The ship seemed awfully quiet after the roaring Williams had gone.
Something was missing, but what it was they did not just know.
Unsuspectingly, the grim jest of sending Williams home to the gallows
had removed the heart of the piratical enterprise. If the _Revenge_
expected to keep on the grand account, fellows like Williams, who could
do the rough work, were essential, and without him the great affair
threatened to simmer back to the status of a mere mutiny.
Then, too, the presence of the warship, with its promise of hundreds
of pounds of hot lead and forest of cutlasses, awakened unhappy
perturbation, and stirred even sluggish imaginations with pictures of
uncomfortable events. The lads pensively stared at their finger nails
and realized only one insistent fact,--that they must depart the region
forthwith.
Some kind of retreat began to be openly proposed, but just whither;
that was the vexing thing. At this point John Gow forfeits a place in
the first rank of pirates for he shows that he did not know the fine
points of the game. He is now not far from the place where Henry Avery,
some years before, had stolen the _Charles the Second_, a ship on
which he was mate, and, with his exploiting of a discontented crew, was
in circumstances very similar to those now surrounding Gow. Avery, it
may be remembered, came first of all to the Madeiras, but the point of
separation between him and Gow is that Avery knew that the local coast
was not the most advantageous place for piracy, knew that the jeweled
Indies was, and set his unswerving prow resolutely thither.
A moment’s thought concerning the conditions of piracy suggests Gow’s
difficulty. A pirate’s main resource was in merchant cargoes; only luck
threw him the fabled treasure ships. For all he could tell about, a
pirate might have to plug along in a quiet way of trade, hoping for the
time when a _Quedagh Merchant_ or a _Gunsway_ would reward his patient
application. But the successful raiding of merchant ships put the
pirate in the same situation that the honest shore trader was in,--to
make any profit at all he had to keep his stock turned over. Now, in
the Indies, while a pirate was waiting his big haul, a system of coast
“fences”, or buyers of stolen freight, made possible his continuance
in business. Kidd and Avery and all the rest of them used these folk
for the disposal of their plunder, for, as we have seen, one of these
gentlemen, Cogi Commodo, boasted to the steward of poor Captain Green’s
ill-fortuned ship that he had been “merchant” on the Malabar coast, to
the eminent Kidd. These illicit traffickers supplied the interlopers
and other competitors of the British East India Company, as well as
catering to the native markets. The arrangement suited everybody except
John Company.
But in European waters the only possible opening for a pirate’s
wares--that is of the usual merchant sort--was in methods akin to
smuggling. That, however, was already a complicated and preëmpted
business, and in taking any ship it would always be questionable
whether her freight were dutiable and therefore worth-while contraband.
Smuggling could never flourish so haphazardly.
Last of all, but sufficiently troublesome, was the stricter policing of
the European coasts. Without these guardians, of course, the customs
would have entirely collapsed and piracy rather than smuggling would
have prospered by maintaining a sort of cheap local bazaar, such as
Blackbeard did in the Carolinas. The lack of effective policing made
possible the brisk trip of John Quelch, the Boston boy, down the Brazil
coast, for a cargo taken in one latitude was auctioned off in another
and no “fence” was needed to aid in dodging a vigilant authority.
The _Revenge_ thus was driven off the coasts of Spain and Portugal by
lack of a market and incidentally by the police patrol.
Gow and his crew turned the matter over and over in a long debate,
which resulted in a determination to sail away to Gow’s native Orkney
Islands, a decision which can only be laid to the peculiar fatality
which seems to work the self-destruction of wickedness. The meeting
must have discussed the possibilities of the East and West Indies,
Madagascar, Africa and the Red Sea, not to mention a flyer in slaving
on the Guinea Coast; in other words, all the available opportunities
for a rising young pirate, but why, against these, were chosen the
lean and foggy Orkneys, where even the poor copper penny was worked to
death, is a puzzler.
Could it be that pirates sometimes grew homesick?
They hauled down the black flag and shoved it in the locker, whence
it was never withdrawn to flap its sinister warning in the winds, and
proceeded to give their gang of perplexed French prisoners a trip to
Scotland. It would not be surprising if those victims of sportive
destiny were beginning to get all turned around, as the saying is.
Without “being chased or giving chase” they reached the northern
islands, and Gow, perhaps with a constricted throat and a wet eye,
looked once again upon his native land. As they drew into the bay,
Gow called his flock together and instructed them to retail to any
curious inhabitant the plausible fiction that the _Revenge_ was bound
from Cadiz to Stockholm, “but contrary winds driving them past the
Sound till it was filled with ice, they were under the necessity of
putting in to clean their ship, and that they would pay ready money
for such articles as they stood in need of.” Of course, they were to
leave undisturbed the assumption that they were the actual as well as
ostensible owners of the aforesaid “ready money.”
One other craft was in the bay when the _Revenge_ put in, but to
Gow’s relief she turned out to be only a French smuggler, or rather
a smuggler belonging to the Isle of Man, laden with wine and brandy
from France, and which had come north about to “steer clear of the
custom-house cutters.” According to the amenities of the sea, Gow
exchanged presents with the smuggler, as he did also with a Swedish
ship which came in a couple of days later. The Swede and the Manxman
marveled greatly at the generous gifts of dried salmon and pickled
herring which this hospitable _Revenge_ almost thrust upon them.