Crossword-Solution: SEADOGS 7 letters, 17 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 9

When Captain Trigger announced his resolve to stay on board, where he belonged, these vainglorious old seadogs elected to remain with him to the end.

The little English "seadogs," not much larger than small pleasure yachts, were led by Sir Francis Drake.

After a generation of half-piratical depredations by the English seadogs against the Spanish treasure fleets and the Spanish settlements in America, King Philip, exasperated beyond all patience and urged on by a bigot's zeal for the Catholic Church, began deliberately to prepare the Great Armada, which was to crush at one blow the insolence, the independence, and the religion of England.

Here comes one who has so long been familiar with tempestuous weather that he takes the bluster of the storm for a friendly greeting, as if it should say, "How fare ye, brother?" He is a retired sea-captain, wrapped in some nameless garment of the pea-jacket order, and is now laying his course towards the Marine Insurance Office, there to spin yarns of gale and shipwreck, with a crew of old seadogs like himself.

None of your red-faced, yo-hoing, growling seadogs; just a kindly, generous old sailor, with only one bee in his bonnet." "What sort of bee?" "Pirates!" in a ghostly whisper.