lamented most deeply his own situation, for he was one of those men whose early good impressions were not entirely effaced. He told me that those who had taken me were no better than pirates and their end would be the halter, but he added, with peculiar emotion, “I will never be hung as a pirate,” showing me a bottle of laudanum which he had found in my medicine chest and saying, “If we are overtaken, this shall cheat the hangman before we are condemned.”
Another day’s cruise to the eastward and the trim, taut little Exertion suffered the melancholy fate of shipwreck, not bravely in a gale, but mishandled and wantonly gutted by her captors. First she stranded on a bar while making in for a secluded creek, and was floated after throwing overboard the deck-load of shooks for making sugar-barrels. Then her sails were stripped, the rigging cut to pieces, and the masts chopped over the side lest they be sighted from seaward. After that the pirates hewed gaps in the deck and bulwarks in order to loot the rest of the cargo more easily, and the staunch schooner was left to bleach her bones on the Cuban coast.
The amiable Nikola found himself in trouble because of his friendly feeling for Captain Lincoln. The Spanish sailors tied him to a tree and were about to shoot him as a soft-hearted traitor who was guilty of unprofessional conduct, but a courageous French pirate surged into the picture with several men of his own opinion, and remarked that when the shooting began there would be other targets besides Nikola. This convinced the mob that it might be healthier to let the Scotchman alone.
The captain and crew of the Exertion were threatened and ill used, but there seemed to be no intention of making them walk the plank or hewing them down with cutlasses. What to do with them was a problem rather perplexing, which was proof that the trade of piracy had fallen from its former estate. These were thrifty freebooters, however, and the business was capably organized. There were even traces of the efficiency management which was to become the religion of the twentieth century. The pirates’ largest boat was manned by a crew which discarded some of its weapons, combed its whiskers, even washed its faces, and set off for the port of Principe in charge of the terrifying Bolidar.
The boat carried letters to a merchant by the name of Dominico who acted as the commercial agent of the industrious pirates and sold their plunder for them. A representative of his was kept on board the wicked schooner and went to sea with her, presumably to make sure of honest dealings, a sensible precaution in the case of such slippery gentry. The whole arrangement was most reprehensible, of course, but it had flourished on a much larger scale in the godly ports of Boston and New York during an earlier era.
It was to put a stop to such scandalous traffic that Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, had been sent out by King William III in 1695 as royal governor of the colonies of New York and Massachusetts. Colonial merchants, outwardly the pattern of respectability, were in secret partnership with the swarm of pirates which infested the American coast and waxed rich on the English commerce of the Indian Ocean.
“I send you, my Lord, to New York,” said King William to Bellomont, “because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down, and because I believe you to be such a man.”
As a result of these instructions, Captain William Kidd was employed to hunt the pirates down by sea while Governor Bellomont made it hot for the unscrupulous merchants ashore who were, no doubt, the ancestors of the modern American profiteers in food and clothing, who are also most respectable men. Captain Kidd was a merchant shipmaster of brave and honorable repute who had a comfortable home in Liberty Street, New York, was married to a widow of good family, and was highly esteemed by the Dutch and English people of the town. A shrewd trader who made money for his owners, he was also a fighting seaman of such proved mettle that he had been given command of privateers which cruised off the coasts of the colonies and harried the French in the West Indies. His excellent reputation and character are attested by official documents.
ARMED WITH AS MANY OF THE AFOREMENTIONED WEAPONS AS THEY COULD WELL SLING ABOUT THEIR BODIES