CHAPTER XII
THE GREAT SIR HENRY MORGAN
About the year 1636 a certain London mariner, named
Dunton, had an experience somewhat similar to that
which we related in the last chapter concerning
Rawlins. Dunton had the bad luck to be taken by the
Sallee pirates, who then sent him out as master and pilot of
a Sallee pirate ship containing twenty-one Moors and five
Flemish renegadoes. The instructions were that Dunton
should sail to the English coast and there capture Christian
prisoners. He had arrived from Barbary in the English
Channel and was off Hurst Castle by the Needles, Isle of
Wight, when he was promptly arrested as a pirate and sent
to Winchester to be tried by law. He was given his release
at a later date, but his ten-year-old boy was still a slave
with the Algerines.
Now about the year when this was taking place, there was born into the world Henry Morgan, who has become celebrated in history and fiction as one of the greatest sea-*rovers who ever stepped aboard a ship. His career is one of continual success, of cruelties and amassing of wealth. He was a buccaneer, and a remarkably clever fellow who rose to the position of Governor-General of one of our most important colonial possessions. Adventures are to the adventurous, and if ever there was a Britisher who longed for
