The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-10-31
our Pir.sie., Ancestors.

sea-stealing. though they did not call 1t by so harsh Q name. was n leading in- dustry by the thrifty dwellers in this town two hundred years ago. That was good time for sturdy adventure afioat; and our weil-mettled New York CTS were not the kind then. any more than they are now. to let money making chances slip away by default Even in referring to what is styled Out very erroneously) the drowsy period of the Dutch denomination. the most romantic of our historians have not ventured that anybody ever went to sleep when there was bargain to be made; and in the period to which now refer. when the English fairly were settled in possession of New York by twenty years of occu- pancy, exceeding wide-awakeness was the rule. Nor was anybody troubled with squeamIshness. Therefore 1t was that our townfolk, paltering no more with fortune than they did with moral scruples, set themselves briskly to col- lecting the revenues of the sea.
 These revenues were raised by two different systems, which may be lik- ened, for convenience sake, to direct and to indirect taxation. In the first case. our robust town people put out to sea in private armed vessels ostenta- tiously carrying letters of marque en- tltling them to war against the kings enemies-which empowering documents the construed, as soon as they made an offing from Sandy Hook, as entitling them to lay hands upon all desirable property that they found afioat under any flag.
 The indirect method of taxation had in 1t less heroic quality than was in- volved in the direct levy; yet was 1t, being safer in business way and al- most as profitable, very extensively car ried on. Euphemism was we'll thought of even then in New York; wherefore this more conservative class of sea-rob- bers posed squarely as honest mer- chants engaged in what they termed the Red Sea Trade. At the foot of the letter, as our French cousins say, their position was we'll taken. Their ss-called merchant ships dropped down the har- bor into the bay and thence out to sea- ward, carrying, for merchantmen, odd ly mixed ladings, whereof the main quantities were arms and gunpowder and cannon balls and lead, and strong spirits. and provisions, and general sea- stores. Making a course to the south- eastward, they would slide around the oape to some convenient meeting-place in the Indian ocean, usually Madagas- car, where they would fall in with other ships-whereof the lading was eastern stuffs, and spices, and precious stones, and good deal of deep-toned yellow-red Arabian gold No information was vol unteered by their, possessors, rough and-tumble, dare devil bushy-bearded set of men, as to where these pleasing commodities came from; nor did the New Workers manifest an indiscreet cu- riosity-being ctntent that they could exchange their lading for the Oriental lading on starssasswhi ma aaesthe trans 'rotfon profitahle Gin Johnsonian phrase) beyond tho, dreams of avarlce. When the exchange, had been effected, the parties to 1t separated amicably; the late vendors of the Oriental goods be- taking themselves, most gloriously drunk on their prodigal purchases of West India rum, to parts unknown. and the New Workers decorously return ed with their rich freightage to their home port.
 Neither of these methods of acquiring wealth on the high seas, the direct or the indirect, seems to have received the unqualified end dorsement of public opin- ion in New. York in those days which came and went again two hundred years ago; yet both of them were more than tolerated, and the Red Sea Trade was regarded as 8 business rather than as crime. Because liberal views in re- gard to. what might properly enough be done off soundings, or at out-of- the-way islands in the ocean sea, it is fact that at the flag end of the sev- enteenth century our enterprislng town folk were sufficiently prominent in both lines of marine industry-as pirates pure and simple, and as keen traders driving hard bargains with pirates in the purchase of their stolen goods-to fix upon themselves the ill-tempered attention of pretty much the whole of the civilized world.-Harper's. M gs5 \