"Piratical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of so many and diverse peculiarities that it would be an impossibility to catalogue them with any degree of satisfactoriness. But, with the exception of his wholesale piratical methods at cards—indeed, at any kind of gambling—perhaps his most striking feature was his almost idolatrous worship for his horses. He simply lived for their well-being, and their evident affection for himself was something that he treasured far beyond the gold he so loved ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... into a habit of mildness, and some dim perception of a sanctity in human life. The very vice of avarice ministered to the purification of barbarism; and the very evil of slavery in its earliest form was applied to the mitigation of another evil—war conducted in the spirit of piratical outrage. The commercial instincts of men having worked one set of changes in war, a second set of changes was prompted by instincts derived from the arts of ornament and pomp. Splendor of arms, of banners, of equipages, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... at your own request, captain," said the second officer. "My main object has been not only to interest you, but to inform you of the dangers that may be expected in navigating these piratical waters. And I have been asked by Curly to warn you against hugging the land. He advises keeping well in mid-channel, as you are more likely to carry a true wind; and if any of the rovers should make their appearance ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... had never shown himself ashamed of anything, and he most certainly did not intend to begin now. He had never disguised his love for Marie Ivanovna and now she was his "spoils"—won by his own strong piratical hand from the good but rather feeble bark Trenchard—he manifested his scorn of us ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... give even a brief account of Drake's life would fill a small encyclopaedia. The story of his first ruin off Vera Cruz, of his campaign of vengeance, of his piratical voyage to the Pacific, of his doings with the California Indians, of his fight in the Armada—any one of these would fill an ordinary volume. Only that part of his life bearing on American exploration has been given here, and that sacrificed in detail to keep from cumbering the sweep of his adventure. ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... command of Sir Robert Holmes, which, by a flagrant violation of every international right, seized the Dutch fort. The balance of wrong was thus roughly reversed. By an act of unwarrantable violence the Duke of York had fixed upon his own nation the burden of maintaining what amounted to piratical aggression; and he had done it—as Clarendon is obliged to allow—"without any authority, and without a shadow of justice," [Footnote: Letter to Downing, October 28th, 1664.]—solely in satisfaction of his own private rights as a company promoter. Clarendon's diplomacy was, of ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... who was the founder of Dublin, or Dubhlywn, as the name was written formerly. Some learned historians say it was Avellanus, one of the Danish Vikings, an adventurous sort of monarchs of old times, very much given to a seafaring life, and piratical depredations. If Avellanus was the founder—and I don't dispute that he was—he showed great taste and wisdom in selecting the site of a city. It has a beautiful harbor; the River Liffey flows through it, a picturesque country lies around it, and in sight are romantic valleys ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... curiously inept criticism of the war which cost France her American provinces occurs in Voltaire's Memoirs, wherein he says, "In 1756 England made a piratical war upon France for some acres of snow." See also his Precis du Siecle ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... rice; some brought poultry, and green sugar-cane for eating; others cocoa-nuts, and quaint articles for barter. But somehow there was an uneasy feeling on the island, that though the sultan and his people were friendly, some of the rajahs detested the English, as being likely to put a stop to their piratical practices, the destruction of Rajah Gantang's stockade, while it gave plenty of satisfaction in some parts, being looked upon with ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... Yonkeer's"—meaning the estate of the young lord—- and afterwards Yonkers. Subsequently the tract passed into the hands of Frederick Philipse, the "Dutch millionaire," as the English called him, some of whom alleged that he owed a large part of his fortune to piratical and contraband ventures. The suspicion was strong enough to force Philipse out of the governing council of the colony, and he returned to his manor where he died (1702) at the age ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... piracy, not solely for what we had done in the South Seas in plundering the Spaniards, but for having used the like violence against other nations, before our arrival in that sea, from which they proposed to infer that we had evinced a piratical disposition in the whole of our conduct. Of this they thought they had sufficient proof in the moidores found upon Hately, as they appeared to have been taken from the subjects of a prince in amity with our ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... the atheist, he drew a little nearer to the wall and, catching the man at a slightly different angle of the evening light, could see his face and figure quite plain. Two facts about him stood out in the picked colours of some piratical schoolboy's story. The first was that his lean brown body was bare to the belt of his loose white trousers; the other that through hygiene, affectation, or whatever other cause, he had a scarlet handkerchief ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... disappear over the long hills leading down to the falls. There was no mistaking him; there never was another Abner Simpson, with his lean height, his bushy reddish hair, the gay cock of his hat, and the long piratical, upturned mustaches, which the boys used to say were used as hat-racks by the Simpson children at night.. The old Milltown road ran past Mrs. Fogg's house, so he must have left Clara Belle there, and Rebecca's heart glowed to think that her poor little friend need ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... committee were on the alert to capture and administer the law upon these fellows. It was discovered, one evening, as the shades of a black and rather tempestuous night were closing upon the mighty "father of waters" and his ancient banks, that a mysterious voyageur, or sort of piratical vidette, was seen in his light canoe, hugging the shore, either for shelter or some ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... that lay in the printing-press. For centuries after its invention mere copying