“The Captain left the prisoners and a rebellious portion of his followers at the mouth of the river and we sailed to Jamaica, where he settled down to the life of a quiet gentleman. As he was wealthy he commanded respect and nobody questioned his record. Upon his transition into the immaterial state a few years afterward we had the good fortune to have him join our party, and we found him in every way delightful.
“Our ghostly little company was later augmented by the addition of Captain Teach, and no more blood-thirsty sea rover ever scuttled a ship, cut a throat, or blew open a treasure safe. He was of the roaring, ranting type that gives the tinge of the melodramatic to piratical annals. He had a black beard of inordinate length that reached from up around his eyes to his waist, and he used to twist it into tails with bits of ribbon and fix it up around his ears.
“We were all with him on board his big ship, the ‘Great Allen’ mounting forty guns, the name of which he afterwards changed to the ‘Queen Anne’s Revenge.’ He was a hard drinker and we agreed that we had never seen a more turbulent and desperate character. For years he terrorized the sea from the Carolinas to Trinidad.
“One night we witnessed the capture of a Yankee vessel bound from New York to Jamaica, under command of a Captain Taylor. The pirates streamed over the larboard quarter of the fated ship, but they met with unexpected resistance. The attackers were nearly all disembodied when suddenly, with blood curdling shrieks, Teach bounded over the side on to the deck into the midst of the pirates, and Taylor’s shade told us afterwards that he had never seen a more horrible object. Lighted tapers hung from the rim of his broad black hat that revealed the whites of the gleaming eyes, the gnashing teeth, frightful red mouth, and flying masses of black whiskers. He waved a huge cutlass and a brace of pistols hung on his breast. With demonic howls and yells this fiendish figure plunged among the Yankees. Encouraged by this sudden apparition the pirates rallied and the ship was soon theirs. The dead were heaved overboard. From them we soon learned all of the particulars of the fight, and they were most dramatic. Teach used to burn pots of brimstone in his cabin to make his crew think he was the devil, and many of them believed it. He kept a big green parrot in a cage on the deck of his ship. In the midst of the smoke and din of battle the raucous voice of the ill-omened bird would be heard above the roar of the conflict, yelling, ‘Go it!—Go it!—Pieces-of-Eight!—Pieces-of-Eight!’
“WITH DEMONIC HOWLS AND YELLS THIS FIENDISH FIGURE PLUNGED AMONG THE YANKEES”
(From “The Book of Pirates”)
“Teach once marooned a lot of his men, after an unusually rich capture, so as to avoid paying their share of the profits. He put them on a small desert island and, with loud curses and imprecations, sailed away. Some of them were subsequently rescued and accomplished his transition. When we met him afterwards he was much subdued but eager to square accounts with his old enemies—another illustration of the survival of a ruling passion under conditions that would seem to discourage its activity.
“Our party now consisted of Kinisi, Sidi ben Musa, Red Beard, Morgan, Teach and myself, and you will admit that this was quite a formidable troop of specters. We spent many years together which I shall pass over, as there were no events of especial interest—merely a long lapse of spiritual quiet.
“In 1818 we were all in New York and had the honor of meeting the shade of Captain William Kidd one night on the steps of the sub-treasury. The Captain had been hanged in England as a pirate in 1701 and for over forty years his bones had rattled in an iron cage, suspended from a gibbet near the Thames. He informed us that he at one time buried considerable treasure in the neighborhood of the Island of Manhattan, and his object in staying in the vicinity was to haunt people who were constantly digging to find his gold.
“He seemed exceedingly good natured and charitable in his ideas. He wanted somebody to find the money who would devote it to some great benevolent use, that in a way would wipe out the foul stains of its acquirement. Doubtless you have noticed that nowadays many senile and repentant, successful and therefore honorable gentlemen are heaving great masses of gold into public benefactions to ease similar pangs of avenging conscience.