"Freebooter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was Messer Benincasa da Laterina, a learned judge, who had condemned to death for their crimes two relatives of Ghin di Tacco, the most famous freebooter of the day, whose headquarters were between Siena and Rome. Some time after, Messer Benincasa sitting as judge in Rome, Ghino entered the city with a band of his followers, made his way to the tribunal, slew Benincasa, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... institutions" of a peculiarly Christian and chosen people, the landstealing propensity of whose progressive republicanism is declared to be in accordance with the will and by the grace of God, and who, like the Scotch freebooter,— ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... at Locksley, in Notts., in the reign of Henry II. (1160). His real name was Fitzooth, and it is commonly said that he was the earl of Huntingdon. Having outrun his fortune, and being outlawed, he lived as a freebooter in Barnsdale (Yorkshire), Sherwood (Notts.), and Plompton Park (Cumberland). His chief companions were Little John (whose name was Nailor), William Scadlock (or Scarlet), George Green, the pinder (or pound-keeper) of Wakefield, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... The queen herself advanced to the borders, to remedy this evil, and to hold courts at Jedburgh. Bothwell was already in Liddesdale, where he had been severely wounded, in an attempt to seize John Elliot, of the Parke, a desperate freebooter; and happy had it been for Mary, had the dagger of the moss-trooper struck more home. Bothwell being transported to his castle of Hermitage, the queen, upon hearing the tidings, hastened thither, A dangerous morass, still called the Queen's ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... superior to the sneaking footpad, who leaped from behind a thicket and bade the unarmed pedestrian stand and deliver. But the wrecker-pirate takes his victim at a disadvantage, for he is not a genuine freebooter of the sea. He shuns an able foe and strikes the crippled. Like the shark and the eagle, he delights to prey on the carcass, rather than ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... in Mexico a robber may sometimes be an honest man, or at all events, have taken to the road through some supposed wrong—personal or political. Freebooting is less a crime, or at all events, more easy of extenuation in a country whose chief magistrate himself is a freebooter; and such, at this moment, neither more nor less, was the chief magistrate of Mexico, Don Antonio Lopez ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... noted freebooter. Never was raid or foray but he was well to the front, and when, as generally happened, the raid or foray resulted in a drove of English cattle finding their way over the Liddesdale hills, and down into Teviotdale, the Master of Harden had no difficulty in guarding his share of ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... he a freebooter with all his other charms? His contempt for government, as we poor wretches know it, is sublime; and yet he is the safest man I know. The law, he often told me, was like a lie; useful only to scoundrels—torn-down scoundrels, ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... with China, but their advances being rejected, doubtless through secret opposition from the Portuguese, they seized the Pescadores, and later established themselves on Formosa, whence they were eventually expelled by Koxinga, a Chinese freebooter. ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Gaston, "I should be by a long score the debtor if we came to that. If it had not been for Sir Reginald, I should be by this time a reckless freebooter, without a hope in this world or the next; if it had not been for you, these bones of mine would long since have been picked by my cousins, the Spanish wolves. But let the gold tarry in your keeping: it were better King Edward's good crowns should not be, ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shivering in a corner, while Chook did the buying. He walked along the stalls, eyeing the sellers and their goods with the air of a freebooter, for, as he always had more impudence than cash, he was a redoubtable customer. There was always a touch of comedy in Chook's buying, and the Chinamen knew and dreaded him, instantly on the defensive, guarding their precious cabbages against his predatory fingers, while ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... these risks, and to brave the efforts of so many skilful gentlemen! May I add to a presumption that your Honor already finds too bold, if one may judge by a displeased eye, by asking if report speaks to the face and other particulars of the person of this—free trader, one must call him, though freebooter should be ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... look at them, but took in good part enough my objection that I never trusted them in any hands but my own. We went on talking for a little while, when he called for betel and pan. This meant that I might go. I helped myself, took leave and recrossed the drawbridge. It was a notorious freebooter, a Hindoo Robin Hood, that I had dropped upon. But why did he not tumble me into his ditch and enrich his armory with my rifle and pistols? It may be that prudence operated, in his letting me go free, as a check on his lust for a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... line for conference in the interest of the public weal. The truce, that on such occasions extended from the day of the meeting to the next day at sunset, was this time violated by a party of English soldiers, who seized upon William Armstrong of Kinmonth, a notorious freebooter, as he, attended by but three or four men, was returning from the conference; and lodged him in Carlisle Castle. The Laird of Buccleuch, after treating in vain for his release, raised two hundred horse, surprised the castle and carried off the prisoner without further ceremony. ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... than they believed they should have treated him, had he fallen into their hands. This confession from an enemy had great weight with the Chinese, who, till then, though they had revered the commodore's power, had yet suspected his morals, and had considered him rather as a lawless freebooter, than as one commissioned by the state for the revenge of public injuries. But they now changed their opinion, and regarded him as a more important person; to which perhaps the vast treasure of his prize might not a little contribute; the acquisition ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... farmer's presence; and one, in a headlong pursuit, broke through the glass of a greenhouse, then dashed through another glass partition, and was only brought up by a third. Pigeons are also quite in its line. Indeed, it is a bold red-taloned freebooter, and only condescends to insects and the smaller reptiles when there are no little birds at hand. During the spring migration this hawk is sometimes ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... Company's servants at Surat were imprisoned, and not released till they had paid full compensation. Some small satisfaction was experienced when it became known that John Proud, master of the Swan, one of the Company's ships, had encountered the Roebuck in the Comoro Islands, and had attacked the freebooter. He was unable to capture it, but succeeded in procuring restitution of the captured goods; the treasure, however, was carried off to London, where it must have seemed as if the days of Drake and Hawkins had ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... victim to swift vagaries of thought and conflicting emotions. She was riding away with a freebooter, a road-agent, to be held for ransom. The fact was scarcely credible. She could not shake the dread of nameless peril. She tried not to recall Roberts's words, yet they haunted her. If she had not been so handsome, he had said! Joan knew she possessed good ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... statesman, courtier, schemer, patriot, soldier, freebooter, discoverer, colonist, castle-builder, historian, philosopher, chemist, prisoner, and visionary," is, of course, from the romantic point of view, principally associated with El Dorado, and his quest ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... men who could stand first in war. In their degraded state the Athenians suffered three hundred and sixty statues to be erected to Demetrius Phalereus, and these were destroyed to make way for the golden images of the conquering freebooter Poliorcetes. This last was hailed by the debased people as a god and a saviour. His name and that of his father, Antigonus, were woven into ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... formidable by their numbers, they had, with some exertion of forethought and contrivance, constantly evaded, either by a little detour, or by a temporary halt in some place of strength. But now it was universally known that they were probably waylaid by a desperate and remorseless freebooter, who, as he put his own trust exclusively in the sword, allowed nobody to hope for any other ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Congressmen, and State and city officials. Fitness being ignored as a qualification to office, made it easy for favoritism and selfish motives to determine the appointment of the army of employees required in the bureaus and departments. That good old political freebooter, Andrew Jackson, merely put into words what his predecessors had put into practice: "To the victors belong the spoils." And since his time, more than one upright and intelligent theorist on government has supported the Party System even to the point ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... and Sergeant Alan Mhor Cameron, have served to paint them in still more sable colours to his imagination. [Of Rob Roy we have had more than enough. Alan Cameron, commonly called Sergeant Mhor, a freebooter of the same period, was equally remarkable for strength, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... which it operated, is itself a disturbing element. It is confusing for a biographer to be required to keep at once independent and in unison the poet, statesman, courtier, schemer, patriot, soldier, sailor, freebooter, discoverer, colonist, castle-builder, historian, philosopher, chemist, prisoner, and visionary. The variety of Ralegh's powers and tendencies, and of their exercise, is the distinctive note of him, and of the epoch which ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... perhaps, with the spirit of deference to his regal authority on the part of his brother, implied in the referring of the case of the accused to him for trial, sent Remus back again to Numitor, saying that Numitor might punish the freebooter himself in any way that he thought best. Remus was accordingly brought again to Numitor's house. In the mean time, the fact