commanded far higher prices than authorship[1]. Writers gave 'authorised' editions to the world sometimes for the sake of fame, often to justify themselves against piratical publishers, seldom in expectation of monetary profit. Listen, for example, to Sir Thomas Browne's excuse for publishing ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... side and from the other. They circle round him like a pair of swift gunboats round an antiquated man-of-war. They even perch upon his back and dash their beaks into his neck and pluck feathers from his piratical plumage. At last his lumbering flight has carried him far enough away, and the brave little defenders fly back to the nest, poising above it on quivering wings for a moment, then dipping down swiftly in pursuit of some passing insect. The war ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... five months before. The ambassador seems to have expressed becoming indignation in the interviews he sought with the Duke of Alva, repudiating with dignity the suggestion that the blame should be laid upon Coligny, for having abused his authority as admiral to set on foot a piratical expedition into the territories of a friendly prince; and holding forth no encouragement to believe that Charles would disavow Coligny's acts. He told Alva distinctly that Menendez was a butcher rather than a good soldier ("plus digne bourreau que ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... the results otherwise. While the benefits derived were not directly pecuniary in their nature, they were such as tended to strengthen commercially the position of the rightful owners of the patents. Many irresponsible and purely piratical concerns were closed altogether; others were compelled to take out royalty licenses; consolidations of large interests were brought about; the public was gradually educated to a more correct view of the true merits of conflicting claims, and, generally speaking, the business ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the city all day do not live in the neighbourhood. Their nests are far away upon the blue peaks; but they pass much of their time in catching fish, and in stealing from back- yards. They pay the wood and the garden swift and sudden piratical visits; and their sinister cry—pi-yoroyoro, pi-yoroyoro—sounds at intervals over the town from dawn till sundown. Most insolent of all feathered creatures they certainly are—more insolent than even their fellow-robbers, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... extremity of Italy where it dies away into the Alps, and also that part of the Alps which is washed by the Tuscan Sea, opposite the Libyan coast. At this time they took also to seafaring, and, sailing forth in small piratical ships, they plundered and preyed upon commerce as far as the columns of Heracles. On Aemilius's approach they opposed him, forty thousand strong; but he, with only eight thousand, attacked five-fold his own numbers, put them to rout, and having chased them into their ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... my story by stating exactly what constituted the crime of Amalgamated, my readers would not have grasped its heinousness. In the chapters that I have devoted to leading up to it they have been educated in the piratical practices of finance and financiers, and have acquired familiarity with the jugglery of corporations and the multiplication and division of stock certificates through which most of the great ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... scale—with a view to obtaining satisfying terms of peace. The one real piece of military work taken in hand was the siege and capture of Sluys in Flanders (in conjunction with Albert of Saxony, on behalf of Maximilian); from which port much injury of a piratical order had been wrought upon English merchants. Meantime negotiations had been carried on, but with no appearance of success. At last in October the King actually crossed the Channel to take command of the army of invasion; ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... said the grocery man, as the boy swallowed the cider, and his face resumed its natural look, and the piratical frown disappeared with the cider. "You have not stabbed your father, have you? I have feared that one thing would bring on another, with you, and that you ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... that cluster; Col. M'P., on his return from the war in Ashantee, upon which occasion the gallant colonel presented the treaty and tribute from that country; Admiral ——, on his appointment to the Baltic fleet; Captain O. N., with despatches from the Red Sea, advising the destruction of the piratical armament and settlements in that quarter, as also in the Persian Gulf; Sir T. O'N., the late resident in Nepaul, to present his report of the war in that territory, and in adjacent regions—names as yet unknown in Europe; the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... years to come, is "Captain Brand," who, as the author states on his title page, was a "pirate of eminence in the West Indies." As a sea story pure and simple, "Captain Brand" has never been excelled, and as a story of piratical life, told without the usual embellishments of blood and thunder, it has ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... it is not very long since a piratical party of Chinese, shipping as steerage passengers on board one of these Hong Kong river steamers, massacred the officers and captured the boat. On board this great, white, deck-above-deck American steamer there is but one European passenger beside myself, but ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Tulifau was a merry soul, a great feaster and drinker. So were all his people merry souls, save in anger, when, on occasion, they could be guilty even of throwing dead pigs at those who made them wroth. Nevertheless, on occasion, they could fight like Maoris, as piratical sandalwood traders and Blackbirders in the old days learned ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... because of a Chinese law that "prohibits those holding a government office from accepting any present without the king's permission, or that of his council." The delays in obtaining a satisfactory audience with the viceroy become permanent upon rumors that circulate regarding new piratical depredations from one who is suspected to be Limahon. The viceroy, suspecting that Omoncon, Sinsay, and the Spaniards have lied to him regarding the pirate, determines, after closely questioning the fathers, to send them and the soldiers back to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... the telegraph and of steam-driven ships settled for ever the account of the pirates, except in China, when even to this day accounts reach us, through the Press, of piratical enterprises; but never again will the black, rakish-looking craft of the pirate, with the Jolly Roger flying, be liable to pounce down upon the unsuspecting ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... dreadful importunity of his viceroy demanded. Fugitives, whom their country rejected, sought a new home on the ocean, and turned to the ships of their enemy to satisfy the cravings both of vengeance and of want. Naval heroes were now formed out of corsairs, and a marine collected out of piratical vessels: out of morasses arose a republic. Seven provinces threw off the yoke at the same time, to form a new, youthful state, powerful by its waters and its union and despair. A solemn decree of the whole nation deposed the tyrant, and the Spanish name was ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... longer series of writers, many of them eminent for wit or learning, than were ever before congregated upon any inquest relating to any author, be he who he might, ancient [Endnote: 21] or modern, Pagan or Christian. It was a most witty saying with respect to a piratical and knavish publisher, who made a trade of insulting the memories of deceased authors by forged writings, that he was "among the new terrors of death." But in the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakspeare, that he is among the modern luxuries of life; that life, in fact, is ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... expensive government; have foreign missions; she must raise taxes; enact this very tariff, which has driven her out of the Union, in order to enable her to raise money, and to sustain the attitude of an independent power. If she should have no force, no navy to protect her, she would be exposed to piratical incursions. Their neighbor, St. Domingo, might pour down a horde of pirates on her borders, and desolate her plantations. She must have her embassies; therefore she must have a revenue. And, let me tell you, there ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... warriors feasted and listened to the tales of the scalds, rousing themselves to energetic efforts only when returning spring again permitted them to launch their dragon ships and set out once more upon their favorite piratical expeditions. In the olden story the bards relate with great gusto every phase of attack and defense during cruise and raid, describe every blow given and received, and spare us none of carnage, or lurid flames which ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... unceasing stream of the world's entire riches, until the day came when they began to care for nothing else, and the enjoyment of material comforts and luxuries took the place of the thirst for and search after knowledge. Their piratical prowess and daring was undermined; their colonies, grown old enough to stand alone, fell away from them, some after a hard fight, others in mutual agreement or silently; and the nations in whose estimation and fear they had held the ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... of Stevenson," writes Mr. Gosse, "during these first years was confined to London upon which he would make sudden piratical descents, staying a few days or weeks and melting into thin air again. He was much at my house, and it must be told that my wife and I, as young married people, had possessed ourselves of a house too large for ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... that she was a much smaller craft, a schooner, standing from the eastward for the islands. Another look at her a little later showed me that she was of the same size and appearance as that of the craft whose piratical crew had attacked us. I felt, indeed, convinced that she was the same. On coming down on deck I told the captain, unable, however, to conjecture what he would do. At first I thought it possible that he might make chase, and attempt to capture her; but then I reflected that though we had four guns ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... some uncertainty in respect to the motive which led Hengist and Horsa to make their first descent upon the English coast. Whether they came on one of their customary piratical expeditions, or were driven on the coast accidentally by stress of weather, or were invited to come by the British king, can not now be accurately ascertained. Such parties of Anglo-Saxons had undoubtedly often landed before under somewhat ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... hand when his fictitious bills on shadowy companies must be dishonoured; and with the dishonour of those bills came the end of all things for him,—a complete revelation of all those dishonest artifices by which he had kept his piratical bark afloat on ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... wisdom that discovers at once what is excellent, and then moulds that excellence to its own purpose, had assiduously cultivated. Many years before the period of which we treat, Robin had accompanied the Buccaneer on one or two piratical cruises; and though it cannot be denied that Hugh was a better sailor than scholar, yet he generously sought to secure for little Robin the advantages he did not himself possess; Robin, accordingly, received daily ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... from several passages of old writers preserved in the various annals of the country. St. Patrick himself was a slave there in his youth, and we learn from his history and other sources how slaves were generally procured, namely, by piratical expeditions to the coast of Britain or Gaul. The Irish curraghs, in pagan times, started from the eastern or southern shores of the island, and, landing on the continent or on some British isle, they captured women, children, and even men, when the crew of the craft ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... distant countries, who have found an asylum from justice in the obscurity of Khartoum. He purchases guns and large quantities of ammunition for his men, together with a few hundred pounds of glass beads. The piratical expedition being complete, he pays his men five months' wages in advance, at the rate of forty-five piastres (nine shillings) per month, and he agrees to give them eighty piastres per month for any period exceeding the five months advanced. His men receive ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... stood face to face on this continent. From then till now, these antagonisms have struggled in incessant conflict. Two years since, the slaveocracy, true to their instincts of violence, after long and secret plotting, crowned their perfidy by perjury, by piratical seizures of Government property that cost $100,000,000, and then burst into ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... interesting to recall the fact that our sometimes piratical and always brilliant Revolutionary naval hero died in Paris, and that until a few years ago his resting place was unknown. The reader will remember that while General Horace Porter was American ambassador to France a search was instituted for the remains ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... her!" She was almost