Accordingly, the next morning the captain sent me word I might have her; that she carried eight guns, had good store of provisions on board, with ammunition sufficient, and I might have her and all that was in her for twelve hundred pieces of eight. In a word, I sent my chief mate back with the same messenger and the money, giving him commission to pay for her, and take possession of her, if he liked her; and the Dutch captain, my friend, lent him twelve men to bring her off to us, which they did the same day.
I was a little put to it for a mast for her, having not anything on board we could spare that was fit for a main-mast; but resolving at last to mast her not as a sloop, but as a brigantine, we made shift with what pieces we had, and a spare foretop-mast, which one of the Dutch ships helped me to; so we fitted her up very handsomely, made her carry twelve guns, and put sixty men on board. One of the best things we found on board her, were casks, which we greatly wanted, especially for barrelling up beef and other provisions, which we found very difficult; but our cooper eked them out with making some new ones out of her old ones.
After staying here sixteen days more, we sailed again. Indeed, I thought once we should never have gone away at all; for it is certain above half the men in the ship had been made uneasy, and there remained still some misunderstanding of my design, and a supposition of all the frightful things the second mate had put in their heads; and, by his means, the boatswain and gunner.
As these three had the principal management of the conspiracy, and that I had pardoned all the rest, I had some thoughts of making an example of these; I took care to let them know it, too, in a manner that they had no room to think it was in jest, but I intended to have them all three hanged; and I kept them above three weeks in suspense about it: however, as I had no intention to put them to death, I thought it was a piece of cruelty, something worse than death, to keep them continually in expectation of it, and in a place too where they had but little more than room to breathe.
So, having been seventeen days gone from the Cape, I resolved to relieve them a little, and yet at the same time remove them out of the way of doing me any capital injury, if they should have any such design still in their heads. For this purpose, I caused them to be removed out of the ship into brigantine, and there I permitted them to have a little more liberty than they had on board the great ship; and where two of them entered into another conspiracy, as wild and foolish as ever I heard of, or as, perhaps, was ever heard of by any other; but of this I shall say more in its place.
We were now to sail in company, and we went away from the Cape, the 3rd of September, 1714. We found the brigantine was an excellent sea-boat, and could bear the weather to a miracle, and no bad sailer; she kept pace with us on all occasions, and in a storm we had at S. S. E., some days after, she shifted as well as we did in the great ship, which made us all well pleased with her.
This storm drove us away to the northward; and I once thought we should have been driven back to the Cape again; which, if it had happened, I believe we should never have gone on with the voyage; for the men began to murmur again, and say we were bewitched; that we were beaten off first from the south of America, that we could never get round there, and now driven back from the south of Africa; so that, in short, it looked as if fate had determined this voyage to be pursued no farther. The wind continued, and blew exceeding hard: and, in short, we were driven so far to the north, that we made the south point of the island of Madagascar.
My pilot knew it to be Madagascar as soon as he had a clear view of the land; and, having beaten so long against the sea to no purpose, and being in want of many things, we resolved to put in; and accordingly made for Port St. Augustine, on the west side of the island, where we came to an anchor in eleven fathom water, and a very good road.
I could not be without a great many anxious thoughts upon our coming into this island; for I knew very well that there was a gang of desperate rogues here, especially on the northern coast, who had been famous for their piracies; and I did not know but that they might be either strong enough as pirates to take us, or rogues enough to entice a great many of my men to run away; so I resolved neither to come near enough the shore to be surprised, nor to suffer any of my men to go on shore, such excepted as I could be very secure of.
But I was soon informed by a Dutchman, who came off to me with some of the natives in a kind of canvass boat, that there were no Europeans there but himself, and the pirates were on the north part of the island; that they had no ship with them of any force, and that they would be glad to be fetched off by any Christian ship; that they were not above two hundred in number, their chief leaders, with the only ships of force they had, being out a cruising on the coast of Arabia, and the Gulf of Persia.
After this, I went on shore myself with Captain Merlotte, and some of the men whom I could trust; and we found it true as the Dutchman had related. The Dutchman gave us a long history of his adventures, and how he came to be left there by a ship he came in from Europe, which, he running up into the country for sport with three more of his comrades, went away without them, and left them among the natives, who, however, used them extremely well; and that now he served them for an interpreter and a broker, to bargain for them with the European ships for provisions. Accordingly, he engaged to bring us what provisions we pleased, and proposed such trinkets in return as he knew the natives desired, and as were of value little enough to us; but he desired a consideration for himself in money, which, though it was of no use to him there, he said it might be hereafter; and, as his demand was but twenty pieces of eight, we thought he very well deserved them.
Here we bought a great quantity of beef, which, having no casks to spare, we salted, and then cured it in the sun, by the Dutchman's direction, and it proved of excellent use to us through the whole voyage; for we kept some of it till we came to England, but it was then so hard, that a good hatchet would hardly cut it.
While we lay here, it came into my thoughts, that now was a good time to execute justice upon my prisoners; so I called up the officers to a kind of council of war, and proposed it to them in general terms, not letting them know my mind as to the manner of it. They all agreed it was necessary, and the second mate, boatswain, and gunner, had so much intelligence of it from the men, that they prepared for death as much as if I had signed a dead-warrant for their execution, and that they were to be hanged at the yard-arm.
But, in the midst of those resolves, I told the council of officers, my design was to the north part of the island, where a gang of pirates were said to be settled, and that I was persuaded I might get a good ship among them, and as many men as we desired, for that I was satisfied the greatest part of them were so wearied of their present situation, that they would be glad of an opportunity to come away, and especially such as had, either by force, or rash, hasty resolutions, been, as it were, surprised into that sort of life; that I had been informed they were very far from being in such a formidable posture as they had been represented to us in Europe, or anything near so numerous; but that, on the contrary, we should find them poor, divided, in distress, and willing to get away upon any terms they could.
Some of the officers of the ship differed from me in my opinion. They had received such ideas of the figure those people made in Madagascar, from the common report in England, that they had no notion of them, but as of a little commonwealth of robbers; that they were immensely rich; that Captain Avery was king of the Island; that they were eight thousand men; that they had a good squadron of stout ships, and that they were able to resist a whole fleet of men of war; having a harbour so well fortified at the entrance into it, that there was no coming at them without a good army for land-service, to assist in the enterprise.
I convinced them how impossible this was to be true, and told them all the discourse I had with the Dutchman, at the place where I now was, who had received a full account of the particulars from several of them who had come down to St. Augustine's in