of his being thus made a prisoner, and charged with crime, and the proceedings in relation to him, in sending him back and forth ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... fool of myself, by going into the extravagances and tom-fooleries of Tannersoil, our neighbor over the way, who happens for the time to be 'under government,' with a salary of nothing to speak of, but with stealings equal to those of a successful freebooter, you—you—you have placed a—a bad estimate ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... ourselves" that "we are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties." "I love the wild," he says, "not less than the good." And again: "The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and" (mark this) "our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind." Even although he were a prig, it will be owned he could ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... against the king, save Dover, which Edward had captured after a siege. Under Simon's leadership the Cinque Ports played the part of pirates on all merchants going to and from England. At last in March, 1266, Edward forced Winchelsea to open its gates to him. He next turned his arms against a valiant freebooter, Adam Gordon, who lurked with his band of outlaws in the dense beech woods of the Chilterns. With the capture of Adam Gordon, after a hand-to-hand tussle with Edward in which the king's son narrowly escaped with his life, the resistance in the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... mountains, among the barren, variegated hills that skirt the Angora plateau. We had already passed through Ismid, the ancient Nicomedia and capital of Diocletian; and had left behind us the heavily timbered valley of the Sakaria, upon whose banks the "Freebooter of the Bithynian hills" settled with his four hundred tents and laid the foundation of the Ottoman empire. Since leaving Geiveh we had been attended by a mounted guard, or zaptieh, who was sometimes forced upon us by the authorities in their anxiety to carry ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... government was concerned. Valentinian's miserable widow, daughter of the eastern, wife of the western, emperor, during a short two months the prey of her husband's murderer, became with her daughters the captive of the Vandal freebooter, and saw the elder compelled to marry his son Hunnerich, the future persecutor of the Church. Twenty years succeed in which emperors are enthroned and pass like shadows, until the Herule general Odoacer, commanding for the time the Teuton mercenaries, deposes the ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... The proof of this they give to be, his always going alone when he travels. The old villain then catches what he can. Myself, I hardly believe he continues his brigandage. He appears wholly worn out. I gave his little son 20 paras to buy camel's flesh. The old freebooter grinned a ghastly smile. Walking in Ben Weleed quarters, I heard a great to-do, and went to see what it was, when I saw the old chief, Haj Ben Mousa Ettanee, standing over his young truant son, whilst with a thick stick the servant ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Prince Hasan, before the latter could accomplish the portended crime of dealing death to his father? I was torn by distracted arguments; at one moment I believed firmly as ever in the stars, at the next my trust was in the lance of the burly freebooter I had brought down with me from ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... acquaintance knew well all the passes of the country, which induced him eagerly to request his company on the ensuing morning. He neither disguised his business and charge, nor his apprehensions of that celebrated freebooter, John Gunn. The Highlander hesitated a moment, and then frankly consented to be his guide. Forth they set in the morning; and in travelling through a solitary and dreary glen, the discourse again turned on John Gunn. 'Would you like to see him?' said ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... before, it was merely to decide between the two claimants, Charles de Valois and Henry of Lancaster. Whoever gained the victory, nothing would be changed in the laws and customs of France. Yet this poor freebooter of the German Marches imagined none the less that under an English king he would be an Englishman. Many French of all ranks believed the same and could not suffer the thought of being Anglicised; in their minds ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... escape. They had, indeed, little to learn from him, even had he been disposed to give intelligence, or capable of communicating it. All were well assured that their lady had fallen into an ambuscade, formed by Dawfyd the one-eyed, a redoubted freebooter of the period, who had ventured upon this hardy enterprise in the hope of obtaining a large ransom for the captive Eveline, and all, incensed at his extreme insolence and audacity, devoted his head and limbs to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... as he was settled in his castle, the freebooter devoted all his energies to rendering it still more impregnable by strengthening the walls and breaking the cliffs into more horrid precipices. In this work he was assisted by his numerous friends and followers; for Musso rapidly ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Ghandur for which the Dictionaries give only "fat, thick." It applies in Arabia especially to a