CHAPTER TWOBLACK FLAG FROM BOSTONJohn QuelchICaptain Plowman, of the brigCharles, was looking for men, not just for beef at the end of a rope nor a stevedore’s back; for sailors, certainly, but something more than sailors—sea-fighters. For a fact, this sort of thing was a little outside the usual jobs of both Captain Plowman and his smart little brig. The brig and her master worked in coastwise trading with an occasional venture to the markets of London. But a civic emergency occasioned by the depredations of French and Spanish war vessels and privateers, long vexing the New England provinces, put a commission instead of a charter party into the hands of Captain Plowman and cutlasses, cannon and round shot in place of goods, wares and merchandise into the hold and on the decks of theCharles.For certain worthy merchants of Boston, indignant at the reprehensible Frenchman and his obnoxious ally and impatient with the slowincompetence of the Government, clubbed together and bought theCharlesto refit her as a privateer to go against the enemy. It was a recognized method of taking the law into one’s own hands. It must not be thought that this was altogether a sacrifice, motived by the pure principles of patriotism. There was a working chance of shaking something worth while out of a captured Frenchman from which at least current expenses might be paid; but in the main it was a public-spirited thought and should properly have resulted in much happier and more useful action than the peculiar and unforeseeable circumstances which were to allow.Having the ship, the merchants then procured from Joseph Dudley, her majesty’s captain general, governor and commander-in-chief of the province, a lawful commission for Captain Plowman, under and by virtue of which, as the saying was, he set about the business of recruiting the crew. But Plowman was getting along in years and was at that time a pretty sick man. So the business of beating up the sea birds was for the most part done by the mates, or “lieutenants”, as they were called, taking a sort of man-of-war nomenclature, namely John Quelch and Anthony Holding.John Quelch was an eager, vigorous, adventurous and able young colonial mariner with not a few of the superb qualities of those who were the proper pride of a maritime province. Likethe men of his type and condition, he was quite unafraid of anything that could present itself to one’s five senses. When at a later time he said he was not afraid to die and feared only a great God and the hereafter, he was doubtless telling the truth. What spoiled the life of John Quelch was that he did not take these two factors of admitted fear into reckoning until the evil was past mending.However that may be, the immediate weakness of Quelch was that his mind was a rudder that any hand might steer. Anthony Holding, quite evil, sly and contemptible, designed to be the helmsman who should drive John Quelch on to the rocks of ruin.Holding and Quelch in due time gathered as ferocious and villainous-looking a gang of ruffians as ever stood on the docks of old Boston. Their subsequent conduct indicates that they must have been about the toughest, hardest crew that an honest master ever piped together for division into watches. If Plowman, gazing from the quarter-deck upon that rabble, felt a premonition of trouble, the event was to justify him.But those were not days in which the master of a privateer could be squeamish about such matters and get his ship manned. TheCharleswould have rotted at her moorings while she waited for good burghers or the sons of good burghers to come and take her to sea. Mostly the driftwood of society, which instinctively damsup along a waterfront, could be loaded on to such ships in such times. Anthony Holding, at any rate, pulled at his long mustache and appraised the crowd with satisfaction.Sea-fighters were all right if you could keep them fighting the other ship. With a hostile craft in front of them there was no trouble about putting the medley of privateersmen at work, and a ship which could provide a good naval battle every morning before breakfast was more likely to be a contented ship than one which loafed a long while between engagements, thus allowing the free gentlemen time to hatch for themselves a little essential excitement. Mutiny was accepted as a passable substitute for battle.Perhaps Plowman felt more comfortable when he glanced at the rocky features of Quelch and Holding; for if ever there were two men in the right jobs such were they. With iron hands and iron nerves to drive them they could meet any contingency the crowd of subordinates might present. Perhaps Plowman was of the same sort, but he was a sick and aging man. He was in the hands