DAYS OF THE PIRATE

Shannon News, 16 October 1925, Page 4

DAYS OF THE PIRATE

HOW WARS ARE MADE. IMMORTAL MEN IN BONDAGE. Italy has been within an ace of entering upon war with Arghanistan owing to the imprisonment and murder of an Italian subject in an Afghan prison, says a London paper, and no one can see yet the end of the wrath of the nations with China and her rebels, who have been ill-treating and killing the subjects of other countries. It was the assassination of an Austrian Grand Duke at Sarajevo which touched off the mine that blew up half of the world in 1914, just as, when Britain went to war with Spain in 1739, the chief allegation against her was that one of her officials had cut off an ear of a British subject, Robert Jenkins, master mariner. The conflict was known as the war of Jenkins* ear. It is not always that nations were willing, to go to war on behalf of the liberty of individuals, and it was this callousness which gave the pirates of old so many of their oppor tunities. For centuries the north coast of Africa Avas a vast series of nests of pirates. Bondage of Cerrantes. Many a notable man and woman languished in the foul gaols of these pirates and their kings, tortured, starved, awaiting, ransom or death. Cervantes, the Shakespeare of Spain, author of tDon Quixote, spent five terrible years in such bondage in Algiers, and although he planned as romantic an escape as that of Monte Cristo, digging a cave and hiding in it for seven months, he was betrayed, in th'e end. There were pirates before before Cervantes' day and after. The future master of the world was once their prisoner; Julius Caesar was, for six weeks, in their hands. Caesar, as a young man of 24, was caught by pirates as he was crossing the Aegean Sea, and was held to ransom off the Carian coast. While a mission was sent to Rome to collect £IO,OOO as his ransom the pirates made much of him, permitting him to join in the games, and so on. Throughout his stay he warned them that he would hang them all in the and let him go when the money came, Plato in Chains. Once at liberty, Caesar collected a fleet, captured is former captors, and carried them to trial. Every man of them was slain though Caesar endeavoured to gain some remission of their sentence. But if they and not he end, but they thought he was joking world history would have been changed! And how improverished would have been the intellectual world had not the same good fortune attended the miseries of a still earlier captive. The great philosopher, Plato, to whom the world owes its knowledge of the imhad proved the executioners, how into slavery. He had visited Syracuse under a guarantee of safe conduct to instruct the tyrant Dlonyeius in the art of humane government. Plato's plain speaking on torture and slavery offended his royal master, who cast his illustrious visitor into chains and sold him into bondage. Happily, admirers of the philosopher bought his mortal Socrates, was himself sold liberty.