Two women pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, deserve men tion, as both rose high in their ancient dual professions.
The famous Captain Kidd was no pirate at all, but the victim or scapegoat of political intrigue.
With the peace of 1815 came a great increase in West Indian piracy, which was assisted by the inability of the Spanish authori ties to cope with the pirates while their colonies were seething with revolt. At last the British and American navies combined to root out the evil once and for all in the Atlantic, although piracy lasted in the Greek islands until nearly 185o.
The end of piracy, after centuries, was brought about by public feeling, backed up by the steam-engine and telegraph. The last relic exists to-day in China, where a nest of troublesome pirates still carries on the old trade in spite of the navies of the foreign powers. The Chinese pirates ship themselves as ordinary coolie passengers on a coastal steamer and, at a given signal, produce revolvers and hold up the officers and crew and compel them to navigate the ship to their headquarters at Bias bay, where the ship is plundered and officers and passengers held for ransom.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Mommsen's History of Rome; Monson's "Naval Tracts" in Churchill's Voyages, v., 5 (London, 1744-46), and in Navy Record Society (1902) ; State Trials, vols. xiii., xiv., xv. (London, 1812) ; Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates (1724) gives full and accurate details of the lives, activities and death of the most notorious pirates of the early 18th century ; and a second volume, published in London in 1726, does the same for the Madagascar pirates. It used to be said that Charles Johnson was inaccurate and unreliable, but recent research has proved again and again that, whoever he was, he had first-hand knowledge of his subject and is to be relied upon in almost every detail. F. C. Bradler, Piracy in the West Indies and its Suppression (1923) ; G. F. Dow and J. H. Ed monds, The Pirates of the New England Coast (163o-173o). See also Publications of Marine Research Society, Salem, Mass., 1923.