Note 1 — Chapter I · AMONG THE CARIBBEES

And at last Fate—in the guise of good-natured and sympathetic friends in the islands—had made possible my dream and I was cruising one-time pirate waters in a pirate ship. Yes, a real pirate ship, the Vigilant, whose solid teak keel was laid well over a century ago; the oldest boat plying the Caribbean, but still as stanch, seaworthy, and fast as when, manned by sea-rovers, she had swept under her cloud of canvas upon some lumbering merchantman or had showed her fleet heels to British corvettes, as, laden with a cargo of “black ivory,” she had crept forth from the fetid mouth of some African river, bound with her human freight for the slave marts of the Antilles. Privateer, pirate, slaver, and man-o’-war she had been in turn through the long years she had sailed the seas. Within her hold were still visible the ring-bolts to which the groaning blacks had been chained. In her timbers were still the wounds of round shot and bullets, and despite her peaceful present-day employment as a packet between the islands, she was yet the typical pirate craft—the “long, low, black schooner with raking masts” so dear to writers of lurid fiction.1 And we were bound to that erstwhile haunt of the sea-rovers, the Virgin Islands.