frightened at this new spirit that had come to her, and, feeling rather that in another moment she would be punished for her piratical audacity, she turned up the steps ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... greatest novelist of all time, my own childhood was happy because I lived purely in a world of the imagination. There never was a bolder or more truly noble pirate than I was during the hour of the Sunday sermon, when I whiled away the good clergyman's discourse by sweeping the seas in my piratical schooner, and harrowing the Spanish Main. My tin soldiers were flesh and blood heroes, my kites flew nearly to the outer limits of the solar system, and I never quite lost the belief that I could dig a tunnel to China with the kitchen fire-shovel, had the cook only had sufficient scientific zeal ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to be a begonia in Washington, for this was rather his ideal of the successful statesman, and he thought about it still more when the Westminster Review for October brought him his article on the Gold Conspiracy, which was also instantly pirated on a great scale. Piratical he was himself henceforth driven to be, and he asked only to be pirated, for he was sure not to be paid; but the honors of piracy resemble the colors of the begonia; they are showy but not useful. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... wrong to call the Northmen mere corsairs, or even to class them with piratical states such as Cilicia of old, or Barbary in more recent times. Their invasions were rather to be regarded as an after-act of the great migration of the Germanic tribes, one of the last waves of the flood which overwhelmed ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... indemnities withheld from all, have been repaired and paid over under the beneficent and glorious administration of President Jackson. But one single instance of outrage has occurred, and that at the extremities of the world, and by a piratical horde, amenable to no law but the law of force. The Malays of Sumatra committed a robbery and massacre upon an American vessel. Wretches! they did not then know that JACKSON was President of the United States! and that no distance, no time, no idle ceremonial of treating with robbers ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... hostilities, and that his unpreparedness would thus be huddled up. All of a sudden, at the beginning of June, De Ruyter led out his fleet, and with a fair wind behind him stood for the Thames. All is fair in war. England was caught napping. The doleful history reads like that of a sudden piratical onslaught, and reveals the fatal inefficiency of the administration. Sheerness was practically defenceless. "There were a Company or two of very good soldiers there under excellent officers, but the fortifications ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... faltering flight, and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing, making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... sail with great swiftness, going either forward or backward with equal readiness. It is a favorite boat used for inter-communication between hundreds of the islands of the South Seas, and the Malays employ them in a different form for their piratical expeditions. They owe their swiftness mainly to the fact that they stand so high out of the water, are very narrow, and present such a large surface to ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... of war, like its inception, can only be brought about by a new collocation of material forces. As the suppression of some nest of piratical tribes by a great emperor substitutes judicial for military sanctions among them, so the conquest of all warring nations by some imperial people could alone establish general peace. The Romans approached this ideal because ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... country town, like Concord, every man feels the necessity for conciliating his neighbor, but the moneyed class in Salem was sufficient for its own purposes, and was opposed to the war in a solid body. The Whigs looked upon the invasion of Mexico as a piratical attempt of the Democratic leaders to secure the permanent ascendency of their party, and this was probably the true reason for Franklin Pierce's joining it. In their eyes, Hawthorne was the representative of a corrupt administration, and they would have been ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... hatred against the Ostmen, who, at that period, were laying every part of Erin waste. His sword never rested in its sheath, and day and night his light gallies cruised about the coast on the watch for any piratical marauder who might turn his prow thither. One day a sail was observed on the horizon; it came nearer and nearer, and the pirate standard was distinguished waving from its mast-head. Immediately surrounded by the Irish ships, it was captured after ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... of resort for the piratical crew of dishonesty; viz.: putting the property out of the law's reach by a fraudulent conveyance. Whoever runs in debt, and consumes the equivalent of his indebtedness; whoever is fairly liable to damage for broken ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... the surface of the water. From the top of it rises a purple crest, which acts as a sail, and by its aid the little voyager scuds gaily before the wind. But should danger threaten—should some hungry, piratical monster in quest of a dinner heave in sight, or the blast grow furious—the float is at once compressed, through two minute orifices at the extremities a portion of the air escapes, and down goes the little craft to the tranquil depths, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... fall over his stool. This was the proximate cause, I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for what appeared to me to be half the night; and dreaming, among other things, that he had launched Mr. Peggotty's house on a piratical expedition, with a black flag at the masthead, bearing the inscription 'Tidd's Practice', under which diabolical ensign he was carrying me and little Em'ly to the Spanish Main, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... his eyes on his horses; his heels were firmly set on the footboard. It. needed all the strength of his iron wrists to restrain the beasts—tall, lean bays, with a certain piratical rakishness about them, long-maned and long-tailed, effective weapons against the voracious flies that swarmed over their rumps. Their powerful frames showed through clean, healthy hides, and their blood in the proud carriage of their heads and ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... Parians were not the sort of people to submit easily to a piratical demand. They kept their foe amused by cunning diplomacy till they had repaired the city walls, then openly defied him to do his worst. Miltiades at once began the assault, and