Harami, brigand or freebooter, most honourable of professions, slain in foray or fray, opposed to "Fatis" or carrion (the corps creve of the Klephts), the man who dies the straw-death. Pilgrimage ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... much of your own cast about, Craigie, to make what Sir William would call a 'famous witness.' He drinks deep, plays deep, swears deep, and I suspect can lie and cheat a little into the bargain; useful qualities, Craigie, if kept in their proper sphere, but which have a little too much of the freebooter to make a figure in a ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... a moment in the light at the cave's mouth, was not buried in Saul's great back, but only hacked off the end of his robe spread out behind him! No personal animosity was in David. However he had been driven to consort with outlaws, and to live a kind of freebooter's life, his natural sweetness was unspoiled, and was reinforced by solemn veneration for the sanctity of the Lord's anointing, which he reverenced all the more because himself had received it. He clambered back to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was a lustier freebooter of the high seas than Capt. Thomas Randall, known familiarly as "Cap'n Tom," commander of the privateering ship Fox, and numerous other vessels. This boat, a brigantine, was well named, for she was quick and sly and yet could fight on occasion. Many a rich haul he made in her in 1748, and many ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... this word from a recent treatise against agrarianism, and having an acquired taste for orders in one sense, at least, he flattered himself with being what is called a Conservative, in other words, he had a strong relish for that maxim of the Scotch freebooter, which is rendered into English by the comely aphorism of "keep what you've got, and get what ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... noting: that the buccaneer by sea, the privateersman, through long practice in endurance, is able to live at the expense of far superior powers. Yes, and the life of the freebooter is no less natural and appropriate to landsmen—I do not say, to those who can till and gather in the fruit of their fields, but to those who find themselves deprived of sustenance; since there is no ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... days, placed himself at the head of a volunteer company which called itself the "Wabash regiment," and had been recruited in Kentucky for an expedition against the Shawnee Indians. Clark had degenerated through intemperance into a kind of border freebooter. Turning his troops from the original purpose, he seized the goods of the Spanish traders at Post Vincennes as a retaliation upon the Spanish, and prepared to descend upon New Orleans. Congress was compelled to take strong measures for disbanding his followers and making amends to Spain. A short ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... men as he could enlist with such weapons as he could find, and sent out a little force of grooms and artificers to face the Constable's ruthless Spaniards and the fierce Germans of his companion freebooter, George of Fransperg, or Franzberg, who carried about a silken cord by which he swore to strangle the Pope with his own hands. The enemy reached the walls of Rome on the night of the fifth of May; devastation and famine lay ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Robert MacGregor, or, as he chose to call himself, Robert Campbell. He was born in 1671 and died in 1734, and was a son of Donald MacGregor, a lieutenant in the army of James II, from whom after the accession of William of Orange, Robert obtained a commission. Afterward he became a freebooter. He was included in the Act of Attainder, but continued to levy blackmail on the gentry of Scotland while in the enjoyment of the protection of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... one of the most audacious and successful buccaneers of modern times. Without doubt he was so; a freebooter who, if he could not appropriate millions, would filch thousands; a pitiless human carnivore, glutting on the blood of his numberless victims; a gambler destitute of the usual gambler's code of fairness ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... brothers, sons of the wife, combined against Veli, the son of the slave, and drove him out of the house. The latter, forced to leave home, bore his fate like a brave man, and determined to levy exactions on others to compensate him for the losses incurred through his brothers. He became a freebooter, patrolling highroads and lanes, with his gun on his shoulder and his yataghan in his belt, attacking, holding for ransom, or plundering all whom ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... fish-hawk emerging from the ocean with his struggling prey. Downward he pounces with rapid flight. The fish-hawk sees his enemy approaching, and attempts to escape; but, laden with the fish he has just captured, in spite of the various evolutions he performs, he is soon overtaken by the savage freebooter. With a scream of despair he drops ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... thereupon having his imagination excited by what he had read of pirates and highwaymen in the works of romance which he devoured whenever he could get hold of them, went about fancying himself a bold buccaneer and freebooter, firing at everything moving within as well as out of range, along the solitary country lanes and hedgerows— thereby frightening passers-by frequently with untimely shots close to their ears, and making them believe their ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... "No," replied the freebooter; "what meaning would there be in that? I would sever thy jugular vein in a moment if that would mend the broken fortunes of my chief. Farewell, however. ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... known to infest the place, but, in general, there is too little to be gained for the risk. Your rich traveller is not an every-day sight among our rocks; and you well know Signore, that there may be too few, as well as too many, on a path, for your freebooter." ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... trees growing up in the ruins of what was once its great cathedral. The freebooter Morgan is said to have plundered one of its altars of a million of gold and silver, and massacred many of its inhabitants, perpetrating on them the atrocities that their ancestors had upon the original natives. It is said that when Pizarro captured ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... foreign lands. In part they went as traders and exchanged the furs, wool, and fish of Scandinavia for the clothing, ornaments, and other articles of luxury found in neighboring countries. But it was no far cry from merchant to freebooter, and, in fact, expeditions for the sake of plunder seem to have been even more popular with the Northmen ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... invited to the camp; but he sent his brother instead, who, it was soon evident, could render them no assistance. The travellers were soon surrounded by the inhabitants, to whom a number of small presents were given. These men were very inferior in appearance even to the common Taki freebooter, and ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... of his enterprises and the intensity of his hatred of the Spaniards. When still a young man, in 1567-'68, he was captain of a small ship, the Judith, one of a fleet of slavers running between the coast of Africa and the West Indies, under the command of John Hawkyns, another famous freebooter. In the harbor of San Juan de Ulua the Spaniards took the fleet by stratagem; the Judith and the Minion, with Hawkyns on board, being the only vessels that escaped. Young Drake's experiences on that occasion fixed the character of ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... costume, he had put on an old blue-and-red foreign uniform, in which he made so strange a figure that, though it was donned in his honour, his visitor had hard work to keep from laughing. Nor was the freebooter's conversation more in accord with his surroundings. He talked much of Edward's family and connections, and especially of his uncle's Jacobite politics—on which last account, he seemed inclined to welcome the young man with more cordiality than, as a soldier of King George, Edward felt to be his ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... itself felt from the very cradle. As a schoolboy I remember the pride with which I hailed Robin Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le Diable as my name-fellows; and the feeling of sore disappointment that fell on my heart when I found a freebooter or a general who did not share with me a single one of my numerous praenomina. Look at the delight with which two children find they have the same name. They are friends from that moment forth; they have a bond of union stronger than exchange ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... desperation to avert robbery and murder, was then only a commonplace of the sea. Men from the safety of the adjoining shore only looked on in calm curiosity, as nowadays men look on indifferently to see the powerful freebooter of the not less troubled business sea rob, impoverish, and perhaps drive down to untimely death others who only ask to be permitted to make their little voyages unvexed ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... the town clung to the hillside, creeping up close to the castle wall and clustering in its shadow as if to claim protection. In truth, for many a day it had been their warden against freebooter and foreign foe, gathering the habitations of the humble as a hen gathers her chickens beneath her wings to defend ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... bars between two and three feet long. The bars played freely like keys on a ring, and splayed out in their flight, and did the most dreadful execution. Intended originally, I believe, for use only against hostile spars and rigging, this rascally freebooter put them to any and every service, and with his powerful armament and merciless ferocity they went ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... said, "and it is for you to decide whether it will alter your plan of proceeding. The man whom I have just met is a messenger, dispatched by the governor of Arica to Lima, to warn the governor there that an English ship, under the noted freebooter Francis Drake, has put into that harbor; and has started again, sailing for the north, after exacting certain contributions, but otherwise refraining ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... of a precipitous hill jutting out from the main range of mountains at the junction of the Bamee[a]n and Ir[a]k rivers, are the remains of an old castle called Zohawk, after a noted freebooter, who, secure in the strength of his fortress, was the terror of the