MEMOIRS OF A B1JOCANEER.* THOSE who open this book with
an eye to blood-curdling adventure are doomed to disappointment. The epoch is not that of Blackbeard and Teach and England ; it is too early even for Morgan and Kidd. There is little, indeed, of the pirate about the gentlemanly hero of Mr. Williams's pages, who begins his career at sea under Blake and ends it, so far as the present instalment goes, as a privateersman successfully hunting down the Spanish galleons. The narra- tive is a purely fictitious one, and the author frankly tells us that he has got his local colouring from Dampier and the Hakluyt collections, and that " in rummaging these storehouses of information he has broken the Eighth Commandent without compunction, believing with the buccaneers that in a good cause the end may justify the means." Mr. Williams cannot pretend to the minute veri- similitude of Defoe, nor to the circumstantial imagination of Stevenson, but he tells a pleasant, straightforward story of life on board the Fleet and in the islands and lagoons of the Spanish Main. The earlier chapters, which deal with the Fleet during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, light up a passage in our naval annals to which justice has been long in coming. The " Tarpaulin captains" of the first Dutch War are the direct ancestors of Nelson's Band of Brothers, and the discipline and organisation which were evolved under Cromwell and the last two Stuarts are still with us. Some historians insist that the great Protector "backed the wrong horse" when he assisted Mazarin in the humiliation of Spain ; but it was the blows dealt at the extremities of the Spanish Empire which founded our power in the West Indies, and incidentally brought much money into an impoverished exchequer. The plate-ships which Stayner captured off Cadiz were the richest prize that had come into English hands since the Cacafuego' was taken in 1599 on her way from Lima to Panama. Mr. Williams gives a graphic picture of Blake, the first great English
Admiral of the modern type, whose career is surely one of the strangest in the history of the Navy:— "It cannot be denied that Oliver on shore did greater things than Blake ; bat he never fought at sea. Nor did Blake go to sea until 1648, after the end of the first Civil War. So here you have a man who did not take to the sea until nearly fifty years of age, who died before he was sixty, who had not borne arms until he was well over forty, and who, to the smart gentlemen of to-day, would, from his boyhood onward to the day of his death have ever appeared a gloomy old scrub and squaretoes, with no liking what- ever for show or affectation or any other of their evil propensities. To what is it due that even these men respect his memory, and that we seamen who are laxer than we should be in our morals, and, to our shame be it said, not much given to religion, loved this morose, solemn-faced, pious old man as we did, and as we have never loved a commander since ? My answer is this : We knew
that he was a man to be trusted, and that he had great faith
in tie • Memoirs of a Buccaneer. By Robert Williams. London• Mine and Boon. Lee.]
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