time of the Restoration, in no unnatural disgust at the fickleness of his countrymen-one or two anecdotes merit, from their singularity, to be preserved. Detecting two of his crew engaged at a game of cards, on a Sunday, he immediately ordered the unlucky gamblers, together with their cards, stakes, and the very table they were playing on, to be thrown overboard. On another occasion, having taken out of a Spanish galleon upwards of seven hundred-weight of silver bullion, he persuaded his men that the possession of so large a sum would not fail to prove injurious to their discipline; and so great was the influence which he had obtained over them, that not a murmur was raised when he distributed one-half only of the amount among them-taking but a single share himself with the rest and had the remainder cast into bullets, which were actually used a few days afterwards in another engagement with the Spaniards!

But the Marooners, as they were called, were Pirates in the worst and most villanous sense of the word. With them there was no peace beyond the Line, not only as regarded the Spaniards, but all the world. They were the Ishmaels of the sea, whose hands were against every man and every man's hand was against them. They owned no other authority than such as the boldest and cleverest ruffian of their number was able, for a time, to enforce. Him, in his wildest and most barbarous freaks, so long as his ascendancy continued, they implicitly obeyed. Some of the atrocities of the monster Teach, a native of Jamaica, where his brother was a lieutenant of militia, are such as it is almost incredible that there should have been found on board the same vessel one man to perpetrate and a hundred others willing to endure.

Yet even these wretches had their exceptions. If Rackham and Goffe the latter of whom figures conspicuously and, on the whole, with tolerable accuracy, in Scott's novel of "The Pirate," -were a couple of as brutal and ignorant scoundrels as ever underwent the last sentence of the law, Roberts, who in point of time came between them, was a man whose talents and energy might have made him respectable, perhaps even eminent, in almost any walk of life. The speech which he addressed to the court, upon his trial, puts one in mind, in some passages, of the celebrated defence of Eugene Aram. The terseness and vigour of its diction reads like a literal version of more than one oration in Sallust. As it is not very well known I will quote a few sentences from it :

"Honest employment hath hard commons and slow gains; it is full of privations and labours for a man's life, or until the spring and beauty of it are over. Honest men become rich when they are no longer able to enjoy riches, and capable heirs wish them in their graves. Avaricious age, or impotent vice, for the most part, follows upon a debarred youth; and such men must needs be governed by any hereditary King— though he should be rogue, coward, or blockhead-whom indiscriminating birth hath

placed over them, and that cannot but despise them in his heart, for the rule which they suffer him to enjoy. Piracy matches youth with pleasure; hath power, and riches, and a full liberty; the choosing of our own commanders and the continuing them in authority no longer than they are braver and abler men than ourselves. Sour looks and a short strangling are the worst end that can befall it; painful moments for pleasant years. And we are commonly our own masters whether to die like men-quickly and suddenly, as Cæsar wished and Gustavus prayed to die—or to hang like dogs. Treachery only it was that brought me to this bar.

"Hanging will end this tryal, it needs no sentence to tell me that; and I would not, though I could, that it should be otherwise. Without hanging, every paltry knave, that coveted gold and loved life, would turn Pirate and prey upon mankind. You shall have my voice if you will, and this body to begin with, for the making it burning or a worse torture. Great dangers make brave resolutions. There would be, were that so, none but choice spirits of our brotherhood. There would be no cowards or traitors in our ranks."

As he was the last, so was the writer of this memoir, by far, the most remarkable man that figured among the Marooners, during the thirty or forty years in which they continued to exist. His career as a sort of admiral among them lasted little more than eighteen months. Towards the close of it, he had collected upwards of thirty vessels, of various sizes, carrying nearly two thousand men; an armament far superior to that with which Morgan had made himself master of Panama and Porto-Bello, and Grammont, in 1685, had successfully attacked Campeachy. With this force, as I have already intimated, he was preparing for a descent upon Jamaica. But the Pirate's success and reputation had excited jealousy among his followers, and, at a moment that would probably have given him an abiding name in history, he was betrayed into the hands of Captain Dawes, the Commander of an English sloop of war, by one Harman or Hartman, a native of Bremen, who acted as his lieutenant. He was carried, desperately wounded, into Port-royal, where he expired, in prison, a few hours after his arrival.

