flew a flag of truce to indicate his errand. This meant nothing
to the ruffian who commanded the English privateer Revenge. He
violently seized the innocent Mary and sent her into New
Providence. Here Captain Driver made lawful protest before the
authorities, and was set at liberty with vessel and cargo--an act
of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty Court of the Bahamas.

Unmolested, the harassed skipper managed to gain Cape Francois
and rescue his three seamen and his schooner in exchange for the
ransom money. As he was about to depart homeward bound, a French
frigate snatched him and his crew out of their vessel and threw
them ashore at Santiago, where for two months they existed as
ragged beachcombers until by some judicial twist the schooner was
returned to them. They worked her home and presented their long
list of grievances to the colonial Government of Massachusetts,
which duly forwarded them--and that was the end of it. Three
years had been spent in this catalogue of misadventures, and
Captain Driver, his owners, and his men were helpless against
such intolerable aggression. They and their kind were a prey to
every scurvy rascal who misused a privateering commission to fill
his own pockets.

Stoutly resolved to sail and trade as they pleased, these
undaunted Americans, nevertheless, increased their business on
blue water until shortly before the Revolution the New England
fleet alone numbered six hundred sail. Its captains felt at home
in Surinam and the Canaries. They trimmed their yards in the
reaches of the Mediterranean and the North Sea or bargained
thriftily in the Levant. The whalers of Nantucket, in their
apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant seas, and the