The Great Blackbeard Comes Upon The Stage

So long as the people of the Carolinas were prosperous and able to capture and execute pirates who interfered with their trade the Atlantic sea-robbers kept away from their ports, but this prosperity did not last. Indian wars broke out, and in the course of time the colonies became very much weakened and impoverished, and then it was that the harbor of Charles Town began to be again interesting to the pirates.

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Eyraud And Bompard

There are accounts of this case in Bataille “Causes Criminelles et Mondaines,” 1890, and in Volume X. of Fouquier “Causes Celebres.” “L’Affaire Gouffe” by Dr. Lacassagne, Lyons, 1891, and Goron “L’Amour Criminel” may be consulted.

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A Pirate Potentate

Sometime in the last half of the seventeenth century on a quiet farm in a secluded part of Wales there was born a little boy baby. His father was a farmer, and his mother churned, and tended the cows and the chickens, and there was no reason to imagine that this gentle little baby, born and reared in this rural solitude, would become one of the most formidable pirates that the world ever knew. Yet such was the case.

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Vitalis And Marie Boyer

I found the story of this case in a brochure published in Paris as one of a series of modern causes celebres. I have compared it with the reports of the trial in the Gazette des Tribunaux.

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Guilty Or Not Guilty?

A few weeks after the lucky termination of the Sandford affair I was engaged in the investigation of a remarkable case of burglary, accompanied by homicide, which had just occurred at the residence of Mr. Bagshawe, a gentleman of competent fortune, situated within a few miles of Kendal in Westmoreland.

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The Gambler

A little more than a year after the period when adverse circumstances—chiefly the result of my own reckless follies—compelled me to enter the ranks of the metropolitan police, as the sole means left me of procuring food and raiment, the attention of one of the principal chiefs of the force was attracted towards me by the ingenuity and boldness which I was supposed to have manifested in hitting upon and unraveling a clue which ultimately led to the detection and punishment of the perpetrators of an artistically-contrived fraud upon an eminent tradesman of the west end of London.

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