What is "freebooters"

Usage examples of "freebooters".

In fact, so daring were their crimes that the home governments, stirred at last by these outrageous barbarities, seriously undertook the suppression of the freebooters, lopping and trimming the main trunk until its members were scattered hither and thither, and it was thought that the organization was exterminated.

At last the Spaniards, no longer able to endure these assaults against their commerce, sent a great force against the freebooters to drive them out of their island stronghold.

So it was that all the western world was, in those days, infested with armed bands of cruising freebooters or pirates, who used to stop merchant vessels and take from them what they chose.

They would even have stopped the pirates from doing what they did if they could, but their provincial governments were too weak to prevent the freebooters from robbing merchant vessels, or to punish them when they came ashore.

He declared that he knew some of the freebooters very well and that at the most they were poor, misdirected wretches who had, by easy gradation, slid into their present evil ways, from having been tempted by the government authorities to enter into privateering in the days of the late war.

A brief description of this one-time notorious rendezvous of freebooters might not be out of place.

The other members of the party were persons of inferior rank and desperate fortunes, who were now ready to rise in that part of the country, as they did afterwards in the year 1715, under Forster and Derwentwater, when a troop, commanded by a Border gentleman, named Douglas, consisted almost entirely of freebooters, among whom the notorious Luck-in-a-bag, as he was called, held a distinguished command.

Every alehouse, wine shop, inn, and brothel did a roaring business, when half the freebooters of the Western Sea swaggered through the cobbled alleys of red Tortage with pouches bursting with gold, bellies bulging with beer and ale, and hearts inflamed by lust and truculence.

Or the three freebooters who, upon a careful search, will of a certainty seem to have too much money on them?

Much better to blame the three freebooters, who had had no connection with any nobility faction.

Forget, for just a moment, that regular soldiers thought of freebooters as little more than land pirates, mostly because during peacetime, and around the fringes of war, they spent more time hunting them down than working with them.

The freebooters tended to report directly to an officer, who was expected to take a long view of things and understand that too many unnecessary fatalities among the mercenaries inevitably meant widespread mercenary desertion or revolt.

Baron Morray was explaining to Baron Mondegreen, over their own late breakfast, about how three ill-mannered freebooters had interfered with his sleep.

Neither she nor he were easily impressed, but the three freebooters had impressed both of them.

Bought at least two weeks before he got here and outfitted with a nice crew of multiracial freebooters and cutthroats.