These bloody pirates had always conquered in their desperate fights
because they were so reckless and so savage, but now they had fallen
among thoroughbred savages, more cruel and more brutal and pitiless than
themselves. Nearly all the buccaneers were killed, and L'Olonnois was
taken prisoner. His furious captors tore his living body apart, piece by
piece, and threw each fragment into the fire, and when the whole of this
most inhuman of inhuman men had been entirely consumed, they scattered
his ashes to the winds so that not a trace should remain on earth of
this monster. If, in his infancy, he had died of croup, the history of
the human race would have lost some of its blackest pages.
Chapter XVI
A Pirate Potentate
Sometime in the last half of the seventeenth century on a quiet farm in
a secluded part of Wales there was born a little boy baby. His father
was a farmer, and his mother churned, and tended the cows and the
chickens, and there was no reason to imagine that this gentle little
baby, born and reared in this rural solitude, would become one of the
most formidable pirates that the world ever knew. Yet such was the case.
The baby's name was Henry Morgan, and as he grew to be a big boy a
distaste for farming grew with him. So strong was his dislike that when
he became a young man he ran away to the seacoast, for he had a fancy to
be a sailor.
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