A quantity of old books, principally Latin, and various papers, among them the original of these memoirs, became the property of his captor, and were by him delivered to Governor Trelawny. The books, or, at least, some of them, were deposited in the public library at Spanish Town. Such of them as are still to be seen there bear, I am told, in the fly-leaf, the inscription-"E. soc. Jesu: " under which, in the Pirate's handwriting, are the words "Victor cepi, J. W.” The occasion upon which they fell into his hands will be alluded to in the course of these memoirs.

The papers, after having perused them, Mr. Trelawny had the good feelings to forward to Sir John W- of H- -d House, between Birmingham and Walsall, the writer's nearest relation, whose name occurs,

DD

more than once, in these pages. A brief letter, still in existence, accompanied the packet; but the ink has so completely faded, that it is impossible to decipher any portion of its contents. Only the signature, "Edward Trelawny," is legible.

has is

What became of the M.S. on its reaching England, Mr. Wnot been been able to discover, with any certainty. Sir John Wknown to have died in 1736-7, some months before it could have arrived, leaving two daughters only, both of whom had married, in his life-time, and quitted their paternal home. The probability is that it remained at Hd until the end of last century, when the estate was sold, by Sir John's only surviving grandson, to the ancestor of the present Earl of D. It had certainly never been opened when it was discovered, in March last, among a number of documents, principally legal, which Mr. W- supposes to have been removed from H- -d at the time of the sale of the property.

I have in my capacity of editor divided the book into chapters, and thrown into the shape of notes many long digressions with which the text was loaded, to the great interruption of the current narrative. I might, perhaps, with advantage, have done this to a much greater extent. These and the author's other notes I have marked with the initials of his name. Where my own reading has sufficed, I have traced, verified, and assigned to their respective authors the numerous quotations; but it has happened much more frequently than I could have desired, that I have not been able to do this. I have also supplied many words, and, occasionally, a whole sentence, where the original had become illegible, from the cutting of the string with which it was tied round the middle, after the fashion of law papers. What I have thought it absolutely necessary to omit-and I have been by no means squeamish upon that head, bearing in mind some very excellent and manly observations of Mr. Macaulay's on the subject, in his review of "Croker's Boswell". may have amounted altogether to about three pages.

With these remarks I terminate my preface, already, perhaps, too long for the patience of my readers; adding, only, this request-that they will bear in mind that the writer's life came to a close in his twenty-fifth year, and that the only part of his memoirs which has been preserved must have been written when he was little more than a mere boy. This is the sole excuse, if it be one, which I either can or wish to offer for many parts of the narrative, and still more of the notes.

J. BAILLIE.

I was born at M

CHAPTER I.

a mean village in the county of Northamptonsix or seven miles distant from the market-town of that name-in the year 1711. My father died when I was twelve months old. He had been a brigadier in Marlbro's army; but was obliged to quit the service, by reason of a bad wound in the belly, which he got at the battle of Ramilies. The Duke spoke very kindly to him when he came away, and, though not much addicted to giving, he made him a present of a tortoiseshell snuff-box with silver hinges, having the letters J. C. on the lid. My mother had used to be very proud of it, and would sometimes, when I was a child, let me carry it in my pocket of a Sunday. What became of it upon her death I know not; but I suppose it fell, like everything else that had belonged to her, into the hands of my scoundrel of an uncle.

