The Zaporogues presented a. strange mixture of virtues and vices difficult to be described. Merciless and cruel destroyers in their predatory incursions abroad, they were nevertheless just, hospitable, and humane at home. They possessed everything in common; the doors of their huts were never kept locked, and any stranger, without distinction, excepting a Jew, was in the day-time at full liberty to enter them unnoticed, and to help himself freely to whatever he might require, money excepted. Lost money and other articles of value were by the finder openly exposed in places of public resort, in order to be reclaimed by the proper owners. A thief, when apprehended, and his guilt clearly established, was fastened to a post erected in the centre of the sitche; near him were placed a bottle of brandy and a stick, and every passer-by had a right to taste of the brandy and to beat the culprit.
Amongst these ferocious banditti, who spared no one in war, the murderer of one of his companions in arms was buried alive, stretched out upon the body of his victim. A punishment no less terrible was reserved for that nameless crime, for the commission of which, as may well be supposed, the law already noticed enacting the rigid exclusion of women from the sitche would naturally furnish a fatal inducement.
A Zaporogue was never permitted to remain for three consecutive days inactive: if no warlike affairs were for the moment on hand, he must busy himself in the chase of the bear or the wolf, or in the fisheries, which were carried on in all seasons throughout the year.
This isolated community of brigands and roving corsairs might have passed unheeded down the great stream of human events into oblivion, had it not been for the fact of their being entrusted with the duty of keeping watch and guard over the great frontier of Poland; and were it not that their maritime expeditions had been fraught to surrounding states with very considerable danger/ When the Cossacks under Khmielnitski separated from Poland, the Zaporogues did not follow their example, but formed themselves into a distinct community, nominally indeed apart from and independent of the others; but, in reality, never properly entitled to the rank of an independent state: for living as they did under the nominal protection of Poland, Russia, or of Turkey, and constantly changing masters, they in point of fact subsisted only upon the produce of their inroads upon their neighbours, by whom, consequently, and justly too, they were looked upon in no other light than that of pirates, lawless adventurers, and common robbers.
The Zaporogues were in constant correspondence with all the other Cossack races, even with those at the remotest distance; forming the nucleus or central point of every plundering expedition, and exercising over all the other tribes a marked influence and ascendancy.
In the wars of Charles XII. against Russia, alternately cajoled and horribly maltreated by Peter the Great, they appeared to incline in favour of the czar's adversaries: they even, by the good offices of Mazeppa, concluded a treaty with the Swedish king at Dykanka.