San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1891-04-09
Sir Knight, the Pirate.
Boston Herald.

DOSJOu h6Tdlu.
When the Spaniards were driven
from Jamaica they left behind them
a number of slav es, who sought shell
ter In the mountains and defied the
authorities. These bandits were
nearly exterminated soon after the
English occupation, but the remnant
later grew to be powerful and greatly
troubled the colony. They were
known as the MarooDs, and the sto-
ries of their desperate struggles for
freedom, of the privileges wrung
from the whites, and of their assist
ance in suepressing the rising OF the
blacks in 1865, reads like q romance.
Six.hundred of these troublesome
marauders were transported to Nova
Scotia. The descendants of the an
Gent Maroons are even to this day a
separate people and still enjoy the
privileges granted to their ancestors.
Pirates and their bloodthirsty deeds
have furnished SO often the plot and
theme for the melodramatist and the
dime novelist, that one hesitates to
write about them in sober earnest.
But they were no myths in Jamaica,
and no account of Jamaica's past,
however brief, can omit reference to
the part they played in its history,
especially as the most dreadful ca
lamity that ever visited the island is
connected with them.
The Jamaica pirates generally
sought to throw over their marauding
and pillaging expeditions the sane
ton Of lagal authority by obtaining
letters of marque, but they were
nevertheless pirates pure and simple.
One chief after another secured the
Spanish Main, capturing vessels,
usually Spanish, on the high seas,
and when the ocean did not offer
enough to satisfy his cupidity and
love of adventure, attacked cities and
towns, laying waste with fire and
sword, and committing horrible bar
barities and crdelties. Nothing was
sacred to these human devils, and yet
they were tolerated for many years
by the Jamaican authorities. The
island profited by their expeditions,
and the last half of the seventeenth
century witnessed prosperity as
great as it was wicked and democrat
izing.
Port Royal was the capital of the
pirate empire, and the Maroons filed
1t with wealth and debauchery. There
they maintained in semi-barbaric
state their great establishment Is.
They lived like men who with the
wealth of princes, did not know
when they might die, and who had
no fear of God or man. Imagination
can hardly picture the character of
the populace of that little city under
the sun or the life within its walls.
To it came the reckless, the
desperate, the men most skilled in
vilIainy. With them they brought
the spoils of richly laden Spanish gal
Icons bound home with silver and
gold, the ransoms of cities, and whole
provinces and eeets of merchant YES
sells freighted with rich stuffs from all
the markets of the world. All this
and more was poured into Port Royal,
and was spent with a lavishness and
extravaganza that'Ris possible only
with treasure brought at so slight q
cost as that of human life.
Nothing seemed lacking to make it
the wickedest place on earth, yet the
vengeance of the Lord apparently
passed it by. But it was only for
season. One day the earth opened,
and In two minutes the city, It's
palaces and its novels lay at the
bottom of the sea. Thousands of the
inhabitants persisted with their ILL
gotten gains, and the unburied dead,
floating in the harbor or heaped upon
the land under tropical sun, bred a
horrible pestilence that carried off
thousands of those who escaped the
earthquake. Today the waters of the
bay hide from sight the ancient city.
Was ever retributive justice more
terrible or complete.
Romantic and exciting as were the
lives of all the buccaneers, that OF
Henry Morgan, the greatest of the
freebooters, was the most so. From
white slave in Barbados, where
he had been sold into servitude, he
became first the most daring and sue
cessful of the pirates, and later,
knight, and as Lieutenant Governor
of Jamaica the ruler of that island.
At the sacking of Panama he obtain
ed 173 mule loads of treasure. The
Governor who gave him his commits
sion was recalled for that act, but
Henry Morgan was knighted, and as
Sir Henry turned his back upon his
former companions and made a most
popular Governor of the colony.