[15] See [doc. no. 68], paragraph 8, post.
[16] Tew appears in Jamaica, Rhode Island, and New York, everywhere with an ill reputation. Edward Randolph (Toppan, Edward Randolph, V. 158) declares that from this present voyage he brought £10,000 in gold and silver into Rhode Island. He had gone out with a privateering commission from Governor Fletcher of New York (N.Y. Col. Doc., IV. 310, etc.), though, according to Bellomont, Fletcher must have known of his piratical habits. Fletcher in his not too satisfying "defence" (ibid., IV. 447) says: "This Tew appeared to me not only a man of courage and activity, but of the greatest sence and remembrance of what he had seen, of any seaman I had mett. He was allso what they call a very pleasant man; soe that at some times when the labours of my day were over it was some divertisement as well as information to me, to heare him talke. I wish'd in my mind to make him a sober man, and in particular to reclaime him from a vile habit of swearing. I gave him a booke to that purpose." But it appears from paragraph 9 of our [no. 68] that Tew was killed, in the act of piracy, within the year of the issue of his commission, and it is impossible to say how far the reformation of his speech had progressed.
[16a] Mocha lies inside the straits, on the Arabian side of the Red Sea.
[17] This.
[18] Probably Cape Diu.
[19] Off the northeast coast. A celebrated resort of pirates; see Capt. Adam Baldridge's deposition, [no. 68], post.
[20] Cayenne, French Guiana. The editor remembers that old New England people, in his boyhood, still pronounced the name Ky-ann.
[21] Now Réunion, then called by the French (to whom it belonged) Bourbon, or Mascaregne, from the Portuguese commander Pedro Mascarenhas, who discovered it in 1512.
[22] Eleuthera.
[23] Governor of the Bahama Islands from 1693 to 1696, when he was removed because of his suspicious dealings with the pirates. He was a cousin of that Chief-Justice Nicholas Trott (1668-1740) who was so great a power in South Carolina, and who in 1718 sentenced Stede Bonnet's company with such severity. See the next document.