was back on the job.
After an hour of pretended despair, both rose from the deck on which they had been sitting and, on an order being given to trim the sails, went to the ropes and aided the privateersmen to haul at them and, before the end of the day, were doing duty as regular members of the crew.
Yet history records a few actions in which the privateersmen showed a steadiness and courage worthy of seamen of the regular service. The limitations of this work do not permit a complete account of the work of the privateers during the war. Although an interesting subject, and one of historical importance, but a few pages can be devoted to it here.
And of these various tendencies, there were no more fitting representatives than Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins and Essex, Cavendish and Grenfell, and the other privateersmen of the sixteenth century.
"You will keep close to me, Mr Voules," said Lieutenant Mason, "for I have as many prisoners on board as I can well manage, and should they be disposed to rise upon us they might succeed if we don't keep a bright look-out." The French privateersmen were indeed a very rough-looking set of fellows. By the way they had fought they showed that they were capable of daring and doing any act of violence.
The great Spence gallery of Eden Valley Parish Kirk was filled with such a mixed assembly as had never been seen there before. Smugglers, privateersmen, the sweepings of ports, home and foreign, some who had blood on their hands though with the distinction that it had been shed in encounters with excisemen.
Other privateersmen, however, were not so valiant or quarrelsome, and there was many a one tied up in London River or the Mersey which had been captured without very savage resistance. Yet on the whole it is fair to say that the private armed ships outfought and outsailed the enemy as impressively as did the few frigates of the American Navy.
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