"free-trader" still swung, tarred and in chains, on conspicuous points of the coast—even as the highwayman rattled at the cross-road—for the encouragement of the brotherhood; when it was naturally considered more logical (since hang you must for almost any misdeed) to hang for a sheep than a lamb, and human life on the whole was held rather cheap in consequence. They are the days when in Liverpool the privateers were daily fitting out or bringing in the "prizes," and when, in Lord Street Offices, distant cargoes of "living ebony" were put to auction by steady, [Pg xiii] intensely respectable, Church-going merchants. But especially they are the days of war and the fortunes of war; days of pressgangs, to kidnap unwilling rulers of the waves; of hulks and prisons filled to overflowing, even in a mere commercial port like Liverpool, with French prisoners of war.

[Pg xiii]

A long course of relentless hostilities, lasting the span of a full-grown generation, had cultivated the predatory instinct of all men with the temperament of action, and seemed to justify it. Venturesome, hot-spirited youths, with their way to make in the world (who in a former age might have been reduced to "the road") took up privateering on a systematic scale. In such an atmosphere there could not fail to return a belief in the good old border rule, "the simple plan: that they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can." And it must be remembered that an island country's border is the enemy's coast! On that ethical understanding many privateer owners built up large fortunes, still enjoyed by descendants who in these days would look upon high-sea looting of non-combatants with definite horror.

The years of the great French war, however, fostered a species of nautical enterprise more venturesome even than privateering, raiding, blockade-running and all the ordinary forms of smuggling that are usual when two coast lines are at enmity. I mean that smuggling of gold specie and bullion which incidentally was destined to affect the course of Sir Adrian's life so powerfully.

As Captain Jack's last venture may, at this distance of time, appear a little improbable, it is well to state here some little-known facts concerning the now rather incomprehensible pursuit of gold smuggling—a romantic subject if ever there was one.

[Pg xiv] The existence at one time of this form of "free-trade" is all but forgotten. Indeed very little was ever heard of it in the world, except among parties directly interested, even at the time when it played an 

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