PDF With Napoleon In Russia by Faber Du Faur in History

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In a life stranger than any fiction; Grace O'Malley; daughter of a clan chief in County Mayo; went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She had a fleet of galleys under her command (four of them Scots). In 1559 her husband was killed in an ambush and not long after she took as a lover a survivor of a shipwreck. Clansmen came over from Scotland and murdered him. She tracked them down and had them killed; and from then on follow episodes of plunder; kidnapping; piracy and general mayhem. In 1586 she was captured by the Earl of Ormond and was actually on the scaffold with a rope around her neck when she was saved on the orders of Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth offered to make her a countess. Grace refused; but was officially allowed to be a 'privateer' thereafter. She may also have been an intelligencer for Elizab