All told, according to one report, this boodling was worth a hundred thousand pounds a year to the city. Tavern keepers, whores, retailers, and others flourished as buccaneers swaggered through the streets with purses full of hard money—Arabian dinars, Hindustani mohurs, Greek byzants, French louis d’or, Spanish doubloons. Merchants reaped huge profits (as great as “200,300, yea sometimes 400” percent, according to the Rev. John Miller) on silk carpets, muslins, ivory fans, ebony and teakwood chairs, East India cabinets, looking-glasses, vases of hammered silver and brass, and other exotic
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