On the cabin table were piled over one hundred heaps of coin. Stowed away in a locker were the forty shares for the ship. Kidd stood at the table, a great pistol lying suggestively at hand in case of too much excitement, and by the door his personal servant, Richard Barlicorn, kept a kind of order.
One by one the crew came in and each swept into his hat the share allotted him, and with a grin and a duck of the head hastened out to the sunshine, to watch with gleaming eyes the enchanting sparkle of the greatest fortune that had ever come to him in the hard and sorrowful farming of the sea.
Everything was square and above board. Kidd had kept his florid promise to ballast the ship with gold and silver, and the workman had received his agreed hire.
It must have been a great day for Bomboo.
VII
While Kidd was fraternizing with pirates and turning the Quedagh Merchant’s cargo into gold at Madagascar, the solemn and serious gentlemen of the British Admiralty heard with pained disappointment how their trusty and well-beloved mariner was behaving himself in the distant seas. They saw gloomily that another experiment in the suppression of piracy had fizzled out, and that the private ship of war was not an approved instrument of police work. That method having been quite the opposite of successful, they ponderously planned another which, in the event—though we will not be concerned to follow it—was to prove if anything still less effective.
Their plan might as well be set in their own peculiar language, and showing that oddity of punctuation which made a state paper of this sort three enormous, mountainous sentences:
“By the king, a proclamation.
William R.
Whereas we being informed, by the frequent complaints of our good subjects trading to the East Indies, of several wicked practises committed on those seas, as well upon our own subjects as those of our allies, have therefore thought fit (for the security of the trade of those countries, by an utter extirpation of the pirates in all parts eastward of the Cape of Good Hope, as well beyond Cape Comorin as on this side of it, unless they shall forthwith surrender themselves, as in hereinafter directed) to send out a squadron of men-of-war, under the command of Captain Thomas Warren.