Unlike most of his fellow-practitioners he did
not gradually become a pirate. From his early youth he never had an
intention of being anything else. As soon as he grew to be a man he
became a bloody buccaneer, and at the first opportunity he joined a
pirate crew, and had made but a few voyages when it was perceived by his
companions that he was destined to become a most remarkable sea-robber.
He was offered the command of a ship with a well-armed crew of marine
savages, and in a very short time after he had set out on his first
independent cruise he fell in with a Spanish ship loaded with silver
bullion; having captured this, he sailed with his prize to Jamaica,
which was one of the great resorts of the English buccaneers. There his
success delighted the community, his talents for the conduct of great
piratical operations soon became apparent, and he was generally
acknowledged as the Head Pirate of the West Indies.
He was now looked upon as a hero even by those colonists who had no
sympathy with pirates, and as for Esquemeling, he simply worshipped the
great Brazilian desperado. If he had been writing the life and times of
Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Mr. Gladstone, he could not have
been more enthusiastic in his praises. And as in The Arabian Nights the
roc is described as the greatest of birds, so, in the eyes of the
buccaneer biographer, this Roc was the greatest of pirates.
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