kept it up for twenty-six days in vain. The island was ravaged, but the town stood intact. Despairing of ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of the influence that mild government has upon the manners of people is that the piratical adventures so common on the eastern coast of the island are unknown on the western. Far from our having apprehensions of the Malays, the guards at the smaller English settlements are almost entirely composed of them, with a mixture of Bugis or Makasar people. Europeans, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Saxon bridge over the Thames is extremely uncertain, as our chapter on London Bridge will show; but it is almost as certain as history can be that, soon after the Dane Olaf's invasion of England (994) in Ethelred's reign, with 390 piratical ships, when he plundered Staines and Sandwich, a rough wooden bridge was built, which crossed the Thames from St. Botolph's wharf to the Surrey shore. We must imagine it a clumsy rickety structure, raised on piles with rough-hewn timber planks, and with drawbridges ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the luxuriance of the overgrowth, hidden to casual passers-by like the life of insects. Only by the seaside, where the houses were clustered together above a seawall of cyclopean stones, and on the beach, where the long narrow boats, sharp-prowed and piratical, were drawn up to the shore, the same gnome-like little men, with a generous display of naked brown limbs, were sawing and hammering ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... on military service in the purchase of female captives.[563] They made excellent mercenaries, but shunned either war or commerce with the neighbouring peoples, and the only excuse for Roman aggression was that a small proportion of the peaceful inhabitants had lent themselves to piratical pursuits.[564] The expedition was led by the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus and resulted in a facile conquest. The ships of the invaders were protected by hides stretched above the decks to guard against the cloud of well-directed missiles;[565] ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... three thieves hanging from one gallows, came near being the "Last Dying Speech and Confession of Francois Villon." This shabby copy of 'The Eve of St. Agnes' is precisely like that which Shelley doubled up and thrust into his pocket when the prow of the piratical felucca crashed into the timbers of the Don Juan. Some rare books have these associations, and they bring you nearer to the authors than do the modern reprints. Bibliophiles will tell you that it is the early READINGS they care for,—the author's first fancies, and ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... natural than that the Baratarians, knowing the mysterious waterways that led up to the Crescent City, should utilize their knowledge to take ships and cargoes in and out without the formality of a custom-house examination? Such were the times that led to the formation and growth of the "piratical" colony of Barataria. Its leaders and rulers were John and Pierre Lafitte; one of whom lived in New Orleans in the character of a prosperous merchant, while the other led the expeditions which brought in merchandise to stock the former's stores. Under the influence of the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... infinitely suggestive. Sometimes I could have pitied her, she was so greedy, so spiteful, so friendless. She always made me think of some wicked old pirate putting into a peaceful port to provision and repair his battered old hulk, obliged to live on friendly terms with the natives, but his piratical old nostrils asniff for plunder and his piratical old soul longing to be off marauding once more. When would that be? Not till the arrival in Paris of her distinguished American friends, of whom we heard a great deal. "Charming people, the Bokums of Chicago, the American branch of the English ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... as they nicknamed him, did indeed have a piratical look, as John had said. He stood more than six and a half feet in his moccasins, and was straight as an arrow, with the waist of a boy. His face was dark, his eyebrows very heavy and black, and his dark, full beard, his scant trousers held up with a brilliant scarf, and his generally ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... the West Indies, had suffered great interruption and annoyance from the Spanish guarda-costas, which, under various pretences, seized the merchant ships, and carried them into their ports, where they were confiscated. This piratical practice had increased to such a degree that scarcely any vessels were safe in those seas; for the Spaniards pretended that wherever they found logwood, cocoa, or pieces of eight on board, the capture was legal. Now, the first two of those commodities were the growth and ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... of Mr. Jefferson Davis to issue letters of marque to whosoever may apply for them, emanating from no recognized Government, is not only without the sanction of public law, but piratical in its tendencies, and therefore deserving the stern condemnation of the civilized world. It cannot result in the fitting out of regular privateers, but may, in infesting the ocean with piratical cruisers, armed with traitorous ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... then Governor of Jamaica, he brought with him from Cuba reliable evidence that the Spaniards were planning an attack upon that colony (see State Papers: West Indies and Colonial Series). If the statements of his prisoners were correct, the subsequent piratical raid upon the Main had some justification. Had the Spaniards matured their plans, and pushed the attack home, it is probable that we should have lost our ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... by Cortes loaded with Aztec gold. In convoying this prize to France he had caught another galleon coming from Hispaniola with a cargo of gold and pearls, and the two rich trophies were now in the harbor of La Rochelle, where the audacious captain was doubtless making ready for another piratical voyage. ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... he hastened to assure her. "The effects of the blow are passing rapidly. In another hour I shall hardly feel it at all. I'm afraid, Miss Forbes," he ventured to add, "that when this piratical gang is broken up, as certainly will be the case now that the English police are tackling it, you will associate our brief acquaintance with the only ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... Rome. The election of 1873 did not improve matters, for it left the divided liberals to face an opposition of equal strength, whenever the conservatives, anti-revolutionaries and Catholics acted together. This same year saw the first phase of the war with the piratical state of Achin. An expedition of 3600 men under General Koehler was sent out against the defiant sultan in April, 1873, but suffered disaster, the General himself dying of disease. A second stronger expedition under General van Swieten was then dispatched, which was successful; and the sultan ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... obtain some approach to a lawn in the tropics) and the other day had broken down some rare bushes he had planted over there. And Captain Whalley remembered immediately that, in 'forty-seven, the then Sultan, "this man's grandfather," had been notorious as a great protector of the piratical fleets of praus from farther East. They had a safe refuge in the river at Batu Beru. He financed more especially a Balinini chief called Haji Daman. Captain Whalley, nodding significantly his bushy white eyebrows, had very good reason to know something of that. ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... repelled several inroads of these piratical Danes, and maintained his kingdom, during some years, in safety and tranquillity. A fleet of a hundred and twenty ships of war was stationed upon the coast; and being provided with warlike engines, as well as with expert seamen, both ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... in the east now, I could stop the publication of a piratical book which has stolen some of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... then, as Leirya said, we had to provide against casualties. Seventeen men walked the plank, rather than join us, and after that we made the necessary transfer of stores and other material, and sank our old vessel. We were now ready and well equipped for our piratical undertaking, and we started at once on ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... up of Algeria to the modern tourist and Murray's guide-books is in fact due to the American nation. So late as 1815 the Americans, along with the other trading nations, were actually paying to the dey his preposterous tribute for exemption from piratical seizure. In this year, however, we changed our mind and sent Decatur over. On the 28th of June he made his appearance at Algiers, having picked up and disposed of some Algerine craft, the frigate Mashouda and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... his reasoning powers must, one would think, have been at least as great in times past as it is now. Yet it is doubtful whether it showed itself then so conspicuously as it does at present. Compare the Elizabethan age with our own. What would be said now of the piratical deeds of such men as Frobisher, Raleigh, Gilbert, and Richard Greville? Suppose Lord Roberts had sent word to President Kruger that if four English soldiers, imprisoned at Pretoria, were molested, he would execute ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... would be exposed to be shot down in their boats: or lurking hordes, who would set on them at night, and massacre them in their encampments. Some lost heart, and proposed to return, rather than fight their way, and, in a manner, run the gauntlet through the country of these piratical marauders. In fact, three men deserted while at this village. Luckily, their place was supplied by three others who happened to be there, and who were prevailed on to join the expedition by promises of liberal pay, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... and fortified Yijiyadrug; or, as the English call it, Gheriah, a town at the mouth of the river Kanui, one hundred and seventy miles south of Bombay; and also the island of Suwarndrug, about half way between Gheriah and Bombay. Here he established a piratical fleet. Fifty years later, Kanhagi Angria, the commander of the Mahratta fleet, broke off this connection with the successors of Sivagi, and set up as a pirate on his own account. Kanhagi not only plundered the native ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... to be made, and I cannot go back from my word." Verres perceived that soft words would be useless, and took at once another line. The King, he said, must leave Sicily before nightfall. The public safety demanded it. He had heard of a piratical expedition which was on its way from Syria to the province, and that his departure was necessary. Antiochus had no choice but to obey; but before he went he publicly protested in the market-place of Syracuse against the wrong that had been done. ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain, determined to keep open market where MEN should be bought ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... the state of our copyright laws at that time, all this foreign publication was piratical; and most of it brought no visible consequence to the author, beyond that cold tribute to personal vanity on which our unlucky race is expected to feed. I should make an exception. The house of Sampson, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... worked, mannged. Cf. Virg. Aen. 6, 302: velisque ministrat.—In ordinem. For a row, i.e. so as to form a row, cf. Z. 314: also Rit. and Doed. in loc. The northmen (Danes and Swedes) became afterwards still more famous for navigation and piratical excursions, till at length they settled down in great numbers in France ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... gold cigarette case and lighted a large, expensive-looking cigarette with a match from a gold safe. "Go on, dear lady! Herron should get you to write our prospectus when we're ready to unload on the public. The dear public! How it does yearn for a share in any piratical enterprise that flies the snowy flag of respectability." He ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... which, in spite of all this eccentric people could do to change their appearance, still looked ship-shaped. There were also some sharp-looking junks being built, which I was told were to be fitted out against the pirates; but, if what I afterwards learned be true, they were more likely to become piratical craft themselves; for it was reported that the person to whose charge they were to have been consigned had been extensively engaged in that business himself, until he was interfered with by the English, who broke up his fleet; and that now he had humbugged the Chinese government ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... attempt, it could never have succeeded in effecting an entrance through them. Here, from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, he dealt with all varieties of scamps and mendicants, fools and desperadoes, and all the tribe of piratical cutthroats which in those days constituted a large part of the merchant marine. Calamity, imbecility, and rascality were his constant companions in that dingy little den; and the gloomy and sooty skies without but faintly pictured the moral atmosphere which they exhaled; ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves, excitement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war for example, the Athenians ask the inhabitants