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I confess ingenuously I could never proceed unless
I was three parts drunk; it was the same even with the crew; Teach
himself was fit for no enterprise till he was full of rum; and it
was one of the most difficult parts of Ballantrae's performance, to
serve us with liquor in the proper quantities. Even this he did to
admiration; being upon the whole the most capable man I ever met
with, and the one of the most natural genius. He did not even
scrape favour with the crew, as I did, by continual buffoonery made
upon a very anxious heart; but preserved on most occasions a great
deal of gravity and distance; so that he was like a parent among a
family of young children, or a schoolmaster with his boys. What
made his part the harder to perform, the men were most inveterate
grumblers; Ballantrae's discipline, little as it was, was yet
irksome to their love of licence; and what was worse, being kept
sober they had time to think. Some of them accordingly would fall
to repenting their abominable crimes; one in particular, who was a
good Catholic, and with whom I would sometimes steal apart for
prayer; above all in bad weather, fogs, lashing rain and the like,
when we would be the less observed; and I am sure no two criminals
in the cart have ever performed their devotions with more anxious
sincerity. But the rest, having no such grounds of hope, fell to
another pastime, that of computation. All day long they would he
telling up their shares or grooming over the result. I have said
we were pretty fortunate. But an observation fails to be made:
that in this world, in no business that I have tried, do the
profits rise to a man's expectations. We found many ships and took
many; yet few of them contained much money, their goods were
usually nothing to our purpose - what did we want with a cargo of
ploughs, or even of tobacco? - and it is quite a painful reflection
how many whole crews we have made to walk the plank for no more
than a stock of biscuit or an anker or two of spirit.
In the meanwhile our ship was growing very foul, and it was high
time we should make for our PORT DE CARRENAGE, which was in the
estuary of a river among swamps. It was openly understood that we
should then break up and go and squander our proportions of the
spoil; and this made every man greedy of a little more, so that our
decision was delayed from day to day. What finally decided
matters, was a trifling accident, such as an ignorant person might
suppose incidental to our way of life. But here I must explain:
on only one of all the ships we boarded, the first on which we
found women, did we meet with any genuine resistance. On that
occasion we had two men killed and several injured, and if it had
not been for the gallantry of Ballantrae we had surely been beat
back at last. Everywhere else the defence (where there was any at
all) was what the worst troops in Europe would have laughed at; so
that the most dangerous part of our employment was to clamber up
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