A ship carrying 500 would bring its owners $240,000, and there were plenty of men willing to risk the penalties of piracy for a share of such prodigious profits.

Moreover, the seas swarmed then with adventurous sailors--mostly of American birth--to whom the very fact that slaving was outlawed made it more attractive.

The years of European war had bred up among New Englanders a daring race of privateersmen--their vocation had long been piracy in all but name, a fact which in these later days the maritime nations recognize by trying to abolish privateering by international agreement.

When the wars of the early years of the nineteenth century ended the privateersmen looked about for some seafaring enterprise which promised profit.

A few became pirates, more went into the slave-trade.