of Melos (the island where the "Venus of Milo" was found), hitherto neutral, to own their lordship. The ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... of tobacco smoke of his own making. Next morning he gave them to Waller, who by night had the score and words married and a day later the finished product went forward to Wm. A. Pond & Co., and was published under the title of "A Piratical Ballad"[4]. Note that these initial verses are described as "ragged" and in this I am also quoting Allison himself who in our various chats on his reminiscence of "Treasure Island" has often given them this characterization. Be that as it may these three verses were the foundation ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... Diligences leave daily for Bastia, Sartene, and Ajaccio. A steamer arrives every Saturday from Ajaccio and returns on the Monday. Bonifacio was founded in 833 by the Tuscan marquis whose name it bears, to protect this part of the island against the piratical incursions of the Saracens. The high town is built on the top of a limestone rock rising vertically from the sea. The low town occupies one side of the fine natural dock, hemmed in by perpendicular cliffs with an opening of only 328 yards ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... to direct and augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions for so doing, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson there had been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, a thing especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remained incongruously about his head through the years when he stood in every eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out of manipulated crises, the foe of ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... in speaking of the piratical and ferocious Sea Dayaks of Borneo, that "besides the ordinary attention which a young man is able to pay to the girl he desires to make his wife—as helping her in her farm work, and in carrying home her load of vegetables or ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... in his room at House; just torn ourselves away from Committee on Irish Land Bill, where, at the moment, oddly enough SEXTON chanced to be speaking. Old MORALITY has been made Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and is trying on his uniform. Rather piratical arrangement; blue cloth coat with large brass buttons, red sash round his waist, with holster thrust in it, containing the horse-pistol with which PITT armed himself when he sat at the window of Walmer ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... thing. He felt alive, jubilant, keenly in sympathy with the lure and zest of the expedition. He felt like singing, would no doubt have sung out in some wild border ballad or bit of deep sea melody with a piratical swing to it, had he not been half the time fairly breathless from the pace they maintained ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... money to the reclamation of land in Ireland, would be laughed to scorn in the British legislature. Yet Parliament would consent almost without a question—perhaps amidst the cheers of all parties—to the expenditure of this amount in piratical incursions, such as those made upon the inhabitants of Affghanistan, Scinde, Syria, and other nations, who have never injured us." The fourth letter is a continuation of the same subjects. The fifth discusses the railway question, then in its infancy. ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... binnacle. In spite of his personal filth, in spite of the lawless, almost piratical, character of the man, in that moment I could not but admire him. If Percy Darrow was ignorant of the purposes of this expedition, how much more so Captain Selover. Yet he accepted his trust blindly, and as far as I could then see, intended to fulfil it faithfully. I liked ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... L2710 for the three tragedies, and in order to protect the copyright, he applied, through counsel (Lancelot Shadwell, afterwards Vice-Chancellor), for an injunction in Chancery to stop the sale of piratical editions of Cain. In delivering judgment (February 12, 1822), the Chancellor, Lord Eldon (see Courier, Wednesday, February 13), replying to Shadwell, drew a comparison between Cain and Paradise Lost, "which he had read from beginning to end during the course of the last Long Vacation—solicitae ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... talkative school-girls, made the house of David North, Esq., rather a questionable paradise. But to-day, being half-holiday, the boys were out on the beach digging miraculous sand-caves, and getting up miraculous piratical battles and excursions with the bare-legged urchins so numerous in the fishermen's huts; and Joanna and Elinor had been absent all day, so the room left to Theo and her elder sister ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... regiment, standing at rest in the roadway, whooped at once, and entered whole-souled upon the side of the maiden. The men became so engrossed in this affair that they entirely ceased to remember their own large war. They jeered the piratical private, and called attention to various defects in his personal appearance; and they were wildly enthusiastic in support of the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... politically as a disturbing factor" is absurd. In the Spanish days its forests furnished a safe refuge for evildoers who were from time to time driven out of Cavite and Batangas. A large proportion of its Filipino inhabitants were criminals who not infrequently organized regular piratical expeditions and raided towns in Masbate, Romblon and Palawan. The people of the Cuyos and Calamianes groups lived in constant terror of the Mindoro pirates, and tulisanes, [326] who paid them frequent visits. I myself have been at Calapan, the capital ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... But now the Seljukian Turks are emerging from the depths of Asia, taking the place of the degenerate Saracens, invading the Eastern empire and conquering Jerusalem. The two waves of hostile fanaticism soon meet in the Crusades. The piratical seizure of Constantinople by the Latins brings in view the French and Venetians, the family of Courtenay and its pleasant digression. Then comes the slow agony of the restored Greek empire. Threatened by the Moguls, it is invaded and dismembered ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... was equally well born, took the view of the common men upon every occasion, claiming that the interests of the many were superior to the privileges of the few. In a word, Crassus, if you could imagine a free-booting Gracchus on one side, and two piratical Patricians upon the other, you would understand the effect which my ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... where I saw that the population were in terrible earnest. "Wide awake," and other