Swinging smartly around the northern nose of Madagascar, and shooting westerly, Bowen set the course for the Comoro Islands, some three hundred and fifty miles northwest of Madagascar and two hundred miles east of the coast of Africa. Apparently John was going to lose no time in his business, for the Comoros would be the nearest likely place to pick up a prize; no waiting until he made the distant littoral of India, you notice. His ultimate destination was Rajapore, way up in what is now called the Bombay presidency, but he did not care to go as the crow flies, but rather as the vulture does; pausing for anything that might be carrion.
The Comoros was a pretty good guess. At Mayotta, one of those islands, they found a ship commanded by George Weoley, which was loading with sugar, rum, cocoa oil and taking in fresh beef. The fact that Weoley’s vessel was in harbor did not mean anything to John Bowen; if the island itself had been navigable he would have put a crew on it and sailed it away. The Speedy Return shoved alongside their victim, and casually, as men doing an easy job away below their real abilities, a handful of fighters dropped to her decks. Nobody interfered with them but the unimaginative first mate, and his protest was met with a crack on the head which created an immediate promotion for the second mate. A little more than a year after this misfortune Captain Weoley wrote a plaintive letter to Mr. Pennyng, “Chief of the English East India Company’s Factory at Calicut,” giving a full and detailed account of the naughtiness of John Bowen, wherein he states that at Mayotta he fell into Bowen’s hands and was “detained by him after they had slain my chief mate and plundered what they pleased.”
Poor Mr. Weoley and the rest of his people were taken into the forecastle of the Speedy Return and thus recruited that ship’s list of able seamen. Whether Bowen burnt, scuttled or simply abandoned Weoley’s craft the good captain does not inform us, but we may be sure that when he headed off for India, he left that unfortunate vessel no better for his visit.
During the long and uneventful voyage—uneventful, that is, so far as the piracy game went—Captain Bowen, alas! did not observe those little amenities between brother captains which so pleasantly mitigate the sternness of the sea. Doubtless Mr. Weoley had to do many things aboard which drove a bitter iron into his soul. One day he might be lending a hand with the art of navigation if the load of rum captured at Mayotta should happen temporarily to incapacitate Captain Bowen; next day he might pitiably have to fetch and carry water at the behest of the sprawling villains, or again bend his elderly and stiffening back at the eternal task of pumping, and pumping ship in the Indian Ocean must have been—well, hot. He says himself that he received “many hazards of life and abuses from those villains.” Not the least of his grievances was that of listening through the long hours of a torrid night to the liquored Bowen boasting of his wickedness. That remark of Weoley’s places Bowen as the true, deliberate, almost romantic pirate and approximates him to the traditional pirate of fiction.
Off the coast of Malabar, Bowen nearly had to sober up, for he was come to his proper fishing grounds. Up and down this roadstead passed much of the commerce of the East Indies. Quite a medley it was, to be sure. There were craft from the ten-ton sloop belonging to a petty local merchant, up through increasing tonnage chartered by Moors, Persians, Armenians, Hindoos, to the two-and three-decker so-called East Indiaman, the ship of the august and imperial East India Company itself. In disturbing this traffic captain William Kidd had found a fortune in less than six months, and numerous pirates of many nations had here easily enriched themselves.
Captain Bowen, who must have been something of a joker as were so many of his outlaw colleagues, doubtless enjoyed immensely taking a ship with the name of Prosperous, which he did shortly after his entry into Indian waters proper. With a chuckle he realized that he had made the owners of the Content discontented; he intended the Speedy Return should go home neither slowly nor speedily, and it is very likely that he put the charterers of the Prosperous into bankruptcy. It might have been of a better omen in those days to name your ship the very opposite to your hopes; say call the Content the Dissatisfied; the Speedy Return the Never Come Back and the Prosperous, Hard Times,—in which case a marauding pirate would at least lose the dramatic pleasure of surprise.
Having bagged the Prosperous, Bowen put a crew on board and used her for an auxiliary, and with this augmented command in a few months, according to Weoley, he took “six sail of ship” and “hundreds ruined.” The last of these six ships was one from Surat, evidently of considerable size, for Bowen transferred all hands to her and then, being as drunk as a fool, entertained the amazed city of Rajapore with a grand nautical bonfire made up both of the Prosperous and the Speedy Return. How uneasily the stockholders of the Scotch Indian-African trading company would have turned in their beds had that lurid light gleamed against their far-off window panes!
This man Bowen was an incorrigible ship burner, which proves that he had not the heart of a true sailorman or the first instincts of a real conqueror of the sea.
On this captured Surat ship, when Bowen got over his pyrotechnic spree, he counted up his men and found, so Weoley records, “70 Lascars (native of India) and 146 fighting men (the Lascars being used as sailors) of which part are 43 English, the better part of the company French, the rest Negroes (our Jamaica friends), Dutch and other nations that cries ‘yaw’.” Quaint foible! Amid all his sufferings poor Captain Weoley could still find a feeling of irritation for men that “cries ‘yaw’” instead of “yes.”
Bowen steered from Rajapore down along the Malabar coast until he came to Cochin, a Portuguese settlement and where a miscalled Portuguese war fleet made its anchorage. Those old sieves were the local maritime joke, and a brisk pirate would think little of using them for mooring buoys. This aggregation had once gone out after the formidable Captain Kidd and much to its surprise and pain had found him. It had never been known to attempt anything notable since. Certainly, they did not trouble John Bowen. As Bowen dawdled along in these parts, touching at this and that small port for frolic or land robbery or both, “about three leagues to the northward of Cochin” Weoley states that “I got clear of the pirates.” Thus ended the worst seven months in the life of that worthy mariner.