surrounding villages, and lived by rapine, pillage, and plunder of every kind. To a careless observer the diminutive tower, which alone remains standing, would not convey ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... burglar, depredator, despoiler, footpad, filibuster, forager, desperado, corsair, freebooter, highwayman, picaroon, marauder, pillager, pirate, plunderer, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... them had incited the attack upon him at Calicut on his former voyage. The truth is they were rich; he wanted the plunder; and there was less likelihood of trouble if he killed them than if they were left alive to publish and avenge their losses. It was merely an application of the freebooter's maxim, that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... ineradicable elements in human nature. They attempted the impossible. How then have their deeds become the source of song and story? Why all the honor that we pay them? It is not because in danger, in sacrifice, and in failure, they were stout-hearted. Many a freebooter or soldier of fortune has been that. It is, as one said whose name I bear, "because they were stout-hearted for an ideal—their ideal, not ours, of civil and religious liberty. Wherever and whenever resolute ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... fully understood his companion's meaning, understood— that is to say—that the Nonsuch had been specially designed and built with a view to her employment as a freebooter, free-trader—as it was then euphemistically termed—or a pirate! But let not the reader be too greatly shocked at this frank admission. For in the days of George Saint Leger piracy was regarded as a perfectly legitimate and honourable trade—always provided that the acts of piracy were perpetrated ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... does not wholly agree with the best authenticated particulars. The Dick Turpin of eighteenth century France, Mandrin has engendered almost as many fables as his English congener. [See Maignien's Bibliographie des Ecrits relatifs a Mandrin.] As far as I have been able to discover, the great freebooter was born at St. Etienne in May 1724. His father having been killed in a coining affair, Mandrin swore to revenge him. He deserted from the army accordingly, and got together a gang of contrebandiers, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... much richer, for there were so many the fewer pockets to fill. But even yet there were too many to share the booty, in Blackbeard's opinion, and so he marooned a parcel more of them—some eighteen or twenty—upon a naked sand bank, from which they were afterward mercifully rescued by another freebooter who chanced that way—a certain Major Stede Bonnet, of whom more will presently be said. About that time a royal proclamation had been issued offering pardon to all pirates in arms who would surrender ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... the thirteenth century there lived at a castle in the heart of these mountains a nobleman called Wolfram Herzog von Bergendorf; and being no freebooter like most of the other German barons of the time, but a man of very pious disposition, he was moved during the prime of his life to forsake his home and join a body of crusaders. Reaching Palestine after a protracted journey, these ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... was thinking of apple-hoards. There was a delightful proprietary sense in the idea of owning one. It stimulated some latent propensity to secretiveness, as also the inclination to play the freebooter in ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... purged of all rancour and jealousy, a stimulus to all honourable conduct and noble effort, a part of the poetry of life. It is so already to many of us, and has been so to the noblest Englishmen since we have had a literature. If Henry V's speech at Agincourt is the splendid gasconade of a royal freebooter, there is no false ring in the scene where John of Gaunt takes leave of his banished son; nor in Sir Walter Scott's 'Breathes there a man with soul so dead,' etc. 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.' ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... harbor, was drawing too near the land; a sunken reef making out off her bow. This seemed to prove her a stranger, indeed, not only to the sealer, but the island; consequently, she could be no wonted freebooter on that ocean. With no small interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her—a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun—by this time hemisphered ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... behind you,' said Mr. Adister warming, to advise him, and checking the trot of his horse. 'Try South America.' The lordly gentleman plotted out a scheme of colonisation and conquest in that region with the coolness of a practised freebooter. 