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$ 9 ft ml rTHE APPEAL STEADILY GAINS VOL. 17. N0..36, T1IOSEofexactinAtlantiscdthatdttre-t' h.'steal 1It alms to publish all the news possible. -v 2It dpes so Impartially, wasting no words. 8Its correspondents are able and1 energetic "VVV'i1 "41 'i1 soul sigh for the days of.Capt. Kid and. Morgan' really should no pine. The coas is full as sweet an pleasan gentlemen of the sea as ever scuttled a ship or' slit a throat in the days of the famous buccaneers. All that the romance seekers need do is to keep their ears open. They may not see any of the piracy of to-day, but then they must remember that Captains Thomas Tew, William Mason, John Hoar and William Kidd did not give performances in full view of the audience, either, ex cepting, of course, the unlucky particular audience that was most vitally con cerned. To-day it Is necessary for the huge tows that pass through the Kill von Kull, the deep and narrow waterway that lies practically inside of the city of New York, to go armed. Many of them carry private officers to protect themselves against the new brothers of the black flag. Only a few weeks ago a whole "fleet of these pirates boarded a tow of Central railroad barges and looted them thor oughly. It was a real, old-time, slap dash affair of boarding and carrying, and it was accompanied-with a quite satis factory amount of shooting. The oyster pirates of the Chesapeake Bay have not indulged in any wholesole kidnapping or murdering recently-,, but they have not experienced a sudden change of heart, and there is no milen nium in sight that will justify the dis armament of the government launches that have been put into commission to hold them in subjection. Morgan and Bluebeard have gone to their reward perhaps a better and hap pier Spanish main has been established for them in the far beyond but the Span ish Main still is not an entirely delightful place. There are able philanthropists who stand ready day and- night to pay embarrassing attentions to any vessel that happens to run up on the Florida Keys. A ship that hits the Old Provi dence island group, near where old Ron cador caught and chewed up the brave old Kearsarge, might as'well-dive ,into a hill of white ants. They would not strip the wreck any more quiekly. 1 All-along the American coaat.^frbm Eastport, Me., to Blscaya Bay, Fla., there" is hardly an oyster* or fishing ground that is not guarded, for most" ex cellent reasons, with shotguns and rifles. -The famous thief who stole a redhot 'stove has a whole fleet of counterparts on the sea. They are. the pirates who the shore bodily. No sandy beach is safe from them, hey steer theirr big '?-j sloops and schooners in bodily and load |y, up with, the^white sand, which brings a tempting prleeedm^^uil^era/^-'TW''pleas l^i ure resorts, being on the 'finest sand beaches atoni? the coast, ..naturally, suffer ^severely.! 'Ma4*# are in conatanijqonSiet Jfltfr the, mefefgho fry. actually" to. take A 'A1 A h.At'-Z&i W- i DpUA away the ground under their feet. Thev are daring thieves, too, and will keep loading up while the beach watchmen are floundering through the sand to cap*- captain liked the looks of it, and there- ture them. Not until the officers get:j aftere, whenever he happened to close enough to begin shooting do these I it pirates deem it necessary to steer out helm and regularly managed to blunder in for the open sea. The' famous beaches oi Rockaway and Long Beach have suf fered so extensively from their depreda tions that the ocean, breaking in where great acres and acres of land had been cut but and started away, made alarming Inroads. They were cheerful piratical creatures of this school who tried a few years ago, ivnen the sea rose and washed high on Rockaway Beach in a big storm, to help its efforts with shovel and pick. Their intention was to open a way clear across the land at the lively summer settlement of Seaside. In this case they d}d not wish to steal sand. What they wanted was to cut -away enough shore so that the mighty surf which was run ning would sweep across and open a new inlet. That would have given them a di rect means of reaching the open sea in stead of sailing several miles to the regu lar inlet. Their simple piratical souls did not harbor the slightest scruples about the Hooding of the village or other possi ble calamities, and they were grieved, and indignant when the baymen appeared OIE the scene anjdt stopped them-with clubs. An unknown but certainly able and de serving pirate was the one whose white sloop dropped in with the tide one night, last year off Bar Harbor and anchored among the big steam yachts. The an chorage was so .full of craft that one more was hardly noticed. That night there was a big dinner, followed by a dance, on one of the big fellows. At mid night the white sloop hauled up anchor urobtrusively and began to drift a round aimlessly. Finally she rubbed along the side of one steam yacht. There sho held, for a time. Then she drifted down a little further until, she rubbed against