VII
We turned Cape Lopez, and stopping for water at Annibo,[7] ran onward to the Cape of Good Hope, where we took a small coasting sloop, rifled her and let her go. Thence we came to Madagascar, where we made some stay. I had been here many times before in honest ships, and it was with shame that I now came in with this unlawful company.
[7] Anamaboe.
Not that there was anybody there whose rebuke I feared, for Madagascar was the wickedest place—outside the West Indies—in the ocean; but I was not easy for thinking that I was now one among those whom I had regarded in times past as malefactors. Three years had passed since my last visit, and piracy had swelled so much as to become a very great evil.
I saw, too, so many more pirating fellows from the West Indies, for the more part Englishmen hailing first from the American provinces, but so outlandish looking a tribe one would never have known them for our countrymen except by their speech, they affecting a Spanish style with bright silk sashes, silk shirts, ruffled breeches; many wearing earrings, and not a few with heavy gold chains about their necks, the true fashion of Caribbean sea robbers. Verily this place had become the very metropolis of rascality, the base for criminal cruises all the way to the Gulf of Aden and the coast of India.
Mr. Every could not come the Madeira game here but had to pay for the provisions he bought and the cows he purchased to slaughter and salt up, for none trafficked here save with a naked blade in one hand and the price in the other.
At Madagascar I took the sickness which even now afflicts me and has reduced me to the poorest state of body and mind ever a man fell into. I was too old for junketing about with pirates, being past sixty years of age, for the long deprivations and exposures of my life at sea—the inclement weather and the intolerable food I had had to endure—made me fit rather for a cottage in my native Mendip Hills, in the parish of Cheddar, rather than in so tan-chasing a fly-by-night company as cruel circumstances had put me.
The ship’s doctor found at Madagascar the chance to quit our way of life and fled the ship, leaving me and a number of other sick men to suffer in our cabins, helpless on the hands of people who were more drunken than kindhearted. How often have I lain on my bed and watched the cook, unstable with rum, tacking and yawing at my threshold, likely on an instant to founder and cast the kid of hot meat upon my head!
Just before we left this wicked and riotous island, one of the Caribbee pirates—an Englishman first from Boston in New England—brought to me the doctor of his ship; a sharp rascal who was sought in his own country for many crimes. This fellow bled me in two ways: one for my good with his lance, the other for his good with his pilfering fingers, for in mauling about my body he slyly stole thirty gold guineas from my belt. He said I ailed with the putrid fever and the dry bellyache. He found me with two diseases; he left me with a third, a burning rancor against the villain which can never be eased save by bleeding; and I have long carried the leech which can suck deep of his venal blood.
Mr. Every now made sail for Joanna.[8]