I do not think that Pitt is guilty in this merely of special pleading, that he is putting forward excuses for his hero.  I think that in those days there was a good deal to oppress Peter Blood.  There was the thought of Arabella Bishop — and that this thought loomed large in his mind we are not permitted to doubt.  He was maddened by the tormenting lure of the unattainable.  He desired Arabella, yet knew her beyond his reach irrevocably and for all time.  Also, whilst he may have desired to go to France or Holland, he had no clear purpose to accomplish when he reached one or the other of these countries.  He was, when all is said, an escaped slave, an outlaw in his own land and a homeless outcast in any other.  There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity.  And so, considering the adventurous spirit that once already had sent him a-roving for the sheer love of it, considering that this spirit was heightened now by a recklessness begotten of his outlawry, that his training and skill in militant seamanship clamorously supported the temptations that were put before him, can you wonder, or dare you blame him, that in the end he succumbed?  And remember that these temptations proceeded not only from adventurous buccaneering acquaintances in the taverns of that evil haven of Tortuga, but even from M. d’Ogeron, the governor of the island, who levied as his harbour dues a percentage of one tenth of all spoils brought into the bay, and who profited further by commissions upon money which he was desired to convert into bills of exchange upon France.

A trade that might have worn a repellent aspect when urged by greasy, half-drunken adventurers, boucan-hunters, lumbermen, beach-combers, English, French, and Dutch, became a dignified, almost official form of privateering when advocated by the courtly, middle-aged gentleman who in representing the French West India Company seemed to represent France herself.

Moreover, to a man — not excluding Jeremy Pitt himself, in whose blood the call of the sea was insistent and imperative — those who had escaped with Peter Blood from the Barbados plantations, and who, consequently, like himself, knew not whither to turn, were all resolved upon joining the great Brotherhood of the Coast, as those rovers called themselves.  And they united theirs to the other voices that were persuading Blood, demanding that he should continue now in the leadership which he had enjoyed since they had left Barbados, and swearing to follow him loyally whithersoever he should lead them.

And so, to condense all that Jeremy has recorded in the matter, Blood ended by yielding to external and internal pressure, abandoned himself to the stream of Destiny.  “Fata viam invenerunt,” is his own expression of it.