New-England Legends (Classic Reprint)
| Preis: | 16.95 EUR* (inkl. MWST zzgl. Versand - Preis kann jetzt höher sein!) |
| Versand: | 0.00 EUR Versandkostenfrei innerhalb von Deutschland |
| Partner: | buecher.de |
| Hersteller: | Forgotten Books (Spofford, Harriet Prescott) |
| Stand: | 2015-08-04 03:50:33 |
Produktbeschreibung
Excerpt from New-England Legends The islands about the harbors of all our New England rivers are so wild, and would seem to have offered so many advantages, that they have always been supposed, by the ruder population, to be the hiding-place of piratical treasures, and particularly of Captain Kidd´s; and the secretion, among rocks and sands, of chests of Jewels stripped from noble Spanish ladies who have walked the awful plank, with shot-bags full of diamonds, and ingots of pure gold, is one of the tenets of the vulgar faith. This belief has ranged up and down the whole shore with more freedom than the pirates ever did, and the legends on the subject are legion - from the old Frenchman of Passamaquoddy Bay to the wild stories of the Jersey and Carolina sandbars too countless for memory, the Fireship off Newport, the Shrieking Woman of Marblenead, and the Lynn Mariner who, while burying his treasure in a cave, was sealed up alive by a thunderbolt that cleft the rock, and whom some one, under spiritual inspiration, spent lately a dozen years in vain endeavor to unearth. The parties that have equipped themselves with hazel-rods and spades, and proceeded, at the dead of night, in search of these riches, without turning their heads or uttering the Divine Name, and, digging till they struck metal, have met with all manner of ghostly appearances, from the little naked negro sitting and crying on the edge of the hogshead of doubloons, to the ball of fire sailing straight up the creek, till it hangs trembling on the tide just opposite the excavation Into which it shoots with the speed of lightning, so terrifying and bewildering the treasure-seekers that when all is over they fail to find again the place of their late labor - the parties that have met with these adventures would, perhaps, cease to waste much more of their time in such pursuits in this part of the country if they knew that Captain Kidd had never landed north of Block Island until, with fatal temerity, he brought his vessel into Boston, and that every penny of his gains was known and was accounted for, while as to Bradish, Tew, and the rest of that gentry, they wasted everything as they went in riotous living, and could never have had a dollar to hide, and no disposition to hide it if they had; and whatever they did possess they took with them when, quietly abandoning their ships to the officers of the law, they went up the creeks and rivers in boats, and dispersed themselves throughout the country. Ever since the time of Jason there have been sea-robbers, and at one period they so infested the Mediterranean - owning a thousand galleys and four hundred cities, it is said - that Pompey was sent out with a fleet and a force of soldiery to extirpate them. In later times there were tribes or lawless men associated together in hunting the cattle of the West Indian islands, curing the flesh, and exchanging it in adjacent settlements; they held all property in common, and were called Buccaneers, from the word "boncan," a Carib term for preserved meat. By the mistaken policy of the viceroys of the islands, who, in order to reduce them to less lawless lives, exterminated all the cattle, these men were driven to the sea, and became In time the celebrated freebooters, or "Brethren of the Coast." The bull of Pope Alexander VI., by authority of which Spain and Portugal claimed all American discoveries, caused England, France and the Netherlands to combine in the Western Hemisphere, whatever quarrels came to hand in the Eastern, and to ravage the common enemy - so that letters-of-marque were constantly issued by them to all adventurers, without requiring any condemnation of prizes or account of proceedings, by which means these countries virtually created a system of piracy, and Sir Francis Drakes sack of St. Domingo, and the subsequent pillage of Pernambuco, were in nowise different from the exploits of the brutal Olonois,
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