Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

Clearly, things were not just as they ought to be. In the twilight, startlingly, a rough tongue ordered them away from the cabin. A sentinel was there; Peter Roach stood guard at the captain’s door, armed with a drawn cutlass. Had the skipper directed this?

Then they noticed that the cabin door was bolted from the outside with a marlin-spike thrust through the bolt socket, the bolt itself having long been lost. Obviously this was not the captain’s doing.

Pimer and Clifford looked at each other as men do in peril. Something very evil was moving about them. At dark Quelch came back in the boat, and there was a whispering between him and Holding. The ship lights were hung out; and the lantern revealed something of the knobbly, stupid face of Peter Roach, still standing at his sinister watch. No one moved toward the ill-fortuned cabin.

Peter Roach, the sentinel, could not be said to have been a peculiarly sensitive person. Some time later he was to die with as little feeling for himself as he had had for poor Plowman. He was an automaton.

And so this crowd of men lay all about the hot decks, waiting for the captain to die. Those were hard hours for Clifford and Pimer and the one or two other loyal men.

A little before midnight the cries of the sufferer ebbed away, and Peter Roach stolidly left his post and as stolidly grunted a few words at Holding. He and Quelch, taking a lantern, entered the cabin and found that nature had at last done their job for them: Captain Plowman was dead.

Captain Quelch, now, if you please, by the law and usage of the sea.

Anthony Holding bobbed his tarry pigtail low in grimacing courtesy—place was little to him, power everything. And he was the power on this ship. He ordered the captain’s body thrown overboard like so much rubbish. Then he called all hands together in the waist of the brig and openly declared that which undoubtedly he had long secretly prepared for,—piracy. The proposal was acclaimed with a unanimity which indicated premeditation.

It was no time for Pimer or Clifford to talk, though manfully they made an effort at protest with no result but to endanger their own safety. That they were not tossed over the side at once is a marvel. The only question that agitated this bandit conference was where to pirate, one suggesting this field and another that. Somebody, probably Holding, persuaded them that Brazil, then a colony of Portugal, and the South American coast gave the most promise of gain.

This policy and its execution were really masterly. They must have been the products of careful pondering based upon information more or less exact. Consider it geographically. From Cape San Augustine, where Brazil thrusts its elbow into the Atlantic Ocean, away down to Rio de Janeiro is one long, continuous coast line, well populated even in the early eighteenth century with numerous ports of small and great importance. Starting then at the cape, a pirate need only drop continually down the latitudes, pausing as occasion suggested to pick up prizes, never staying in a vicinity or returning to it to be captured. At Rio, where the cruise was to be finished, swing out far from the coast and make a bee line for home. It was an able plan and strong because so simple.