“There’s a strange man,” he shouted as loudly as a quavering voice would permit, indicating with a backward jerk of his thumb. “Aloft—”
The Thing was moving about the yards; there was a sort of solid blackness to It that somehow made It visible even against its somber background.
Turning the helm over to the boatswain, the mate rushed below for his pistol, but when he came back to the deck the Thing was gone.
Richards laughed thinly. “The Devil’s signed on with us, boys!”
“Then that’s the end o’ us,” groaned the boatswain.
But the fact that a New Hand was on the ship if not on her articles was not immediately disastrous. For very shortly after that vivid night, Blackbeard, recovered now of his bout, met and took a very fine French ship, which was in so excellent a condition that to call it “salvage” was indeed the very subtlest of piratical jokes.
And the joke was made good, too, when, taking her at once into Ocracoke, His Excellency, with little hesitation, gave her captor a certificate of salvage, accepting as his fee for the certificate some sixty hogsheads of sugar. What the Governor did not use, Toby Knight obligingly allowed to be stored in the Knight barn.
This was the final straw that caused the proverbial fatal accident to the camel. North Carolina, at the end of patience, now flared up, and, ignoring her own corrupt authorities, appealed to the capable Alexander Spotswood, Governor of Virginia, for the extermination of the pest of Ocracoke Inlet.
Virginia heard and responded and despatched Captain Brand and Lieutenant Maynard, each in command of a small ship of war, to the Carolina coast in quest of Blackbeard.
Brand and Maynard appreciated the size of their job, so they gathered into their crews picked men who were volunteering for the duty, and who would be likely to keep the same zestful lookout for the oncoming terror as does a whaler in fat and profitable fishing grounds for the dark bulk which shall fill all his barrels with oil.