secret societies were organized; and inflammatory harangues aroused the populace. The favorite theme of the orators was the "martyrdom" of John Brown; the piratical and murderous raid of that fanatic into the State of Virginia being exalted into a praiseworthy act of heroism. When I returned to Virginia and contrasted the apparent apathy and want of preparation there with the state of affairs at the North, ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... term is, according to one interpretation merely a general expression for barbarians) was, in an early age of the empire, formed of the roving and piratical inhabitants of the north, whom a love of adventure, the greatest perhaps that ever was indulged, and a contempt of danger, which never had a parallel in the history of human nature, drove forth upon ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... miscellaneous poems. By Robert Southwell whose initials appear on the titlepage of some of the later editions. The first edition was probably that published the same year as printed by I[ames]. R[oberts]. for G[abriel]. C[awood]. and of which the present appears to be a piratical reprint. ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... of vibrant quality. It can not be read at a leisurely pace. It bears the reader through piratical seas and buccaneering adventures, through storm and stress of many sorts, but it lands him safely, and leads ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... international law as "piratical" only if, upon the high seas, she either attacks other vessels, without being commissioned by any State so to do (nullius Principis auctoritate, as Bynkershoek puts it), or wrongfully displaces the authority of her own commander. The essence ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... quiet; though a good deal strained. The captain now took a boat, and four men, and pulled ashore, to get prows, to lighten the vessel. We had but eight men before the mast, and six aft. This, of course, left only nine souls on board. That night nothing occurred; but, in the morning early, two piratical prows approached, and showed a disposition to board us. Mr. Croes was the person who saved the ship. He stuck up handspikes, and other objects, about deck; putting hats and caps on them, so as to make us appear very strong-handed. At the same ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... junks. So long as these could be attacked successfully and secretly, with no witnesses to carry information to the outside world, there was little risk in swooping down upon them. The celestial government did not follow up piratical forays of this kind in seas distant from the Empire itself; and the Malays were not likely to attack unless they had a great advantage over their victim in point of numbers. A junk might be seized and its crew massacred without the slightest whisper ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... it seems to me, we set foot as it were on the bridge between the middle and the final period of Shakespeare. That priceless waif of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy rapacity of a hungry publisher is of course more accurately definable as the first play of Hamlet than as the first edition of the play. And this first Hamlet, on the whole, belongs altogether to the middle period. The deeper complexities of the ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... protection of himself and followers), then locked the shrine, and threw the keys into the Nid. Its secrets from that day were respected until the profane hands of Lutheran Danes carried it bodily away, with all the gold and silver chalices, and jewelled pyxes, which, by kingly gifts and piratical offerings, had accumulated for centuries in ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... more than ever vigilant precautions against all attempts to enlighten or educate the negroes, the severer restrictions on manumission, the thrusting forth out of certain States of all free persons of colour, the atrocious Fugitive Slave Bill, one of the latest achievements of Congress, and the piratical attempts upon Cuba, avowedly on the part of all Southerners, abetting or justifying it because it will add slave-territory and 600,000 slaves to their possessions;—surely these do not seem indications of the better state of things you anticipate, except, indeed, as the straining ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the fancy of the skull—of letting fall a bullet through the skull's eye—was suggested to Kidd by the piratical flag. No doubt he felt a kind of poetical consistency in recovering his money ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... by the sinking of English ships, might hamper deals with the fascist leaders if such attacks were not ended. In return for the cessation of the piratical attacks, Chamberlain was ready to offer recognition of Abyssinia and even loans to Italy to develop her captured territory. It was paying tribute to a pirate chieftain, but Chamberlain was ready to do it to ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... king held not only over his own people but over the Gentiles of the mainlands as well. With these mainlanders, he regarded Beaver Island as a nest of pirates and murderers. He knew of the depredations of Strang and his people among the fishermen and settlers, of the piratical expeditions of his armed boats, of the dreaded raids of his sheriffs, and of the crimes that made the women of the shores tremble and turn white at the mere ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... a highly cultured people, but were living a nomadic life, engaged in hunting, fishing, piratical exploits, and carrying on agriculture intermittently. They had also become acquainted with the use of metals, having passed during this period from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age. About the year 1500 B.C. they had become acquainted ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... deliberate injustice has been seldom condensed within so small a compass. From the experience, however, that I, in common with many American scientific gentlemen, have already had of the piratical conjoined with the abusive propensity of a certain class of English savans and writers, I can scarcely expect either liberality or justice from the quarter whence this falsehood has issued. But there is, fortunately, an appeal to my own countrymen, to the impartial and liberal-minded ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... of them here on deck—stood in a ring around us. They were all big men, nearly of a seven-foot average, dressed in leather jerkins and short leather breeches, with bare knees and flaring leather boots. Piratical swaggering fellows, knife-blades mingled with small hand projectors fastened to their belts. Gray, heavy faces, some with scraggly, unshaven beards. They plucked at ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings |
