"At Guzarat I met with a Portuguese named Anthony de Sylvestre;he came with two other Portuguese and two Dutchmen to take on in the Moor's service, as many Europeans do. This Anthony told me he had been among the pirates, and that he belonged to one of the sloops in Virginia when Blackbeard was taken. He informed me that if it should be my lot ever to go to York River or Maryland, near an island called Mulberry Island, provided we went on shore at the watering place, where the shipping used most commonly to ride, that there the pirates had buried considerable sums of money in great chests well clamped with iron plates. As to my part, I never was that way, nor much acquainted with any that ever used those parts; but I have made inquiry, and am informed that there is such a place as Mulberry Island. If any person who uses those parts should think it worth while to dig a little way at the upper end of a small cove, where it is convenient to land, he would soon find whether the information I had was well grounded. Fronting the landing place are five trees, among which, he said, the money was hid. I cannot warrant the truth of this account; but if I was ever to go there, I should find some means or other to satisfy myself, as it could not be a great deal out of my way. If anybody should obtain the benefit of this account, if it please God that they ever come to England, 'tis hoped they will remember whence they had this information."Another worthy was Capt. Edward Low, who learned his trade of sail-making at good old Boston town, and piracy at Honduras. No one stood higher in the trade than he, and no one mounted to more lofty altitudes of bloodthirsty and unscrupulous wickedness. 'Tis strange that so little has been written and sung of this man of might, for he was as worthy of story and of song as was Blackbeard.
It was under a Yankee captain that he made his first cruise--down to Honduras, for a cargo of logwood, which in those times was no better than stolen from the Spanish folk.
One day, lying off the shore, in the Gulf of Honduras, comes Master Low and the crew of the whaleboat rowing across from the beach, where they had been all morning chopping logwood.
"What are you after?" says the captain, for they were coming back with nothing but themselves in the boat.
"We're after our dinner," says Low, as spokesman of the party.
"You'll have no dinner," says the captain, "until you fetch off another load.""Dinner or no dinner, we'll pay for it," says Low, wherewith he up with a musket, squinted along the barrel, and pulled the trigger.
Luckily the gun hung fire, and the Yankee captain was spared to steal logwood a while longer.
All the same, that was no place for Ned Low to make a longer stay, so off he and his messmates rowed in a whaleboat, captured a brig out at sea, and turned pirates.
He presently fell in with the notorious Captain Lowther, a fellow after his own kidney, who put the finishing touches to his education and taught him what wickedness he did not already know.
And so he became a master pirate, and a famous hand at his craft, and thereafter forever bore an inveterate hatred of all Yankees because of the dinner he had lost, and never failed to smite whatever one of them luck put within his reach. Once he fell in with a ship off South Carolina--the Amsterdam Merchant, Captain Williamson, commander--a Yankee craft and a Yankee master. He slit the nose and cropped the ears of the captain, and then sailed merrily away, feeling the better for having marred a Yankee.
New York and New England had more than one visit from the doughty captain, each of which visits they had good cause to remember, for he made them smart for it.
Along in the year 1722 thirteen vessels were riding at anchor in front of the good town of Marblehead. Into the harbor sailed a strange craft. "Who is she?" say the townsfolk, for the coming of a new vessel was no small matter in those days.
Who the strangers were was not long a matter of doubt. Up goes the black flag, and the skull and crossbones to the fore.
"'Tis the bloody Low," say one and all; and straightway all was flutter and commotion, as in a duck pond when a hawk pitches and strikes in the midst.
It was a glorious thing for our captain, for here were thirteen Yankee crafts at one and the same time. So he took what he wanted, and then sailed away, and it was many a day before Marblehead forgot that visit.
Some time after this he and his consort fell foul of an English sloop of war, the Greyhound, whereby they were so roughly handled that Low was glad enough to slip away, leaving his consort and her crew behind him, as a sop to the powers of law and order. And lucky for them if no worse fate awaited them than to walk the dreadful plank with a bandage around the blinded eyes and a rope around the elbows. So the consort was taken, and the crew tried and hanged in chains, and Low sailed off in as pretty a bit of rage as ever a pirate fell into.
The end of this worthy is lost in the fogs of the past: some say that he died of a yellow fever down in New Orleans; it was not at the end of a hempen cord, more's the pity.
Here fittingly with our strictly American pirates should stand Major Stede Bonnet along with the rest. But in truth he was only a poor half- and-half fellow of his kind, and even after his hand was fairly turned to the business he had undertaken, a qualm of conscience would now and then come across him, and he would make vast promises to forswear his evil courses.
