Howard Pyle's Book of pirates : fiction, fact & fancy concerning the buccaneers & marooners of the Spanish Main
"Why, it's Levi West!" croaked the Squire, at last finding his voice.
Then, suddenly, Lieutenant Maynard pushed forward, before the others
crowded around the figure on the floor, and, clutching Levi by the
hair, dragged his head backward so as to better see his face. "Levi
West!" said he in a loud voice. "Is this the Levi West you've been
telling me of? Look at that scar and the mark on his cheek! _This is
Blueskin himself._"
XIV
In the chest which Blueskin had dug up out of the sand were found not
only the goldsmiths' bills taken from the packet, but also many other
valuables belonging to the officers and the passengers of the
unfortunate ship.
The New York agents offered Hiram a handsome reward for his efforts in
recovering the lost bills, but Hiram declined it, positively and
finally. "All I want," said he, in his usual dull, stolid fashion, "is
to have folks know I'm honest." Nevertheless, though he did not
accept what the agents of the packet offered, fate took the matter
into its own hands and rewarded him not unsubstantially. Blueskin was
taken to England in the _Scorpion_. But he never came to trial. While
in Newgate he hanged himself to the cell window with his own
stockings. The news of his end was brought to Lewes in the early
autumn and Squire Hall took immediate measures to have the five
hundred pounds of his father's legacy duly transferred to Hiram.
In November Hiram married the pirate's widow.
Chapter VII
CAPTAIN SCARFIELD
PREFACE
_The author of this narrative cannot recall that, in any history of
the famous pirates, he has ever read a detailed and sufficient account
of the life and death of Capt. John Scarfield. Doubtless some data
concerning his death and the destruction of his schooner might be
gathered from the report of Lieutenant Mainwaring, now filed in the
archives of the Navy Department, but beyond such bald and bloodless
narrative the author knows of nothing, unless it be the little
chap-book history published by Isaiah Thomas in Newburyport about the
year 1821-22, entitled, "A True History of the Life and Death of
Captain Jack Scarfield." This lack of particularity in the history of
one so notable in his profession it is the design of the present
narrative in a measure to supply, and, if the author has seen fit to
cast it in the form of a fictional story, it is only that it may make
more easy reading for those who see fit to follow the tale from this
to its conclusion._
CAPTAIN SCARFIELD
I
Eleazer Cooper, or Captain Cooper, as was his better-known title in
Philadelphia, was a prominent member of the Society of Friends. He was
an overseer of the meeting and an occasional speaker upon particular
occasions. When at home from one of his many voyages he never failed
to occupy his seat in the meeting both on First Day and Fifth Day, and
he was regarded by his fellow townsmen as a model of business
integrity and of domestic responsibility.
More incidental to this history, however, it is to be narrated that
Captain Cooper was one of those trading skippers who carried their own
merchandise in their own vessels which they sailed themselves, and on
whose decks they did their own bartering. His vessel was a swift,
large schooner, the _Eliza Cooper_, _of Philadelphia_, named for his
wife. His cruising grounds were the West India Islands, and his
merchandise was flour and corn meal ground at the Brandywine Mills at
Wilmington, Delaware.
During the War of 1812 he had earned, as was very well known, an
extraordinary fortune in this trading; for flour and corn meal sold at
fabulous prices in the French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish islands, cut
off, as they were, from the rest of the world by the British blockade.
The running of this blockade was one of the most hazardous maritime
ventures possible, but Captain Cooper had met with such unvaried
success, and had sold his merchandise at such incredible profit that,
at the end of the war, he found himself to have become one of the
wealthiest merchants of his native city.
It was known at one time that his balance in the Mechanics' Bank was
greater than that of any other individual depositor upon the books,
and it was told of him that he had once deposited in the bank a chest
of foreign silver coin, the exchanged value of which, when translated
into American currency, was upward of forty-two thousand dollars--a
prodigious sum of money in those days.
In person, Captain Cooper was tall and angular of frame. His face was
thin and severe, wearing continually an unsmiling, mask-like
expression of continent and unruffled sobriety. His manner was dry and
taciturn, and his conduct and life were measured to the most absolute
accord with the teachings of his religious belief.
He lived in an old-fashioned house on Front Street below Spruce--as
pleasant, cheerful a house as ever a trading captain could return to.
At the back of the house a lawn sloped steeply down toward the river.
To the south stood the wharf and storehouses; to the north an orchard
and kitchen garden bloomed with abundant verdure. Two large chestnut
trees sheltered the porch and the little space of lawn, and when you
sat under them in the shade you looked down the slope between two rows
of box bushes directly across the shining river to the Jersey shore.
At the time of our story--that is, about the year 1820--this property
had increased very greatly in value, but it was the old home of the
Coopers, as Eleazer Cooper was entirely rich enough to indulge his
fancy in such matters. Accordingly, as he chose to live in the same
house where his father and his grandfather had dwelt before him, he
peremptorily, if quietly, refused all offers looking toward the
purchase of the lot of ground--though it was now worth five or six
times its former value.
