Chapter 1 - Page 2

which rendered the period that occurred between the
years 1790 and 1815 the most eventful of modern times are familiar to
all; though the incidents which chequered that memorable quarter of a
century have already passed into history. All the elements of strife
that then agitated the world appear now to have subsided as completely
as if they owed their existence to a remote age; and living men recall
the events of their youth as they regard the recorded incidents of other
centuries. Then, each month brought its defeat or its victory; its
account of a government overturned, or of a province conquered. The
world was agitated like men in a tumult. On that epoch the timid look
back with wonder; the young with doubt; and the restless with envy.

The years 1798 and 1799 were two of the most memorable of this
ever-memorable period; and to that stirring and teeming season we must
carry the mind of the reader in order to place it in the midst of the
scenes it is our object to portray.

Toward the close of a fine day in the month of August, a light,
fairy-like craft was fanning her way before a gentle westerly air into
what is called the Canal of Piombino, steering easterly. The rigs of the
Mediterranean are proverbial for their picturesque beauty and
quaintness, embracing the xebeque, the felucca, the polacre, and the
bombarda, or ketch; all unknown, or nearly so, to our own seas; and
occasionally the lugger. The latter, a species of craft, however, much
less common in the waters of Italy than in the Bay of Biscay and the
British Channel, was the construction of the vessel in question; a
circumstance that the mariners who eyed her from the shores of Elba
deemed indicative of mischief. A three-masted lugger, that spread a wide
breadth of canvas, with a low, dark hull, relieved by a single and
almost imperceptible line of red beneath her channels, and a waist so
deep that nothing was visible above it but the hat of some mariner
taller than common, was considered a suspicious vessel; and not even a
fisherman would have ventured out within reach of a shot, so long as her
character was unknown. Privateers, or corsairs, as it was the fashion to
term them (and the name, with even its English signification, was often
merited by their acts), not unfrequently glided down that coast; and it
was sometimes dangerous for those who belonged to friendly nations to
meet them, in moments when the plunder that a relic of barbarism still
legalizes had failed.

The lugger was actually of about one hundred and eighty tons
admeasurement, but her dark paint and low hull gave her an appearance of
being much smaller than she really was; still, the spread of her canvas,
as she came down before the wind, wing-and-wing, as seamen term