They were mostly English and Welsh, with a few Frenchmen, and though I had little to say for their doings, they left British ships in the main unmolested, and were welcomed as a godsend by our coast dwellers, since they smuggled goods to them which would have been twice the cost if bought at the convoy markets.

Lastly, there were one or two horrid desperadoes who ravaged the seas like tigers.

Such an one was the man Cosh, and that Teach, surnamed Blackbeard, of whom we hear too much to-day.

But, on the whole, we of Virginia suffered not at all from these gentlemen of fortune, and piracy, though the common peril of the seas, entered but little into the estimation of the merchants.
Judge, then, of my disgust when I got news a week later that one of my ships, the Ayr brig, had straggled from the convoy, and been seized, rifled, and burned to the water by pirates almost in sight of Cape Charles.

The loss was grievous, but what angered me was the mystery of such a happening.