Every day brought new excitements as the endless war with Spain unrolled. Pirate ships set out from Long Wharf with the blessings of the Commonwealth, half-hidden guns peeping black from port­holes. The sailors who crowded into Mrs. Copley's shop for a last hunk of tobacco before the adventure began had cutlasses in their belts, and their voices were thin with anticipation. Watching pi­rate sails vanish down the horizon, an imaginative lad could coin endless visions of blood and glory. Then months later there would be a running of feet on Long Wharf and a staring from the tip as the privateer came home towing a prize. In 1748, when Copley was ten, the frigate Bethel out of Boston, armed with only fourteen guns and carrying only thirty-eight men, brought following docilely in its wake a Spanish treasure ship of twenty-four guns. More than a hundred prisoners lay bound beneath its decks. The breathless rumour went round that in the Spaniard's hold was a hundred thousand pounds in ducats and doubloons.

We should expect an adventurous boy brought up in such an at­mosphere to run off to sea at an early age, ship as a cabin boy, and return at last resplendent with strange oaths and cutlass wounds. Or if he became a painter we should expect his canvases to be in­stinct with the dash of adventure: battles would be glorified, gen­erals and privateers. But we may search Copley's work in vain for such pictures as these; rarely has a great artist been so unreceptive to the possibilities of romance. Neither interested nor impressed by men of physical action, Copley idealized sensitive intellectual faces, portraying them so lovingly that they formed the subject matter of his finest portraits. And when in the manner of his time he turned to scenes of war, his canvases revealed no taste for carnage. In the best of his battle pictures. The Death of Major Pierson, the eye is caught and held by a weeping group in the foreground; the wife and child of the dying hero wail, louder than the guns and the shouts of victory, their anguish at man's inhumanity to man.

Copley's few paintings of the sea are tinged with horror. In his The Repulse of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, he shows the ocean full of the writhing forms of dying men; half-naked, mangled bodies struggle in every contortion of pain with the enveloping flood. Only one other of his important canvases deals primarily with the ocean, and that is a brilliantly painted representation of night­mare. In the foreground, a naked and defenceless swimmer sprawls in a contortion of anguish; he is being attacked by a shark. Behind him several men in a small boat huddle together in helpless terror, or vainly gesture to bring assistance when assistance is past hope. And the water in which the victim flounders is a sickly yellow-green, a stringy and repulsive element in which naked men are attacked by monsters.

Whenever in the many letters that have come down to us Copley refers to ships or the sea, he does so with displeasure. If he had to travel from Boston to New York and Philadelphia, he travelled by land, although the roads were so bad that water offered.a much quicker and more comfortable route. As we shall see, Copley hesi­tated for years before he made the trip across the ocean so necessary to a Colonial painter, and he could never force himself to return.

Eighteenth-century seafaring was not altogether romantic; there was another side that might impress a lad more sensitive than ad­venturesome. Watching from his mother's window, Copley saw rebellious sailors hanging from yardarms; he heard the cut of cat-o'-nine-tails on naked backs. Impressed seamen who had been ' knocked down in the streets of London and carried off in stinking holds without a word to their families; battered, wincing derelicts limped into Mrs. Copley's shop, and their hands trembled when they picked up the tobacco the boy dealt out to them. In 1747, Commodore Charles Knowles tried this British custom in Boston. Annoyed by desertions, he landed a press gang that kidnapped ap­prentices as they strolled down Long Wharf. Then the Boston pop­ulace rose and rioted for three long days, while the Royal Governor fled to Castle William and the naval commander threatened to bombard the town. With anxious eyes, the nine-year-old Copley watched sails rise on the British frigate as it manoeuvred into posi­tion. But the commodore did not shoot, and in the end was forced to release the men he had stolen.

The slave trade, too, had its horrors. The West Indian planters, most of whose black imports died anyway during the first five years on the steaming and unhealthy plantations, would buy only prime human stock. Negroes who had sickened but not died during the long voyage from Africa, children born on the voyage or accepted in the jungle as a compromise to close a deal, these found no buyers. The traders were forced to ship such defective merchandise on to Boston and sell it for what it would bring as domestic servants. How