Accordingly, sailors learned to defend themselves, and the ship's armory was as necessary and vastly better stocked than the ship's medicine case.

To point a carronade became as needful an accomplishment as to box the compass; and he was no A.B.who did not know how to swing a cutlass.
Out of such conditions, and out of the wars which the Napoleonic plague forced upon the world, sprung the practise of privateering; and while it is the purpose of this book to tell the story of the American merchant sailor only, it could not be complete without some account, however brief, of the American privateersman.

For, indeed, the two were one throughout a considerable period of our maritime history, the sailor turning privateersman or the privateersman sailor as political or trade conditions demanded.

In our colonial times, and in the earlier days of the nation, to be a famous privateersman, or to have had a hand in fitting out a successful privateer, was no mean passport to fame and fortune.

Some of the names most eminent in the history of our country appear in connection with the outfitting or command of privateers; and not a few of the oldest fortunes of New England had their origin in this form of legalized piracy.
And, after all, it is the need of the times that fixes the morality of an act.