The war maker

I was born on May 1, 1842, on Fifth Avenue, New York, not a long way north of Washington Square. My father was a distinguished surgeon and owned a large estate on Lake Champlain...

Having succeeded as a blockade runner I was ambitious to become a filibuster, which kindred vocation I thought offered even greater opportunities for adventure. Immediately afte...

During the Cuban filibustering days I gained more notoriety than I desired, even though it really was not a great deal, and as I did not wish to be known as a trouble-maker on t...

The first word that reached me on my arrival in New York near the end of September, 1870, was that my wife was seriously ill at her old home in Illinois. She had been on the Con...

I had been with Guzman Blanco for about a year after he proclaimed himself Dictator of Venezuela, on February 14, 1871, when I began to grow restless again. This was in no sense...

President Baez of Santo Domingo was short and thin and had a washed-out look, as though his skin had been faded by chemicals instead of by a three-quarters’ admixture of white b...

As a boy it was my ambition to fight Indians, but if I had known as much about them then as I do now, I would have selected pirates. They have none of the claims on life which t...

“The Beautiful White Devil,” a woman pirate whom I at first regarded as a purely fanciful being, born of the unreal atmosphere of the East, came into my life, in which she was d...

When I rejoined the “Leckwith,” after having started the Beautiful White Devil, who was a devil no longer but the one woman in the world for me, on her way to England to secure...

On my way back to England on the “Leckwith,” along toward the end of the still sadly remembered year of 1876, after having said farewell to the China Sea, with its beauty, booty...

In the old days, when I was cavorting with contraband throughout the West Indies and South America, I ran into one unpleasant incident which left me with a large moral,--or immo...

With my return to London in the early eighties, after I had been sent to prison by proxy for seven years in Australia, the old lure of the West Indies, with their continuous rio...

When I finally forsook Australia, near the close of 1889, accompanied by Leigh and Wilson, who had paid a penitentiary penalty for my revengeful ambition and their own carelessn...

The friendliness of Fate, in throwing me in the way of adventures which were beyond my discernment, was never more plainly evidenced than on my return to New York from Australia...

Notwithstanding the discouragement I had met with in Brazil, and the manner in which I had been deprived of a fresh fortune and much excitement by the discovery of my plan to se...

It was in vexed Venezuela that I was destined to end my days of deviltry, but not until after a protracted warfare, none the less bitter because it was conducted at long range,...