'No young man is worth a job,' he said, 'who does not mean to be a leader, and as leader to have dominion. Here we are fettered by ancestry and antecedents. Had I to recommence without those encumbrances, I would try my fortune yonder. I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Carl became nervous again, then gaily defiant, then nervous again, till the alternation of gloom and bravado disgusted him and made Ruth wonder whether he was an office-slave or a freebooter. As he happened to be both at the time, it was hard for him to be either convincingly. She accused him of vacillating; he retorted; the suspense kept them ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... lowest step to the throne, is the guerilla leader in the wilderness of Judah who finally is compelled by Saul's persecutions to pass over to Philistine territory, there under the protection of the enemies of his nation, carrying on his freebooter life. After the battle of Gilboa he avails himself of the dissolution of the kingdom to set up a separate principality in the south as a vassal of the Philistines; he is not chosen, but comes with a following six hundred strong, and offers himself to the elders of Judah, whom ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... It was not difficult to find his way back by the road he had come; and that road he travelled as fast as a leading breeze would carry him along it. But retreat, as it now appeared, was not the only difficulty with which this freebooter had to contend. It happened that no kind feeling existed between the admiral and the officers of the largest of the brigs. So far had their animosity extended, that the admiral had deemed it expedient to take a large sum of money, which had fallen to the share of the vessel in question, out ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... knew a man in the East who was neither a flatterer nor freebooter, but who by his own masterly perseverance worked his way to immense wealth, and to such power as wealth commands, though his high view of the social aims of mankind deterred him from mixing in political questions. Bon chien chasse de race is a proverb which applies ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... (“Tenures of Land and Customs of Manors,” pp. 115, 237) mentions similar tenures in Notts. and Kent (“Lincs. N. A Q.,” vol. i., p. 256). There is a peculiarity about these two “spur” tenures in our neighbourhood worthy of note. An old chronicler says that, when the freebooter’s larder got low, his wife had only to put a pair of spurs in his platter, as a hint that he must issue forth to replenish it. We can, without any great stretch of imagination, picture to ourselves ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... prize for sheer political ruffianism, for the frank audacity of the freebooter, unshadowed by the darker vices of his better-born associates, may be awarded to Rigby. Not that Rigby redeemed by many private virtues the unblushing effrontery of his public career. It was given to few men to be as bad as Dashwood, and Rigby was ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... was bewildering, this change in her estimate of Marshall Haney. The deeper he sank in reminiscent meditation the farther he withdrew from the bold and splendid freebooter he had once seemed to her. She was now unjust to him for he was still capable of what his kind call "standing pat." The rough-and-ready borderman was still housed under the same thatch of hair with the sentimental old Irishman, and yet it would ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... were. I was interested listening to their conversation mixed with sharp jokes. Nearly every man had a nickname. Murch was called 'Captain Snarl'; a tall, fierce-looking man, who just filled my idea of a Spanish freebooter, was 'Dr. Coddle.' I think his real name was Wood. The rum seems to make them crazy, for one, who was called 'Rub-a-dub,' pitched 'Dr. Coddle' head and heels into the water. A gentlemanly man named Thompson, who acted as master of ceremonies, or Grand Turk, interfered and put ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... few miles from the English border, the ruin of an old fortalice, called Gilnockie Tower, in a situation which in point of natural beauty is scarcely equalled even in Scotland. It was the stronghold of a chief popularly known in his day as Johnnie Armstrong.*[1] He was a mighty freebooter in the time of James V., and the terror of his name is said to have extended as far as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, between which town and his castle on the Esk he was accustomed to levy black-mail, or "protection and forbearance money," as it was called. The King, however, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... were not doubled, that bread was not to be had for asking, that the disparities of life remained the same,—the rich still rich, the poor still poor. In the first days of the revolution, Sir Geoffrey Gates, the freebooter, little comprehending the earl's merciful policy, and anxious naturally to turn a victory into its accustomed fruit of rapine and pillage, placed himself at the head of an armed mob, marched from Kent to the suburbs of London, and, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in the rock above the fall yawns a hole, hardly a cavern, where once lurked a famous freebooter of Wales, Twm Sion Catti: the entrance to this cave is through a narrow aperture, formed of two immense slate rocks, which face each other, and the space between them is narrower at the bottom than the top, so {456} ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... freebooter who had burnt it down; one Philip Heredith, a descendant of Philip Here-Deith, whose name is inscribed in the Domesday Book as one of the knights of the army of Duke William which had assembled at Dives for the conquest of England. Philip ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... Bred and raised a merry freebooter on the unbranded spoils of the cattle range, it was no long step from stealing a maverick ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... we