of his lieutenants.Englishmen of the first or second generation made up the list of seamen; Cæsar-Pompey, Charlie and Mingo, first or second generation Africans, were in command of the galley. Cæsar-Pompey and Charlie were pressed into the service; they had not volunteered to handle the pots and pans of the brig.They were the slaves of one Colonel Hobbey; and Quelch, finding them on the street, ran them aboard the brig. You see he did not hesitate about small matters. The ship would need cooks, of course, and here were two black fellows who ought to know how to cook even if they did not, so why not ship them? Why worry about the gallant colonel? Worry would be his job when theCharleswas far at sea.Thus casually Cæsar-Pompey and Charlie found themselves dedicated to a life on the ocean wave. They were to travel far and see much ere they beheld the good Colonel Hobbey again. Quelch was by way of being something of a crimp.Cooks and seamen being now on hand, in August, 1703, the brig spread her square sails and drew away from the steaming wharves of Boston toward the cool acres of the ocean. No doubt the worthy merchants and a concourse of citizens cheered her departure; probably there were speeches, and mayhap a town band was on the dock. Anthony Holding especially must have enjoyed these marks of civic appreciation.According to orders they headed off for Newfoundland; but Plowman, who was still sick, must have left the managing of the ship largely to Quelch, his immediate subordinate. Everything went snappily as with leather throats and fisted hands Quelch and Holding hustled the men into quick, effective action.When they had been a week out from Boston it was easy to see that the captain was in a bad way. Probably at his command they put in at a way port to obtain medical help. The brig was anchored in the stream, and Quelch went ashore in the boat.Now among the riffraff aboard there was a handful—a small handful—of the more decent sort of seamen, of whom Pimer and Clifford were representatives. These two began to get anxious about the captain as the afternoon dragged on and no boat, Quelch or doctor returned from the shore. The sick man was groaning all the time and in apparent extremes. Nobody seemed to pay any heed to him; but all afternoon the crew roared and shouted and quarreled over their cards and dice, while aft by the cabin only Holding turned about and about on the deck, his hands behind his back, preoccupied with his thoughts.It began to strike Pimer and Clifford as odd, to say the least; so toward evening, as the August sun was turning red behind the hills, Pimer and Clifford went to the cabin to give a little human help. As they passed Holding, walking up and down the deck, he looked at them queerly but said nothing.Clearly, things were not just as they ought to be. In the twilight, startlingly, a rough tongue ordered them away from the cabin. A sentinel was there; Peter Roach stood guard at the captain’sdoor, armed with a drawn cutlass. Had the skipper directed this?Then they noticed that the cabin door was bolted from the outside with a marlin-spike thrust through the bolt socket, the bolt itself having long been lost. Obviously this was not the captain’s doing.Pimer and Clifford looked at each other as men do in peril. Something very evil was moving about them. At dark Quelch came back in the boat, and there was a whispering between him and Holding. The ship lights were hung out; and the lantern revealed something of the knobbly, stupid face of Peter Roach, still standing at his sinister watch. No one moved toward the ill-fortuned cabin.Peter Roach, the sentinel, could not be said to have been a peculiarly sensitive person. Some time later he was to die with as little feeling for himself as he had had for poor Plowman. He was an automaton.And so this crowd of men lay all about the hot decks, waiting for the captain to die. Those were hard hours for Clifford and Pimer and the one or two other loyal men.A little before midnight the cries of the sufferer ebbed away, and Peter Roach stolidly left his post and as stolidly grunted a few words at Holding. He and Quelch, taking a lantern, entered the cabin and found that nature had at lastdone their job for them: Captain Plowman was dead.Captain Quelch, now, if you please, by the law and usage of the sea.Anthony Holding bobbed his tarry pigtail low in grimacing courtesy—place was little to him, power everything. And he was the power on this ship. He ordered the captain’s body thrown overboard like so much rubbish. Then he called all hands together in the waist of the brig and openly declared that which undoubtedly he had long secretly prepared for,—piracy. The proposal was acclaimed with a unanimity which indicated premeditation.It was no time for Pimer or Clifford to talk, though manfully they made an effort at protest with no result but to endanger their own safety. That they were not tossed over the side at once is a marvel. The only question that agitated this bandit conference was where to pirate, one suggesting this field and another that. Somebody, probably Holding, persuaded them that Brazil, then a colony of Portugal, and the South American coast gave the most promise of gain.This policy and its execution were really masterly. They must have been the products of careful pondering based upon information more or less exact. Consider it geographically. From Cape San Augustine, where Brazil thrusts its elbow into the Atlantic Ocean, away down to Rio de Janeiro is one long, continuous coast line, wellpopulated even in the early eighteenth century with numerous ports of small and great importance. Starting then at the cape, a pirate need only drop continually down the latitudes, pausing as occasion suggested to pick up prizes, never staying in a vicinity or returning to it to be captured. At Rio, where the cruise was to be finished, swing out far from the coast and make a bee line for home. It was an able plan and strong because so simple.Holding, or whoever the proponent of the South American cruise might have been, had without question made a close study of the methods of Captain Kidd, hanged some two years before in London. The parallel between the Kidd and Quelch piracies is so exact as to be more than coincidental. Both perverted the use of a commissioned ship; both journeyed thousands of miles to their fields of operation; both sought to make one quick, strong strike at fortune and return to respectability.Neither Kidd nor Quelch had a notion of being conventional pirates, that is, of infesting some given locality and preying on passing traffic, spending their gains riotously and expecting not to leave the business except perhaps unluckily by way of the king’s rope. Kidd had made a fortune which was the talk of the colony; and the incident that he was hanged for it only proved his subsequent mismanagement and did not impugn his actual methods of pirating.Again, pirates of the type of Kidd and Quelch were attracted by a combination of two favoring factors,—a good sea traffic and a weak land government. In Kidd’s case the flourishing Indian commerce was not completely protected by the decaying Mogul Government, while in Quelch’s case the merchants of the east coast of South America were considerably ahead of any authority which could guarantee them a peaceful development.In the middle of November, or just a little more than three months after leaving Boston, theCharles, having reeled off three thousand miles of journeying, arrived in the seventh degree, south latitude, off the bold beak of Cape St. Augustine, and hungrily searched the sea for prey.Quelch was under English colors, and at the ports hereabouts where he made his first stops he gave out that he was cruising against the French and Spanish. That kind of talk kept things clear on shore.With Quelch was one John Twist, who was either recruited in the neighborhood of St. Augustine or came originally from Boston. John was the ship’s “linguister”, as the quaint old word was—the interpreter—and he was what army men might call the officer of liaison between the New Englanders and the Portuguese. He was also the pilot in the Brazilian waters, but died before theCharleswent home, though apparentlynot until he had brought her to her extreme southern objective, Rio de Janeiro.On November fifteenth, after leaving the cape and working slowly southward, a little Portuguese fishing boat was stopped by the pirates as she was slipping into port, and her cargo of fish and salt was quickly tossed over the bulwarks of theCharles. Fish and salt do not make any great treasure; in fact, this particular fish and salt were worth about three pounds to Quelch. But it was a little preliminary workout.Three days later the brig was opposite Pernambuco, where she coolly picked up a small Portuguese vessel of fifteen tons right from under the eyes of the townsfolk. She was stuffed with sugar and molasses to the value of one hundred and fifty pounds. In the modern worth of the pound this would be about six hundred and seventy-five dollars; but it must be noted, of course, that that amount of silver would buy a great deal more in those times than in these.John Twist persuaded two white men and one negro of the crew of five to sign up with the pirates. Quelch no doubt had the same experience that Kidd had with his original crew; there was a continual attrition by disease or desertion, and the man-power had to be kept up by recruiting so far as possible from captured ships.Those who did not care to join up with theCharleswere returned to their boats in most cases and permitted to pass on their way. It was quiteunnecessary for the pirates to kill such as refused to go along with them, for by the time they got back to port and had a chase organized, theCharleswould be well ahead of them to the south.The fifteen-ton brig with the sugar and molasses aboard was kept by Quelch and made a “tender”, as he called it, of theCharles, and thus created a sort of fleet, with the Boston brig as flagship and John Quelch as admiral.Latitudes seven and eight degrees south had yielded two victims; November twenty-fourth found them in latitude nine degrees south, and tumbling well around the elbow of Brazil, but still in the vicinity of Cape St. Augustine.Below the cape they took another Portuguese brig, this time of forty tons. She was on her way from the plantations to Pernambuco, laden with about eight hundred dollars’ worth of sugar and molasses. We are vividly reminded of Kidd’s first catches, which so often consisted of small sloops carrying butter, coffee and opium.A cool piece of work was the taking of this ship, impudently accomplished well within sight of land. Quelch, with John Twist, the linguister, at his side, led in the capture, which was made without resistance on the part of the Portuguese. It took two or three days to shift her cargo to theCharles, after which she was tossed away like a squeezed lemon to get back to port as best she might. Through Twist Quelch informed these Portuguese that theCharleswas a French shipand that the Portuguese, as allies of the English, had fallen on the sad mischances of war. Another trick out of Kidd’s bag.Isaac Johnson, a Dutchman, committed the chief crime on a pirate ship: he talked too much. Somehow or other he told the Portuguese the truth about Quelch. Gunner Moore had met his end at the hands of Captain Kidd because of a fatal flexibility of the lips, and Ike Johnson likewise, though not so severely, was made an example of by the decisive Quelch.All hands were piped on deck,—not with a boatswain’s whistle, however, but by a trumpet loudly sounded by the kidnapped though apparently not disconsolate Cæsar-Pompey, who to the job of cook added that of ship’s trumpeter. Johnson was brought forward and tied by the wrists to a grating; and Anthony Holding, with malice aforethought and continuous, laid on Ike’s bare back with a rope’s end, and thus counseled him as to the wisdom of silence. It was an approved sea fashion of admonition.December brought them to latitude thirteen degrees south and early presented them with two jars of rum, a little linen and a trifle of earthenware filched from a shallop. This was the smallest sprat that came to their net during the cruise. She was taken by the tender, and, being despoiled, was sent on her way.The same day the tender took another small Portuguese boat. Both of these takings wereright under the guns of Fort Mora, so close that the flag flying over the fort was clearly discerned. Being a little too close to the fort to run needless risk, Quelch staved in the captured boat and let her gurgle and bubble down into the green Atlantic. Her crew went aboard theCharles, perhaps as recruits.From her they took a quantity of vari-colored silk; and soon the crew of theCharleswere gallant and picturesque in silk breeches and shirts,—of homemade cut and tailoring, to be sure, but none the less gratifying to the wearers.The next capture was in latitude thirteen degrees south and below Mora. The busy little tender here grabbed a twenty-ton brig, from which an inconsiderable amount of rice and a negro slave were taken. The negro’s name was Joachim; but his captors dubbed him Cuffee and turned him over to Cæsar-Pompey as a flunky. In addition to these there was a young man on board with a canvas bag containing two hundred and fifty dollars in gold coin. The young man was allowed to keep the canvas bag.After the fashion of the trade, the pirate crew were working on the share basis; that is, after deducting for general expenses, a major part went to Quelch—and of course Holding—and minor parts of the plunder were distributed head for head. All cash taken was put in the keeping of the quartermaster to accumulate for future division; merchandise such as sugar and so onwas probably marketed at way ports and the proceeds put into the treasury, after the manner again of Kidd in the East Indies.Cuffee, the flunky, not being divisible, was auctioned off at the mast to the highest bidder, who happened to be one Ben Perkins. The price was thrown into the common pot. Cuffee’s sale brought a hundred dollars to the cash account.
BLACK FLAG FROM BOSTON
John Quelch
Captain Plowman, of the brigCharles, was looking for men, not just for beef at the end of a rope nor a stevedore’s back; for sailors, certainly, but something more than sailors—sea-fighters. For a fact, this sort of thing was a little outside the usual jobs of both Captain Plowman and his smart little brig. The brig and her master worked in coastwise trading with an occasional venture to the markets of London. But a civic emergency occasioned by the depredations of French and Spanish war vessels and privateers, long vexing the New England provinces, put a commission instead of a charter party into the hands of Captain Plowman and cutlasses, cannon and round shot in place of goods, wares and merchandise into the hold and on the decks of theCharles.
For certain worthy merchants of Boston, indignant at the reprehensible Frenchman and his obnoxious ally and impatient with the slowincompetence of the Government, clubbed together and bought theCharlesto refit her as a privateer to go against the enemy. It was a recognized method of taking the law into one’s own hands. It must not be thought that this was altogether a sacrifice, motived by the pure principles of patriotism. There was a working chance of shaking something worth while out of a captured Frenchman from which at least current expenses might be paid; but in the main it was a public-spirited thought and should properly have resulted in much happier and more useful action than the peculiar and unforeseeable circumstances which were to allow.
Having the ship, the merchants then procured from Joseph Dudley, her majesty’s captain general, governor and commander-in-chief of the province, a lawful commission for Captain Plowman, under and by virtue of which, as the saying was, he set about the business of recruiting the crew. But Plowman was getting along in years and was at that time a pretty sick man. So the business of beating up the sea birds was for the most part done by the mates, or “lieutenants”, as they were called, taking a sort of man-of-war nomenclature, namely John Quelch and Anthony Holding.
John Quelch was an eager, vigorous, adventurous and able young colonial mariner with not a few of the superb qualities of those who were the proper pride of a maritime province. Likethe men of his type and condition, he was quite unafraid of anything that could present itself to one’s five senses. When at a later time he said he was not afraid to die and feared only a great God and the hereafter, he was doubtless telling the truth. What spoiled the life of John Quelch was that he did not take these two factors of admitted fear into reckoning until the evil was past mending.
However that may be, the immediate weakness of Quelch was that his mind was a rudder that any hand might steer. Anthony Holding, quite evil, sly and contemptible, designed to be the helmsman who should drive John Quelch on to the rocks of ruin.
Holding and Quelch in due time gathered as ferocious and villainous-looking a gang of ruffians as ever stood on the docks of old Boston. Their subsequent conduct indicates that they must have been about the toughest, hardest crew that an honest master ever piped together for division into watches. If Plowman, gazing from the quarter-deck upon that rabble, felt a premonition of trouble, the event was to justify him.
But those were not days in which the master of a privateer could be squeamish about such matters and get his ship manned. TheCharleswould have rotted at her moorings while she waited for good burghers or the sons of good burghers to come and take her to sea. Mostly the driftwood of society, which instinctively damsup along a waterfront, could be loaded on to such ships in such times. Anthony Holding, at any rate, pulled at his long mustache and appraised the crowd with satisfaction.
Sea-fighters were all right if you could keep them fighting the other ship. With a hostile craft in front of them there was no trouble about putting the medley of privateersmen at work, and a ship which could provide a good naval battle every morning before breakfast was more likely to be a contented ship than one which loafed a long while between engagements, thus allowing the free gentlemen time to hatch for themselves a little essential excitement. Mutiny was accepted as a passable substitute for battle.
Perhaps Plowman felt more comfortable when he glanced at the rocky features of Quelch and Holding; for if ever there were two men in the right jobs such were they. With iron hands and iron nerves to drive them they could meet any contingency the crowd of subordinates might present. Perhaps Plowman was of the same sort, but he was a sick and aging man. He was in the hands of his lieutenants.
Englishmen of the first or second generation made up the list of seamen; Cæsar-Pompey, Charlie and Mingo, first or second generation Africans, were in command of the galley. Cæsar-Pompey and Charlie were pressed into the service; they had not volunteered to handle the pots and pans of the brig.
They were the slaves of one Colonel Hobbey; and Quelch, finding them on the street, ran them aboard the brig. You see he did not hesitate about small matters. The ship would need cooks, of course, and here were two black fellows who ought to know how to cook even if they did not, so why not ship them? Why worry about the gallant colonel? Worry would be his job when theCharleswas far at sea.
Thus casually Cæsar-Pompey and Charlie found themselves dedicated to a life on the ocean wave. They were to travel far and see much ere they beheld the good Colonel Hobbey again. Quelch was by way of being something of a crimp.
Cooks and seamen being now on hand, in August, 1703, the brig spread her square sails and drew away from the steaming wharves of Boston toward the cool acres of the ocean. No doubt the worthy merchants and a concourse of citizens cheered her departure; probably there were speeches, and mayhap a town band was on the dock. Anthony Holding especially must have enjoyed these marks of civic appreciation.
According to orders they headed off for Newfoundland; but Plowman, who was still sick, must have left the managing of the ship largely to Quelch, his immediate subordinate. Everything went snappily as with leather throats and fisted hands Quelch and Holding hustled the men into quick, effective action.
When they had been a week out from Boston it was easy to see that the captain was in a bad way. Probably at his command they put in at a way port to obtain medical help. The brig was anchored in the stream, and Quelch went ashore in the boat.
Now among the riffraff aboard there was a handful—a small handful—of the more decent sort of seamen, of whom Pimer and Clifford were representatives. These two began to get anxious about the captain as the afternoon dragged on and no boat, Quelch or doctor returned from the shore. The sick man was groaning all the time and in apparent extremes. Nobody seemed to pay any heed to him; but all afternoon the crew roared and shouted and quarreled over their cards and dice, while aft by the cabin only Holding turned about and about on the deck, his hands behind his back, preoccupied with his thoughts.
It began to strike Pimer and Clifford as odd, to say the least; so toward evening, as the August sun was turning red behind the hills, Pimer and Clifford went to the cabin to give a little human help. As they passed Holding, walking up and down the deck, he looked at them queerly but said nothing.
Clearly, things were not just as they ought to be. In the twilight, startlingly, a rough tongue ordered them away from the cabin. A sentinel was there; Peter Roach stood guard at the captain’sdoor, armed with a drawn cutlass. Had the skipper directed this?
Then they noticed that the cabin door was bolted from the outside with a marlin-spike thrust through the bolt socket, the bolt itself having long been lost. Obviously this was not the captain’s doing.
Pimer and Clifford looked at each other as men do in peril. Something very evil was moving about them. At dark Quelch came back in the boat, and there was a whispering between him and Holding. The ship lights were hung out; and the lantern revealed something of the knobbly, stupid face of Peter Roach, still standing at his sinister watch. No one moved toward the ill-fortuned cabin.
Peter Roach, the sentinel, could not be said to have been a peculiarly sensitive person. Some time later he was to die with as little feeling for himself as he had had for poor Plowman. He was an automaton.
And so this crowd of men lay all about the hot decks, waiting for the captain to die. Those were hard hours for Clifford and Pimer and the one or two other loyal men.
A little before midnight the cries of the sufferer ebbed away, and Peter Roach stolidly left his post and as stolidly grunted a few words at Holding. He and Quelch, taking a lantern, entered the cabin and found that nature had at lastdone their job for them: Captain Plowman was dead.
Captain Quelch, now, if you please, by the law and usage of the sea.
Anthony Holding bobbed his tarry pigtail low in grimacing courtesy—place was little to him, power everything. And he was the power on this ship. He ordered the captain’s body thrown overboard like so much rubbish. Then he called all hands together in the waist of the brig and openly declared that which undoubtedly he had long secretly prepared for,—piracy. The proposal was acclaimed with a unanimity which indicated premeditation.
It was no time for Pimer or Clifford to talk, though manfully they made an effort at protest with no result but to endanger their own safety. That they were not tossed over the side at once is a marvel. The only question that agitated this bandit conference was where to pirate, one suggesting this field and another that. Somebody, probably Holding, persuaded them that Brazil, then a colony of Portugal, and the South American coast gave the most promise of gain.
This policy and its execution were really masterly. They must have been the products of careful pondering based upon information more or less exact. Consider it geographically. From Cape San Augustine, where Brazil thrusts its elbow into the Atlantic Ocean, away down to Rio de Janeiro is one long, continuous coast line, wellpopulated even in the early eighteenth century with numerous ports of small and great importance. Starting then at the cape, a pirate need only drop continually down the latitudes, pausing as occasion suggested to pick up prizes, never staying in a vicinity or returning to it to be captured. At Rio, where the cruise was to be finished, swing out far from the coast and make a bee line for home. It was an able plan and strong because so simple.
Holding, or whoever the proponent of the South American cruise might have been, had without question made a close study of the methods of Captain Kidd, hanged some two years before in London. The parallel between the Kidd and Quelch piracies is so exact as to be more than coincidental. Both perverted the use of a commissioned ship; both journeyed thousands of miles to their fields of operation; both sought to make one quick, strong strike at fortune and return to respectability.
Neither Kidd nor Quelch had a notion of being conventional pirates, that is, of infesting some given locality and preying on passing traffic, spending their gains riotously and expecting not to leave the business except perhaps unluckily by way of the king’s rope. Kidd had made a fortune which was the talk of the colony; and the incident that he was hanged for it only proved his subsequent mismanagement and did not impugn his actual methods of pirating.
Again, pirates of the type of Kidd and Quelch were attracted by a combination of two favoring factors,—a good sea traffic and a weak land government. In Kidd’s case the flourishing Indian commerce was not completely protected by the decaying Mogul Government, while in Quelch’s case the merchants of the east coast of South America were considerably ahead of any authority which could guarantee them a peaceful development.
In the middle of November, or just a little more than three months after leaving Boston, theCharles, having reeled off three thousand miles of journeying, arrived in the seventh degree, south latitude, off the bold beak of Cape St. Augustine, and hungrily searched the sea for prey.
Quelch was under English colors, and at the ports hereabouts where he made his first stops he gave out that he was cruising against the French and Spanish. That kind of talk kept things clear on shore.
With Quelch was one John Twist, who was either recruited in the neighborhood of St. Augustine or came originally from Boston. John was the ship’s “linguister”, as the quaint old word was—the interpreter—and he was what army men might call the officer of liaison between the New Englanders and the Portuguese. He was also the pilot in the Brazilian waters, but died before theCharleswent home, though apparentlynot until he had brought her to her extreme southern objective, Rio de Janeiro.
On November fifteenth, after leaving the cape and working slowly southward, a little Portuguese fishing boat was stopped by the pirates as she was slipping into port, and her cargo of fish and salt was quickly tossed over the bulwarks of theCharles. Fish and salt do not make any great treasure; in fact, this particular fish and salt were worth about three pounds to Quelch. But it was a little preliminary workout.
Three days later the brig was opposite Pernambuco, where she coolly picked up a small Portuguese vessel of fifteen tons right from under the eyes of the townsfolk. She was stuffed with sugar and molasses to the value of one hundred and fifty pounds. In the modern worth of the pound this would be about six hundred and seventy-five dollars; but it must be noted, of course, that that amount of silver would buy a great deal more in those times than in these.
John Twist persuaded two white men and one negro of the crew of five to sign up with the pirates. Quelch no doubt had the same experience that Kidd had with his original crew; there was a continual attrition by disease or desertion, and the man-power had to be kept up by recruiting so far as possible from captured ships.