As was said, it was a cheerful, pleasant home, impressing you when you
entered it with the feeling of spotless and all-pervading
cleanliness--a cleanliness that greeted you in the shining brass
door-knocker; that entertained you in the sitting room with its
stiff, leather-covered furniture, the brass-headed tacks whereof
sparkled like so many stars--a cleanliness that bade you farewell in
the spotless stretch of sand-sprinkled hallway, the wooden floor of
which was worn into knobs around the nail heads by the countless
scourings and scrubbings to which it had been subjected and which left
behind them an all-pervading faint, fragrant odor of soap and warm
water.
Eleazer Cooper and his wife were childless, but one inmate made the
great, silent, shady house bright with life. Lucinda Fairbanks, a
niece of Captain Cooper's by his only sister, was a handsome,
sprightly girl of eighteen or twenty, and a great favorite in the
Quaker society of the city.
It remains only to introduce the final and, perhaps, the most
important actor of the narrative--Lieut. James Mainwaring. During the
past twelve months or so he had been a frequent visitor at the Cooper
house. At this time he was a broad-shouldered, red-cheeked, stalwart
fellow of twenty-six or twenty-eight. He was a great social favorite,
and possessed the added romantic interest of having been aboard the
_Constitution_ when she fought the _Guerriere_, and of having, with
his own hands, touched the match that fired the first gun of that
great battle.
Mainwaring's mother and Eliza Cooper had always been intimate friends,
and the coming and going of the young man during his leave of absence
were looked upon in the house as quite a matter of course. Half a
dozen times a week he would drop in to execute some little commission
for the ladies, or, if Captain Cooper was at home, to smoke a pipe of
tobacco with him, to sip a dram of his famous old Jamaica rum, or to
play a rubber of checkers of an evening. It is not likely that either
of the older people was the least aware of the real cause of his
visits; still less did they suspect that any passages of sentiment had
passed between the young people.
The truth was that Mainwaring and the young lady were very deeply in
love. It was a love that they were obliged to keep a profound secret,
for not only had Eleazer Cooper held the strictest sort of testimony
against the late war--a testimony so rigorous as to render it
altogether unlikely that one of so military a profession as Mainwaring
practiced could hope for his consent to a suit for marriage, but
Lucinda could not have married one not a member of the Society of
Friends without losing her own birthright membership therein. She
herself might not attach much weight to such a loss of membership in
the Society, but her fear of, and her respect for, her uncle led her
to walk very closely in her path of duty in this respect. Accordingly
she and Mainwaring met as they could--clandestinely--and the stolen
moments were very sweet. With equal secrecy Lucinda had, at the
request of her lover, sat for a miniature portrait to Mrs. Gregory,
which miniature, set in a gold medallion, Mainwaring, with a mild,
sentimental pleasure, wore hung around his neck and beneath his shirt
frill next his heart.
In the month of April of the year 1820 Mainwaring received orders to
report at Washington. During the preceding autumn the West India
pirates, and notably Capt. Jack Scarfield, had been more than usually
active, and the loss of the packet _Marblehead_ (which, sailing from
Charleston, South Carolina, was never heard of more) was attributed to
them. Two other coasting vessels off the coast of Georgia had been
looted and burned by Scarfield, and the government had at last aroused
itself to the necessity of active measures for repressing these pests
of the West India waters.
Mainwaring received orders to take command of the _Yankee_, a swift,
light-draught, heavily armed brig of war, and to cruise about the
Bahama Islands and to capture and destroy all the pirates' vessels he
could there discover.
On his way from Washington to New York, where the _Yankee_ was then
waiting orders, Mainwaring stopped in Philadelphia to bid good-by to
his many friends in that city. He called at the old Cooper house. It
was on a Sunday afternoon. The spring was early and the weather
extremely pleasant that day, being filled with a warmth almost as of
summer. The apple trees were already in full bloom and filled all the
air with their fragrance. Everywhere there seemed to be the pervading
hum of bees, and the drowsy, tepid sunshine was very delightful.
At that time Eleazer was just home from an unusually successful voyage
to Antigua. Mainwaring found the family sitting under one of the still
leafless chestnut trees, Captain Cooper smoking his long clay pipe and
lazily perusing a copy of the _National Gazette_. Eleazer listened
with a great deal of interest to what Mainwaring had to say of his
proposed cruise. He himself knew a great deal about the pirates, and,
singularly unbending from his normal, stiff taciturnity, he began
telling of what he knew, particularly of Captain Scarfield--in whom he
appeared to take an extraordinary interest.
Vastly to Mainwaring's surprise, the old Quaker assumed the position
of a defendant of the pirates, protesting that the wickedness of the
accused was enormously exaggerated. He declared that he knew some of
the freebooters very well and that at the most they were poor,