look habitually out of square windows and live under flat ceilings, we meet with the more beautiful forms in the ruins of our abbeys. But when those abbeys were built, the pointed arch was used for every shop door, as well as for that of the cloister, and the feudal baron and freebooter feasted, as the monk sang, under vaulted roofs; not because the vaulting was thought especially appropriate to either the revel or psalm, but because it was then the form in which a strong roof was easiest built. We have destroyed the goodly architecture of our cities; we have substituted one ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... from the Dutch Vlieboot, fly-boat, swift boat, a kind of small craft whose sailing qualities were superior to those of the other vessels then in vogue. It is possible that the English made freebooter[9] out of the French adaptation. The fly-boat was originally only a long, light pinnace[10] or cutter with oars, fitted also to carry sail; we often find the word used by the French writers to designate vessels which brought important intelligence. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... fields of rice, sugar, hemp! The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers, The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss, The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal'd hut;) O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... again, in the reign of Henry VI., Malkin Tower became a robber's stronghold, and gave protection to a freebooter named Blackburn, who, with a band of daring and desperate marauders, took advantage of the troubled state of the country, ravaged it far and wide, and committed unheard of atrocities, even levying ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... but indifferent in character and the rations scanty. I make no doubt but that it is harder to earn an honest living at the law than by any other means of livelihood. Once one discovers this he must perforce choose whether he will remain a galley slave for life or hoist the Jolly Roger and turn freebooter, with a chance of dangling betimes from his ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... be the nephew of Olopana, a king of Oahu, whose kindness in acting as his foster father he repaid by the robbery of his henroosts and other unfilial conduct. He lived the lawless life of a marauder and freebooter, not confining his operations to one island, but swimming from one to another as the fit took him. On one occasion, when, the farmers of Waipi'o, whom he had robbed, assembled with arms to bar his retreat and to deal vengeance upon him, he charged upon the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... know how, under such a home government, I ever became a decent fellow. I do not know why I am not now a pirate, a freebooter, a pickpocket, or a nuisance to myself and the world in some other capacity. I have come to believe since that my inherited good qualities saved me under such an utter neglect of all home influences. It is a marvel to me that I was not ruined before I was twenty-one; ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... sly freebooter was out of hearing, the magistrate asked the city clerk, "what he thought ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... these men there was one whose character is forever blackened on the pages of history by the relentless pen of Cicero, Caius Licinius Verres, who, if we may believe the only records we have regarding him, was the most phenomenal freebooter of all time. The story of his career is a vivid demonstration of the manner in which the people of the Roman provinces were outraged by the officers sent to rule over them, and we shall anticipate our story a little in ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... they tacked out to sea, laying their account to make an attempt upon our ships in Plymouth next morning. In the mean time, while thus deceived in the land, they were discovered by captain Fleming, a pirate or freebooter who had been roving at sea, and who knowing them to be the Spanish fleet, repaired in all haste to Plymouth, and gave notice to our fleet then, riding at anchor, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... shouted so loud that the lofty windows rattled, "Mr. Garry called me a foreigner, a freebooter and the like. I object most decidedly. I am as much an American citizen as Mr. Garry. Mr. Garry, do you hear I am an American citizen?" For certain reasons Lilienfeld had had himself naturalised only a month before. "Mr. Garry, do you hear I am an American citizen?" ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... fifty years after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French "civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the Northern freebooter. To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that she should be united into one people, strong, not in mere political, but in moral ideas; strong by the clear sense of right and wrong, by the belief in the government and the judgments ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... face of the woman advancing towards him suggested that she was not particular about the identity of the form emerging from the mists of time to rescue her from virginity. She looked as if she would have gladly surrendered that jewel to any freebooter in return for a passage in the ship of matrimony, and gone off flying ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees |
