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Updated: June 4, 2025
It carried him out of himself so completely that as they rowed slowly back to town he did not see a single house in it, although every western window-pane flashed back the out-going sun like a golden mirror. His serious, brown eyes were following the adventures of these bold sea-robbers, "marooned three times and wounded nine and blowed up in the air."
No treaty, exclaim others, should be made with a monarch or a despot; there will be no naval security while those sea-robbers domineer on the ocean; their den must be destroyed; that nation must be extirpated. I like this, sir, because it is sincerity. With feelings such as these, we do not pant for treaties.
Then came the sea-robbers, and haunted the shores: and many a dying wretch screamed at night among the caverns many a murdered corpse lies buried in our sands. Then the negroes were brought in from over the sea; and from among their chains, from under the lash, grew up the hatred of races. The whites hated the mulattoes, and despised the blacks.
The Arab at the present day listens with eager interest to the same tales of genii and afrits, sorcerers and enchanted princesses, which delighted his ancestors in the times of Haroun al Raschid. The gentle, church-going Icelander of our time beguiles the long night of his winter with the very sagas and runes which thrilled with not unpleasing horror the hearts of the old Norse sea-robbers.
Indian wars broke out, and in the course of time the colonies became very much weakened and impoverished, and then it was that the harbor of Charles Town began to be again interesting to the pirates. About this time one of the most famous of sea-robbers was harassing the Atlantic coast of North America, and from New England to the West Indies, he was known as the great pirate Blackbeard.
The first great philosopher of the seventeenth century (if we except Galileo) was Des Cartes; and if ever one could say of a man that he was all but murdered murdered within an inch one must say it of him. The case was this, as reported by Baillet in his Vie De M. Des Cartes, tom. I. p. 102-3. In the year 1621, when Des Cartes might be about twenty-six years old, he was touring about as usual, (for he was as restless as a hyæna,) and, coming to the Elbe, either at Gluckstadt or at Hamburgh, he took shipping for East Friezland: what he could want in East Friezland no man has ever discovered; and perhaps he took this into consideration himself; for, on reaching Embden, he resolved to sail instantly for West Friezland; and being very impatient of delay, he hired a bark, with a few mariners to navigate it. No sooner had he got out to sea than he made a pleasing discovery, viz. that he had shut himself up in a den of murderers. His crew, says M. Baillet, he soon found out to be "des scélérats," not amateurs, gentlemen, as we are, but professional men the height of whose ambition at that moment was to cut his throat. But the story is too pleasing to be abridged; I shall give it, therefore, accurately, from the French of his biographer: "M. Des Cartes had no company but that of his servant, with whom he was conversing in French. The sailors, who took him for a foreign merchant, rather than a cavalier, concluded that he must have money about him. Accordingly they came to a resolution by no means advantageous to his purse. There is this difference, however, between sea-robbers and the robbers in forests, that the latter may, without hazard, spare the lives of their victims; whereas the other cannot put a passenger on shore in such a case without running the risk of being apprehended. The crew of M. Des Cartes arranged their measures with a view to evade any danger of that sort. They observed that he was a stranger from a distance, without acquaintance in the country, and that nobody would take any trouble to inquire about him, in case he should never come to hand, (quand il viendroit
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