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A Paper read before the Maryland Historical Society,
"Captain Richard Ingle, ... a pirate and a rebel, was discovered hovering about the settlement."--_McSherry, History of Maryland, p. 59._
"The destruction of the records by him [Ingle] has involved this episode in impenetrable obscurity, &c."--_Johnson, Foundation of Maryland, p. 99._
"Captain Ingle, the pirate, the man who gloried in the name of 'The Reformation.'"--_Davis, "The Day Star," p. 210._
"That Heinous Rebellion first put in Practice by that Pirate Ingle."--_Acts of Assembly, 1638-64, p. 238._
"Those late troubles raised there by that ungrateful Villaine Richard Ingle."--_Ibid., p. 270._
"I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."--_Jefferson, Works, Vol. III, p. 105._
A Paper read before the Maryland Historical Society,
HENRY STOCKBRIDGE, JOHN W. M. LEE, BRADLEY T. JOHNSON.
PRINTED BY JOHN MURPHY & CO. PRINTERS TO THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, BALTIMORE, 1884.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the American colonies, from Massachusetts to South Carolina, were at intervals subject to visitations of pirates, who were wont to appear suddenly upon the coasts, to pillage a settlement or attack trading vessels and as suddenly to take flight to their strongholds. Captain Kidd was long celebrated in prose and verse, and only within a few years have credulous people ceased to seek his buried treasures. The arch-villain, Blackbeard, was a terror to Virginians and Carolinians until Spotswood, of "Horseshoe" fame, took the matter in hand, and sent after him lieutenant Maynard, who, slaying the pirate in hand to hand conflict, returned with his head at the bowsprit.[1] Lapse of time has cast a romantic and semi-mythologic glamor around these depredators, and it is in many instances at this day extremely difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. The unprotected situation of many settlements along the seaboard colonies rendered them an easy prey to rapacious sea rovers, but it might have been expected that the Maryland shores of the Chesapeake bay would be free from their harassings. The province, however, it seems was not to enjoy such good fortune, for in the _printed_ annals of her life appears the name of one man, who has been handed down from generation to generation as a "pirate," a "rebel" and an "ungrateful villain," and other equally complimentary epithets have been applied to him. The original historians of Maryland based their ideas about him upon some of the statements made by those whom he had injured or attacked, and who differed from him in political creed. The later history writers have been satisfied to follow such authors as Bozman, McMahon and McSherry, or to copy them directly, without consulting original records. To the general reader, therefore, who relies upon these authorities, Richard Ingle is "a pirate and rebel" still.[2]