another of the fine craft. This operation was repeated from one steam y,acht to another. Several times sharp-eyed deck watches hailed the sloop. Each time the answer came, readily enough, that the craft had lost her anchor cable and had .gone adrift, but was just fetching up.. This lulled suspicion! But the next morn ing, when it was found that the cabins of almost a dozen steam yachts had foee stripped clean, there was a great hunt for the white sloop. There being about one. thousand white sloops along the Atlantic coasts the search .did not produce-brilliant results. vtf An ingenious pirate ,was the owner And captain of a blunt-nosed, ugly heavily built New London fishing steamer. ,He got his eye on a fine wooden pier off Nor ton's Point, Coney Island, near where the Atlantic Yacht club anchorage is now. Tfte pier Jjriginally Jiad, teen connected offers^ do they,combine. gut Most of the coastal pirates of this shore are pt the type of*the Kill ypn Kull pi rates. These sea rovers, who have col lected tribute in the narrow channel be tween Statcn island and New Jersey for many years, are veritable sea gypsies. Generally they play a lone hand. Only occasionally, when such a rich prize as a long and' weakly manned freight -tow they have with the land, but the water nact eaten r,ough organization always to warn each the shore away and it stood out at sea other and to help each other qut in case in solitary grandeur. The fishing boat of capture'or pursuit. Most of them are owners of small ves sels ranging from twenty to thirty-five feet water line. Usually they are pro vided with big holds like oyster boats and^vith a little cabin. They are sloop rigged and can be han'dled easily by two" men, which is the extent of the crew in most cases. Generally they are battered and worn and dirty, with grotesquely patched sails and frayed and ragged rig- .ging^ -v They'have no fixed haunts. The At lantic coast, with its thousands of miles of salt bays that are protected from the ocean by long sand spits, furnishes a cruising and stealing ground that is sur passed nowhere in the'world. The coves of Maine, protected by the rocky islands, in the inlets and bays around Cape Cod, throughput the network of channels on the south shore of Long Island, in th Albemarle sound and Pamlico sound and clear away down to Key West they are equally at home. Lying in the sedges or up quiet creeks during the day in pic turesque'- innocence, they ^''tip sail" at night to harry and pillage. Everything, from a wrecked steamship to an aif chored rowboat, pleases them. They' have no prejudices, and the only things for which they cannot find use are things that are guarded, with a loaded.jfun: As all the robberies and thefts of the modern pirates are committed where i legal authority is hard, to reach and where every man looks out for 'himself, few complaints are entered against the [thieves and th public rarely hears of 'their deeds until dne of.them becomes as daring as was the^ famous "blac 'sloop" that robbed the coast from Point Judith to New York two years ago. The '."black sloop" pirates had a swift boat and nerve. They tackled everything from a cottage to a steamship, and hardly a night passed without a rich haul being made by them. Unlike most of their class, who make it their practice to sail far away as soon as they have made a hauL the pirates of the black sloop re mained along that particular part of ths coast despite the fact that hundreds of sailing vessels and steam and naphtha, launches, not to mention ponce boats, were on a keen- hunt for'Jhe steadily for months. After two months this pirate* was as much of a terror to the coast shore as any old time pirate ever was. It was a hard time for all Sloops that were paint ed black for whenever one appeared In any of the harbors she was kept under' surveillance until she sailed again. During this time it became plain what in enormous amount of piracy there ik ilong the Atlantic coast, for in the gen eral excitement over the mysterious de predations -hundreds of robberies were re ported from places so" far apart, that It was evident thai the black- sjoop could would lose all his cunningbetnear a the and ram the pier. After several weeks of faithful ramming the entire pier gave way one day when the sea was unusually heavy, and the captain thankfully steamed around in the wreckage until he had all the timbers made up into a fine, large raft, which brought a good price from a New York "Red sea trader." New York, New London, Baltimore, Sa vannah and many other seaport towns, big and little, occupy much the same commercial position (in a smaller and less public way) toward these pirates to-day as did old New York and jolly, ship-shape Bristol toward Captains Tew. Mason and Hoar and their colleagues. Two hundred years ago the merchants of those two towns were in the business of abetting and even fitting out pirates openly. It was a common thing to see armed ships' lying peacefully in the harbor that every body knew would fly the Jolly Roger as soon as they got off soundings. Old