They were more dangerous to the merchant than to the seaman.
But they in turn were replaced by more savage and desperate men, who
frankly recognised that they would get no quarter in their war with the
human race, and who swore that they would give as little as they got.
Of their histories we know little that is trustworthy. They wrote no
memoirs and left no trace, save an occasional blackened and
blood-stained derelict adrift upon the face of the Atlantic.
Their deeds could only be surmised from the long roll of ships who never
made their port.
Searching the records of history, it is only here and there in an
old-world trial that the veil that shrouds them seems for an instant to
be lifted, and we catch a glimpse of some amazing and grotesque
brutality behind. Such was the breed of Ned Low, of Gow the Scotchman,
and of the infamous Sharkey, whose coal-black barque, the _Happy
Delivery_, was known from the Newfoundland Banks to the mouths of the
Orinoco as the dark forerunner of misery and of death.
There were many men, both among the islands and on the Main, who had a
blood feud with Sharkey, but not one who had suffered more bitterly than
Copley Banks, of Kingston. Banks had been one of the leading sugar
merchants of the West Indies. He was a man of position, a member of the
Council, the husband of a Percival, and the cousin of the Governor of
Virginia.
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