Mr. Every made a great friend of the island governor and gave all the promise in the world of becoming one of the leading malefactors of this region. Here he found the things he liked, for from these parts real navies of buccaneers set out to harry the Main itself, the American provinces,—everywhere, even, as I had seen, over to the far shores of Africa and India.
As for me, with the money I had from the Gunsway I bought passage on a ship going to the Virginia plantations.
“Farewell, wicked ship and wicked men,” thought I as the Virginia vessel passed by the Charles the Second at her moorings. “Farewell,” said I, gazing at the empty decks on which the sun lay white and hot; “good riddance, and may you be quickly entombed in the deep waters.”
Had I been a moral philosopher and not a mere sailorman I would have profited by my reflections.
Would that I had tarried in Virginia, where there is much to a man’s liking! But no, I longed to be at home and out of the sun; I longed for the cool vales of Somerset and the sweet evening air which from the Mendips blows the blue peat smoke about the thatched roofs of simple cottages; I longed for quietness and rest, and these honest longings drove me afoul of the cruel courts of justice.
I was still miserably weak when I crawled at length from the docks at Bristol up into the town. I lay a week in bed at a tavern in the High Street, afflicted with a return of the dry bellyache.
I felt danger to be about me; for all England over there was little talk but of the notorious Captain Every; no exaggeration of his crimes being too great or untrue to go down the gullets of the staring people. Behind it all was the East India Company, as well as the Mogul rulers, who dinned continually at the British Government for the punishment and extermination of pirates.
All of this was to make bad weather for me, yet I was resolved to go to my lords of the Admiralty and make a plain discovery of all the things which had taken place. Scarcely able to pull my breeches over my shrunken knees, I nevertheless paid my score and set out by coach for London.
The coach had not gone three leagues from town before she was hove to, and, behold you, the king’s messengers were there, looking for old Bill May.
“You are one of Every’s men,” they said, hauling me out the gangway. “We have a warrant to take you.”