Lord Bellomont, whose bones lie in an unnamed grave in St. Paul's church Sard, found this out when he was sent to New York by the British government to stop the "Red sea trade." The "Red sea trade" was nothing but the fitting out of ships to meet the big pirates off the African coast and receive their spoils, which were brought home and sold here openly. The "Red sea trade" of to-day in the seaport towns is neither so open nor so extensive, but it has not shrunken to entirely insignificant proportions, as the police of New York discovered a few months ago, when one of the Red sea traders bought a whole railroad barge full of serapiron from one of his friendly pirates. This little act of buccaneering was committed under the statue of liber ty, where the barge was lying peacefully at anchor. Her owners thought, with some show of reason, that she was as safe as the statue itself but the next morning there was nothing left to justify the be lief. Soundings showed that she had not sunk. For days the search for'her was unavailing, but at last the police found her hidden, away nicely in a dock on the Jersey shore behind a lot of old canalboats and ancient wrecks. The Red sea traders were working merrily on her,,when"the police swooped down on them..^ y ^usai Defective Page 3 & I3UIUV' j*-''^Hy$*it*t *T. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS. MINN.. SATUBDAV SEPTEMBEB 7.1901.^' k^k -**S"* *V* *G^,, ^^e 5 *y It!%a^^w*s-*..' '^v% t aot be responsible for one-tenth, of them UncaugM, often fired at with,aim good snough to riddle the sails, the sloop con tinued on her victorious way until men dad nearly given up hope of gettin\ her. Then, made over-confident, the pirate sntered one of the l&tle harbors along the sound in broad daylight and were taken prisoners while they were asleep. But only a small percentage of their plunder was recovered. The vast bull of it had gone to enrich the Red Sec trade. As a matter of Xact these sea gypsies have little to fear. So long as they re frain from murder they are comparative ly safe from organized pursuit: Their aperations, although they are really grreat in the aggregate, are in so exten sive a field that -no': one locality is sufft ciently injured, except in cases like the one cited, to do more than-pursue the thieves to the limit* of their local juris diction. So all they need to do is to keep 3n the move. 'The federal government is the only one that could follow and- hunt them down everywhere, and none of them, taken singly,' has become' danger- DUS enough to call for action by the navj lepartment. Hundreds of them regulate their lives by the seasons, as do the birds, follow ing the summer up and down the coast. They are good hunters and naturally ex cellent fishermen, and turn to either work readily when circumstances make it profitable. They have no food problem. The farms along 3,000 miles of coast 3iTer them the pick of the crops, and the marshes and channels provide the rest abundantly. They live a glorious, free, careless, idle life. The late soring and summer finds them scattered1 from Cap May northward. When the warm dayi vanish they cruise lazily southward picking up their pequliar living on tht way, for every place is good for their business. f- They are as daring as they are lazj and think nothing of "cutting out" a few yachts from a fleet lying at anchor immediately In front cf a crowded clur. house. They pick out a time In the night when the flood tide has stopped running Then, when the pleasure boats are riding with scarcely a strain en their anchorage ropes, the pirate's sloop drops idlydowr with the wind and steers irinocentlj through the fleet As the pirate drift* close by the tenantless yachts which ht has singled out he gives each anchor1 lint a swift,slash,.with a keen.knife-. There being no tide the ropes do not part at once. By the time the ebb tide rvau flpK ""v: :.-wV^''~d CUTTW6- OPT A PLEASURE CRAFT srrorgly the pirate is miles away, waiting well out of sight for his prey. As 4he tide begins to speed toward the sea the half-severed anchor ropes part, and the yachts drift down to where he is waiting. Then jt is an easy matter to strip them. The stripping is done thoroughly. *The pirate has a ready market for every item of a boat's fitting. His first care is to unreeve all the running rigging. The standing rigging is cut away, the lacing of the sails is cut and they are rolled up and bundled into the sloop. Then the pirate has the most valuable part of the spoils, and it doesn't matter so much to him if he has to run for It. But if there still Is time, the brass fittings are his next care. u'^:| He takes no chances while he is dis mantling a yacht. If a vessel comes with in sight, he sails away without waiting and loiters at a safe distance till the coast is clear again. Another branch of piracy that is a fa vorite around the, pleasure resorts is to :sail~n.o dark '^Blrn'ra and" hook on'to? as many rowboats as it is possible to tow. An agile crew of two-^ohe to handle the tiller and the other to cut the painters of