Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

Yo-ho-ho, for a pirate’s life!

So good-natured were the sea bandits that they treated the two Portuguese ladies with urbane consideration and the despoiled crew with tolerance. They kept them all on the Charles that night, and with the coming of morning restored them to their ship and bade them be off.

Three days later the quartermaster, the carpenter and the captain, composing a committee on division of profits, ordered a pair of scales set up on the quarter-deck, from which each man had weighed out to him his share of the fascinating dust. Added to that was a neat little bonus of good, hard-ringing Portuguese gold coins, forty-five hundred dollars’ worth of which were gathered in from this very profitable find.

Rich with the plucking of the gold bird, the Charles and her tender ran rapidly from the stage and stopped nowhere until they were abreast the south end of the Brazilian coast and in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro.

Quelch was about ready to call it a day. The big scoop had been made, and by this time the coast must have been getting a little warm for him. The alarm was certainly raised; for in the last ship he attacked—a Portuguese two-hundred-tonner carrying hides and other merchandise—he met with his first real fight. This ship did not stop at Quelch’s summoning round shot but crowded on sail and made haste to get away, thus showing that Captain Bastian, her master, had had warning of the character of the New England brig and her tender.

After chasing her for two days the pirates pulled up with her, and the Portuguese, after a sharp trading of shot, gave in. When the pirates gained her deck there was some altercation with Captain Bastian, who was shot down and his body heaved overboard. In the reminiscence of this incident there were several of the rascals who claimed the honor of shooting Bastian, but after a quarrel which nearly came to fighting, Cooper Scudamore—a minor ringleader, it seems—was conceded to be the hero of that black job.

The captors took off hides, tallow and beef and then left the Portuguese. They were ready for home now, and the little tender which had journeyed a thousand miles with them was dismantled and set adrift to float upon some Brazilian beach. The Charles swung round and drove northward for Boston, home and—not mother. The end of February, 1704, was when they struck off from the Rio Region, concluding just about three months of active piracy, perhaps three and a half.

It surely looked reckless for Quelch to come back to Boston with the good merchants’ brig and with no trophies in his hold of England’s enemies but shamefully of England’s ally, Portugal. It was as reckless as it looked; but mere recklessness never bothered John Quelch.

Perhaps the yarn that Anthony Holding and he had spun together gave him a confidence that he would not otherwise have had. It was a plausible thing. All hands were to say that Captain Plowman had died naturally, true only in part; that thereafter while cruising for Frenchmen according to Plowman’s commission, now executed by Quelch, they beat down as far as Brazil way.

Here they met with coast Indians who told them that a rich Portuguese brig had been recently wrecked in those parts, from which the Indians had obtained great treasure, of which the gold dust and doubloons on the Charles were a part, having been given to Quelch and his men by the pleasant natives, who had little notion of the worth of those things.