Those who did not care to join up with theCharleswere returned to their boats in most cases and permitted to pass on their way. It was quiteunnecessary for the pirates to kill such as refused to go along with them, for by the time they got back to port and had a chase organized, theCharleswould be well ahead of them to the south.
The fifteen-ton brig with the sugar and molasses aboard was kept by Quelch and made a “tender”, as he called it, of theCharles, and thus created a sort of fleet, with the Boston brig as flagship and John Quelch as admiral.
Latitudes seven and eight degrees south had yielded two victims; November twenty-fourth found them in latitude nine degrees south, and tumbling well around the elbow of Brazil, but still in the vicinity of Cape St. Augustine.
Below the cape they took another Portuguese brig, this time of forty tons. She was on her way from the plantations to Pernambuco, laden with about eight hundred dollars’ worth of sugar and molasses. We are vividly reminded of Kidd’s first catches, which so often consisted of small sloops carrying butter, coffee and opium.
A cool piece of work was the taking of this ship, impudently accomplished well within sight of land. Quelch, with John Twist, the linguister, at his side, led in the capture, which was made without resistance on the part of the Portuguese. It took two or three days to shift her cargo to theCharles, after which she was tossed away like a squeezed lemon to get back to port as best she might. Through Twist Quelch informed these Portuguese that theCharleswas a French shipand that the Portuguese, as allies of the English, had fallen on the sad mischances of war. Another trick out of Kidd’s bag.
Isaac Johnson, a Dutchman, committed the chief crime on a pirate ship: he talked too much. Somehow or other he told the Portuguese the truth about Quelch. Gunner Moore had met his end at the hands of Captain Kidd because of a fatal flexibility of the lips, and Ike Johnson likewise, though not so severely, was made an example of by the decisive Quelch.
All hands were piped on deck,—not with a boatswain’s whistle, however, but by a trumpet loudly sounded by the kidnapped though apparently not disconsolate Cæsar-Pompey, who to the job of cook added that of ship’s trumpeter. Johnson was brought forward and tied by the wrists to a grating; and Anthony Holding, with malice aforethought and continuous, laid on Ike’s bare back with a rope’s end, and thus counseled him as to the wisdom of silence. It was an approved sea fashion of admonition.
December brought them to latitude thirteen degrees south and early presented them with two jars of rum, a little linen and a trifle of earthenware filched from a shallop. This was the smallest sprat that came to their net during the cruise. She was taken by the tender, and, being despoiled, was sent on her way.
The same day the tender took another small Portuguese boat. Both of these takings wereright under the guns of Fort Mora, so close that the flag flying over the fort was clearly discerned. Being a little too close to the fort to run needless risk, Quelch staved in the captured boat and let her gurgle and bubble down into the green Atlantic. Her crew went aboard theCharles, perhaps as recruits.
From her they took a quantity of vari-colored silk; and soon the crew of theCharleswere gallant and picturesque in silk breeches and shirts,—of homemade cut and tailoring, to be sure, but none the less gratifying to the wearers.
The next capture was in latitude thirteen degrees south and below Mora. The busy little tender here grabbed a twenty-ton brig, from which an inconsiderable amount of rice and a negro slave were taken. The negro’s name was Joachim; but his captors dubbed him Cuffee and turned him over to Cæsar-Pompey as a flunky. In addition to these there was a young man on board with a canvas bag containing two hundred and fifty dollars in gold coin. The young man was allowed to keep the canvas bag.
After the fashion of the trade, the pirate crew were working on the share basis; that is, after deducting for general expenses, a major part went to Quelch—and of course Holding—and minor parts of the plunder were distributed head for head. All cash taken was put in the keeping of the quartermaster to accumulate for future division; merchandise such as sugar and so onwas probably marketed at way ports and the proceeds put into the treasury, after the manner again of Kidd in the East Indies.
Cuffee, the flunky, not being divisible, was auctioned off at the mast to the highest bidder, who happened to be one Ben Perkins. The price was thrown into the common pot. Cuffee’s sale brought a hundred dollars to the cash account.