Chapter 12 - Page 2

of the century, your mercantile moralists were far less
manly in the avowal of their sentiments, though their practices were
in no degree wanting in the spirit of our more modern theories. Ships
were fitted out, armed, and navigated, on this just principle, quite
as confidently and successfully as if the tongue had declared all that
the head had conceived.

Guarda-Costas were the arguments used, on the other side of this
knotty question, by the authorities of Spain; and a very insufficient
argument, on the whole, did they prove to be. It is an old saying,
that vice is twice as active as virtue; the last sleeping, while the
former is hard at work. If this be true of things in general, it is
thrice true as regards smugglers and custom-house officers. Owing to
this circumstance, and sundry other causes, it is certain that English
and American vessels found the means of plundering the inhabitants of
South America, at the period of which I am writing, without having
recourse to the no longer reputable violence of Dampier, Wood, Rogers,
or Drake. As I feel bound to deal honestly with the reader, whatever I
may have done by the Spanish laws, I shall own that we made one or two
calls, as we proceeded north, shoving ashore certain articles
purchased in London, and taking on board dollars, in return for our
civility. I do not know whether I am bound, or not, to apologize for
my own agency in these irregular transactions--regular, would be quite
as apposite a word--for, had I been disposed to murmur, it would have
done my morals no good, nor the smuggling any harm. Captain Williams
was a silent man, and it was not easy to ascertain precisely what he
_thought_ on the subject of smuggling; but, in the way of
_practice_, I never saw any reason to doubt that he was a firm
believer in the doctrine of Free Trade. As for Marble, he put me in
mind of a certain renowned editor of a well-known New York journal,
who evidently thinks that all things in heaven and earth, sun, moon,
and stars, the void above and the caverns beneath us, the universe, in
short, was created to furnish materials for newspaper paragraphs; the
worthy mate, just as confidently believing that coasts, bays, inlets,
roadsteads and havens, were all intended by nature, as means to run
goods ashore wherever the duties, or prohibitions, rendered it
inconvenient to land them in the more legal mode. Smuggling, in his
view of the matter, was rather more creditable than the regular
commerce, since it required greater cleverness.

I shall not dwell on the movements of the Crisis, for the five months
that succeeded her escape from the Straits of Magellan. Suffice it to
say, that she anchored at as many different points on the coast; that
all which came up