Kingsley has written a book about these adventurers; a very good book it is; but his pictures are marred with the touch of the ecclesiastic—­we need not suppose that the young men sat always Bible in hand, talked like seminarists, or thought like curates.  The rovers who sailed with Drake and Raleigh had their religion, like their rations, served out to them.  Sailors always do.  Drake, the captain, might and did, consult the Bible for encouragement and hope.  Even he, however, reserved the right of using profane oaths; that right survived the older form of faith.  In a word, the Elizabethan sailor—­although a Protestant—­was, in all respects, like his predecessor, save that on this new battle-field he was filled with a larger confidence and an audacity almost incredible to read of—­almost impossible to think upon.

This was the first phase of the romance which grew up along the shores of America.  So far it belongs to the Spanish Main and to the Isthmus of Panama.  The romance remained when the Elizabethans passed away—­they were followed by the buccaneers, privateers, marooners and pirates—­a degenerate company, but not without their picturesque side.  Pierre le Grand, Francois l’Olonnois, Henry Morgan, are captains only one degree more piratical than Drake and Raleigh.  Edward Teach, Kidd, Avery, Bartholomew Roberts were pirates only because they plundered ships English and French as well as Spanish; that they were roaring, reckless, deboshed villains as well, detracted little from the renown with which their names and exploits were surrounded, and that they were mostly hanged in the end was an accident common to such a life, the men under Drake were also sometimes hanged, though they were mostly killed by sword, bullet, or fever.  The romance remained.  The lad who would have enlisted under Drake found no difficulty in joining Morgan, and, if the occasion offered, he was ready to join the bold Captain Kidd with alacrity.

The seventeenth century furnished another kind of romance.  It was the century of settlement.  In the year 1606, after Sir Walter Raleigh had led the way, the Virginia Company sent out the Susan Constant with two smaller ships, containing a handful of colonists.  They settled on the James River.  Among them was John Smith, an adventurer and free-lance quite of the Elizabethan strain.  In him John Oxenham lived again.  We all know the story of Captain John Smith.  He began his career by killing Turks; he continued it by exploring the creeks and rivers of Virginia, with endless adventures.  Sometimes he was a prisoner of the Indians.  Once, if his own account is true, he was rescued from imminent death by the intervention of Pocahontas, called Princess—­or Lady Rebecca.  He explored Chesapeake Bay, and he gave the name of New England to the country north of Cape Cod.  Such histories, of which this is only one, kept alive in England the adventurous spirit and the romance of the West.  The dream of finding