Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

But he was only one of many who had to learn that, above all things, pirates loved their little jokes, especially some delicate impertinence like this to constituted authority.

VI

The ship seemed awfully quiet after the roaring Williams had gone. Something was missing, but what it was they did not just know. Unsuspectingly, the grim jest of sending Williams home to the gallows had removed the heart of the piratical enterprise. If the Revenge expected to keep on the grand account, fellows like Williams, who could do the rough work, were essential, and without him the great affair threatened to simmer back to the status of a mere mutiny.

Then, too, the presence of the warship, with its promise of hundreds of pounds of hot lead and forest of cutlasses, awakened unhappy perturbation, and stirred even sluggish imaginations with pictures of uncomfortable events. The lads pensively stared at their finger nails and realized only one insistent fact,—that they must depart the region forthwith.

Some kind of retreat began to be openly proposed, but just whither; that was the vexing thing. At this point John Gow forfeits a place in the first rank of pirates for he shows that he did not know the fine points of the game. He is now not far from the place where Henry Avery, some years before, had stolen the Charles the Second, a ship on which he was mate, and, with his exploiting of a discontented crew, was in circumstances very similar to those now surrounding Gow. Avery, it may be remembered, came first of all to the Madeiras, but the point of separation between him and Gow is that Avery knew that the local coast was not the most advantageous place for piracy, knew that the jeweled Indies was, and set his unswerving prow resolutely thither.

A moment’s thought concerning the conditions of piracy suggests Gow’s difficulty. A pirate’s main resource was in merchant cargoes; only luck threw him the fabled treasure ships. For all he could tell about, a pirate might have to plug along in a quiet way of trade, hoping for the time when a Quedagh Merchant or a Gunsway would reward his patient application. But the successful raiding of merchant ships put the pirate in the same situation that the honest shore trader was in,—to make any profit at all he had to keep his stock turned over. Now, in the Indies, while a pirate was waiting his big haul, a system of coast “fences”, or buyers of stolen freight, made possible his continuance in business. Kidd and Avery and all the rest of them used these folk for the disposal of their plunder, for, as we have seen, one of these gentlemen, Cogi Commodo, boasted to the steward of poor Captain Green’s ill-fortuned ship that he had been “merchant” on the Malabar coast, to the eminent Kidd. These illicit traffickers supplied the interlopers and other competitors of the British East India Company, as well as catering to the native markets. The arrangement suited everybody except John Company.

But in European waters the only possible opening for a pirate’s wares—that is of the usual merchant sort—was in methods akin to smuggling. That, however, was already a complicated and preëmpted business, and in taking any ship it would always be questionable whether her freight were dutiable and therefore worth-while contraband. Smuggling could never flourish so haphazardly.

Last of all, but sufficiently troublesome, was the stricter policing of the European coasts. Without these guardians, of course, the customs would have entirely collapsed and piracy rather than smuggling would have prospered by maintaining a sort of cheap local bazaar, such as Blackbeard did in the Carolinas. The lack of effective policing made possible the brisk trip of John Quelch, the Boston boy, down the Brazil coast, for a cargo taken in one latitude was auctioned off in another and no “fence” was needed to aid in dodging a vigilant authority.

The Revenge thus was driven off the coasts of Spain and Portugal by lack of a market and incidentally by the police patrol.

Gow and his crew turned the matter over and over in a long debate, which resulted in a determination to sail away to Gow’s native Orkney Islands, a decision which can only be laid to the peculiar fatality which seems to work the self-destruction of wickedness. The meeting must have discussed the possibilities of the East and West Indies, Madagascar, Africa and the Red Sea, not to mention a flyer in slaving on the Guinea Coast; in other words, all the available opportunities for a rising young pirate, but why, against these, were chosen the lean and foggy Orkneys, where even the poor copper penny was worked to death, is a puzzler.