My father's family was Norman, and had lands at H, by Berminghame, from, or shortly after, Hastings. One of his ancestors was Sheriff of Staffordshire, in the reign of Richard the Second. He had for his wife a sister of that Exton that killed the King at Pomfret; and there was a long tradition in the family that he was present at the murder, aiding his brother-in-law, and was wounded in the scuffle. Another was Parliament-man, for Litchfield, in the reigns of Edward the Sixth and bloody Mary. This one was married to a niece of Bishop Bonner; but he could have had but little love for the Bishop, for he was the author of a savage epitaph upon him, to be found, if I remember right, in one of the editions of "Camden's Remains."* A third, and more to be proud of than either, was a famous Herald, in James the First's time; and what does not often happen to men of that profession, he was a poet, or, at least, versifier of some reputation. Besides a learned treatise on the "True Use of Arms," dedicated to the Lords of martial discipline, to which Dugdale and other great Heralds lie under heavy obligations, he wrote rhyming chronicles of the lives and actions of Sir Jno. de Grailhy, Captal of Buz-fourth Knight of the Garter-and the renowned Sir Jno. Chandos. Scattered about these poems, "rarè nantes," in a great gulf of prose, are many sweet and pathetic verses. I had as lieve have been the author of the "Envoi" to the chronicle of Chandos as of any equal

* I conjecture the following to be the epitaph alluded to, but it is in no edition of "Camden's Remains" which I have had the opportunity of consulting :

"If Heaven is pleas'd when Sinners cease to sin,

If Hell is pleas'd when Sinners enter in,

If Earth is pleas'd when she hath lost a Knave

Then all are pleas'd; for Bonner's in his grave.”—J. B.

number of lines in the writings of Mr. Pope. If there is less shine and compression in it, there is, to my mind, a good deal more of tenderness and true feeling joined to something of the old dignity. These, and other particulars of our family, I gathered out of "Erdeswicke's Survey of Staffordshire," of which there was a copy at M- with many notes and augmentations in my father's handwriting. S. Erdeswicke-who flourished in Elizabeth's time, dying the same year with that great Queen (the only sovereign, of her sex, I ever read of, that made me less in love with a Salique law)-had been in his younger days a great friend, and sort of patron of my ancestor the Herald; but had the meanness and folly, when he was grown old, to claim the other's books for his own—as is related by Sir W. Dugdale and, that honestest of all biographers, Antony à Wood.

Towards the beginning of Henry the Eighth's time, a younger son of the family married a rich heiress, a grand-daughter of that Sir Humphrey Stafford who was executed at Tyburn, for heading an insurrection, the year after the Battle of Bosworth, against that mean rogue Henry the Seventh; and descended from another Humphrey Stafford who was beheaded by Jack Cade. He bought with part of his wife's fortune a small estate at Dodford, in Northamptonshire, which his son and grandson, by other purchases and prosperous alliances, greatly increased. His descendants continued to reside upon it in opulence and, for aught that I know, in good reputation, until the end of last century, when it unluckily fell to two co-heiresses-wanting here too a Salique law-and passed, by their marriages, into the hands and names of strangers.

My grandfather was a younger son of this branch of our family. He married a lady of the name of Pickering (a connection of Mr. Dryden's, the poet), who bore him three sons, my father being the youngest of them. Being of small means, and those already deeply trenched upon in providing for his elder children, he willingly fell in with my father's views of adopting the profession of arms, as being at once the most honourable and the least costly of any; for that it is thought to need the least education for it. By the interest of the head of the family, in Staffordshire, at that time a very young man, but with whom my grandfather, notwithstanding the difference of their ages, was on very friendly terms, a pair of colours was provided for him in my Lord Dumbarton's Regiment of Horse. He served with that regiment, in Scotland, under the Duke of Monmouth and the famous Viscount Dundee, then Colonel Grahame, and he afterwards fought against Monmouth at the battle by Bridgewater. I have heard my mother say that it went sorely to his heart to have to draw his sword against his old commander, and that he would willingly have gone over to the Duke if any of the Scotch