the rowboats and hitch them to the sloopcan steal from a^half dozen to a dozen boats within a few hundred yards of a boat houese and no one on shore will be the wiser for it until daylight dis closes a looted anchorage, Pursuit of these thieves1'is APPEAL KEEPSIN FRONT BECAUSE:^ ?5*#' iSr-Ifc is the organ of ALL Afro-Americans. ^fg? 6Itls not controlled by any ring or clique. _-~ %SM*? It asks no support but the people's. so difficult and so very likely to be entirely fruit less that the victims usually pocket the loss and make no- official complaint. About the most that, they can do is to keep a sharp lookout for their boats wherever they go. &*^' i '^'"J" A few years ago 'Jan^Tca Bay/ the great salt-watet fishing resort of New York state, was visited by pirates, and ,as nearly as could be discovered several hundred rowboats were taken. One boat keeper, who lost half a dozen boats, hunted In vain, and after two years made up his mind that he never would see them again. Then he sent one of his sloops down to Pamlico sdund, and the first thing that his captain saw down there were two of the stolen rowboats. The pirates had not even bothered to change their color or their fittings and identification *$as "easy. The owners showed that they had purchased them in good faith from a stranger. When stolen rowboats are to be sold near the place whence they Were taken, the thieves usually have clever dodges for changing them so that their former SHI -&* $2.40 PER YEAE, OYSTER PJRATE5 lH A RUNNING Ff6flT owners find it nard tven to be sure that they are the stolen property and still harder to prove it. The.first thing that is done js to scrape and burn all the paint off and give them a coating of en tirely different color. Then all private marks are cut out and the wood around them scraped down to hide the marks of the operation. Often the thwarts are changed. That makes an immense dif ference in the appearance of a rowboat. There is nothing timorous about the modern Capt. Kidds. They know that they may expect short shrift if they are caught. Over and over again the bay men, having overpowered a crew of the thieves, give them atremendous beatine. taKe their boats and gear for further punishment and. throw them overboard to sink or swim as "toiay be. Having ac quired a good vessel and'- obtained re rer.ge at the same time, the baymen naturally do not feel it advisable to talk about the little affair. And the pirates as naturally, if they happen to survive, \o not unbosom themselves to the world. They take what comes as part of their profession, as their predecessors of the Spanish Main did. If any one doubts the prevalence of that piracy'long shore piracylet him make a little water voyage among the oyster islands anywhere on the Atlantic 3hore coast.. He will find that there hard ly is a single hut that is not provided with one shotgun at least. Many of the oyster houses boast an arsenal. Gen erally there are two or three heavy shot guns and at least a pair of revolvers, and" they are not for show. Every one 1* loaded, and the baymen are economical souls, who hate to waste powder an shot. So they shoot to hit. Once a year, in the season when It be comes necessary to plant new oysters to stock old grounds, there is an outbreak of unique piracy on the American coast. To replenish worked out beds young oysters,, known as seed oysters, are used. Oyster planters everywhere have a superstition that the grounds where seed oysters are found belong to everybody. This supersti tion is not shared by the owners of see* oyster beds, whose own superstition is that they must have good money for them. Therefore, each season there Is a little American holy war, each side fight ing for its articles of faith, and good, honest oyster planters become pirates for the time being. A popular scene for this is off New Lon lon, Conn., where, in the season, shot guns and rifles are in hearty demand., Hardly a night passes that a squadron! DC long, low and rakish craft does not! '.'.over in the offing, They are erstwhile honest oyster boats of genial and heartyr jaymen of Long Island and New Jersey/ who steal up the Sound to do the same to. %&% *he oyster beds. The seed bed owners-' t-S'-'% ire not timid and shrinking Christians, A.V^'T They don't believe in getting warrants' for the arrest of unknown thieves on tho, ',r **fe day after they have stolen and disap- t- peared. They use the ounce of prevention^ in the form of about that weight of pow der and shot, and they aim to hit. Tho. thieves, having sailed a long distance, ob-, ject earnestly to sail away without lh& spoils, and it needs a quite expensive* amount of shooting to impress on themi the fact that it is immoral to take what) does nol belong to them. They know that_tnefe will be shooting and they must have the sociable habit of*'!.,- bringing uns of their own. Shotguns at^ Jf long range are not particularly deadly^t but enough lead finds Its billet eyery aea-4 son to make a respectable' casualty Hs*.| Neither the shooters nor the shot burn] Jt i ,*33 ~S^H% $ :A y-."4ft