Old Virginia and her neighbours

THE GOLDEN AGE OF PIRATES. 361next score of years the decline ofthe pirates wasrapid.The first English settlements south of Virginiawere made at the time when buccaneering wasmigrhty and defiant. The colony of SirCarolinaX 1 ^7- r^ -n -r.«John Yeamans, on Cape Fear River, was and theBaliainas.. .-irrrrKibegun in 1665, and it was in 1670, thevery year of the treaty of America, that GovernorSayle landed at Port Royal. The earliest settlersin Carolina, as we have seen, were not ofsuch good quality as those who came a few yearslater. They furnished a convenient market forthe pirates, who were apt to be open-handed customers,ready to jsay good prices in Spanish gold,whether for clothes, weapons, and brandy broughtfrom Europe, or for timber, tar, tobacco, rice, orcorn raised in America. One of the BahamaIslands, called New Providence, had been settledby the English. Its remarkable facilities foranchorage and its convenient situation made it afavourite haunt of pirates, whose evil communicationscorrupted the good manners of the inhabitants.Rather than lose such customers theybefriended them in every possible way, so thatthe island became notorious as one of the worstnests of desperadoes in the American waters. Themalady was not long in spreading to the mainland.The Carolina coast, with its numeroussheltered harbours and inlets, afforded excellentlurking-places, whither one might retreat frompursuers, and where one might leisurely rejDairdamages and make ready for further mischief.The pirates, therefore, long haunted that coast,