no man but Morgan ever knew, for when a division was made it was

found that there was only TWO HUNDRED PIECES OF EIGHT TO EACH
MAN.

When this dividend was declared a howl of execration went up,
under which even Capt. Henry Morgan quailed. At night he and

four other commanders slipped their cables and ran out to sea,
and it was said that these divided the greater part of the booty

among themselves. But the wealthplundered at Panama could
hardly have fallen short of a million and a half of dollars.

Computing it at this reasonable figure, the various prizes won by
Henry Morgan in the West Indies would stand as follows: Panama,

$1,500,000; Porto Bello, $800,000; Puerto del Principe, $700,000;
Maracaibo and Gibraltar, $400,000; various piracies,

$250,000--making a grand total of $3,650,000 as the vast harvest
of plunder. With this fabulouswealth, wrenched from the

Spaniards by means of the rack and the cord, and pilfered from
his companions by the meanest of thieving, Capt. Henry Morgan

retired from business, honored of all, rendered famous by his
deeds, knighted by the good King Charles II, and finally

appointed governor of the rich island of Jamaica.
Other buccaneers followed him. Campeche was taken and sacked,

and even Cartagena itself fell; but with Henry Morgan culminated
the glory of the buccaneers, and from that time they declined in

power and wealth and wickedness until they were finally swept
away.

The buccaneers became bolder and bolder. In fact, so daring were
their crimes that the home governments, stirred at last by these

outrageous barbarities, seriouslyundertook the suppression of
the freebooters, lopping and trimming the main trunk until its

members were scattered hither and thither, and it was thought
that the organization was exterminated. But, so far from being

exterminated, the individual members were merely scattered north,
south, east, and west, each forming a nucleus around which

gathered and clustered the very worst of the offscouring of
humanity.

The result was that when the seventeenth century was fairly
packed away with its lavender in the store chest of the past, a

score or more bands of freebooters were cruising along the
Atlantic seaboard in armed vessels, each with a black flag with

its skull and crossbones at the fore, and with a nondescript crew
made up of the tags and remnants of civilized and semicivilized

humanity (white, black, red, and yellow), known generally as
marooners, swarming upon the decks below.

Nor did these offshoots from the old buccaneer stem confine their
depredations to the American seas alone; the East Indies and the

African coast also witnessed their doings, and suffered from
them, and even the Bay of Biscay had good cause to remember more

than one visit from them.
Worthy sprigs from so worthy a stem improved variously upon the

parent methods; for while the buccaneers were content to prey
upon the Spaniards alone, the marooners reaped the harvest from

the commerce of all nations.
So up and down the Atlantic seaboard they cruised, and for the

fifty years that marooning was in the flower of its glory it was
a sorrowful time for the coasters of New England, the middle

provinces, and the Virginias, sailing to the West Indies with
their cargoes of salt fish, grain, and tobacco. Trading became

almost as dangerous as privateering, and sea captains were chosen
as much for their knowledge of the flintlock and the cutlass as

for their seamanship.
As by far the largest part of the trading in American waters was

conducted by these Yankee coasters, so by far the heaviest blows,
and those most keenly felt, fell upon them. Bulletin after

bulletin came to port with its doleful tale of this vessel burned
or that vessel scuttled, this one held by the pirates for their

own use or that one stripped of its goods and sent into port as
empty as an eggshell from which the yolk had been sucked. Boston,

New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston suffered alike, and worthy
ship owners had to leave off counting their losses upon their

fingers and take to the slate to keep the dismal record.
"Maroon--to put ashore on a desert isle, as a sailor, under

pretense of having committed some great crime." Thus our good
Noah Webster gives us the dry bones, the anatomy, upon which the

imagination may construct a specimen to suit itself.
It is thence that the marooners took their name, for marooning

was one of their most effective instruments of punishment or
revenge. If a pirate broke one of the many rules which governed

the particular band to which he belonged, he was marooned; did a
captain defend his ship to such a degree as to be unpleasant to

the pirates attacking it, he was marooned; even the pirate
captain himself, if he displeased his followers by the severity

of his rule, was in danger of having the same punishment visited
upon him which he had perhaps more than once visited upon

another.
The process of marooning was as simple as terrible. A suitable

place was chosen (generally some desert isle as far removed as
possible from the pathway of commerce), and the condemned man was

rowed from the ship to the beach. Out he was bundled upon the
sand spit; a gun, a half dozen bullets, a few pinches of powder,

and a bottle of water were chucked ashore after him, and away
rowed the boat's crew back to the ship, leaving the poor wretch

alone to rave away his life in madness, or to sit sunken in his
gloomy despair till death mercifully released him from torment.

It rarely if ever happened that anything was known of him after
having been marooned. A boat's crew from some vessel, sailing by

chance that way, might perhaps find a few chalky bones bleaching
upon the white sand in the garish glare of the sunlight, but that

was all. And such were marooners.
By far the largest number of pirate captains were Englishmen,

for, from the days of good Queen Bess, English sea captains
seemed to have a natural turn for any species of venture that had

a smack of piracy in it, and from the great Admiral Drake of the
old, old days, to the truculent Morgan of buccaneering times, the

Englishman did the boldest and wickedest deeds, and wrought the
most damage.

First of all upon the list of pirates stands the bold Captain
Avary, one of the institutors of marooning. Him we see but

dimly, half hidden by the glamouring mists of legends and
tradition. Others who came afterward outstripped him far enough

in their doings, but he stands pre-eminent as the first of
marooners of whom actual history has been handed down to us of

the present day.
When the English, Dutch, and Spanish entered into an alliance to

suppress buccaneering in the West Indies, certain worthies of
Bristol, in old England, fitted out two vessels to assist in this

laudable project; for doubtless Bristol trade suffered smartly
from the Morgans and the l'Olonoises of that old time. One of

these vessels was named the Duke, of which a certain Captain
Gibson was the commander and Avary the mate.

Away they sailed to the West Indies, and there Avary became
impressed by the advantages offered by piracy, and by the amount

of good things that were to be gained by very little striving.
One night the captain (who was one of those fellows mightily

addicted to punch), instead of going ashore to saturate himself
with rum at the ordinary, had his drink in his cabin in private.

While he lay snoring away the effects of his rum in the cabin,
Avary and a few other conspirators heaved the anchor very

leisurely, and sailed out of the harbor of Corunna, and through
the midst of the allied fleet riding at anchor in the darkness.

By and by, when the morning came, the captain was awakened by the