wooping down on unprotected merchant vessels and even
presuming to attack warships. Several expeditions had been directed
against them, but always in vain; and when in 1754 the chief of that
date, Tulaji Angria, known to Europeans as the Pirate, burnt two large
Dutch vessels of fifty and thirty-six guns respectively, and captured a
smaller one of eighteen guns, he boasted in his elation that he would
soon be master of the Indian seas.

But a term was about to be put to his insolence and his depredations. On
March twenty-second, 1755, Commodore William James, commander of the East
India Company's marine force, set sail from Bombay in the Protector of
forty-four guns, with the Swallow of sixteen guns, and two bomb vessels.
With the assistance of a Maratha fleet he had attacked the island
fortress of Suwarndrug, and captured it, as Hybati had related. A few
days afterwards another of the Pirate's fortresses, the island of
Bancoote, six miles north of Suwarndrug, surrendered. The Maratha rajah,
Ramaji Punt, delighted with these successes against fortified places
which had for nearly fifty years been deemed impregnable, offered the
English commodore an immense sum of money to proceed against others of
Angria's forts; but the monsoon approaching, the commodore was recalled
to Bombay.

The spot at which the Good Intent had fallen in with the sinking grab was
about eighty miles from the Indian coast, and Captain Barker expected to
sight land next day. No one was more delighted at the prospect than
Desmond. Leaving out of account the miseries of the long voyage, he felt
that now he was within reach of the goal of his hopes. The future was all
uncertain; he was no longer inclined to trust his fortunes to Diggle, for
though he could not believe that the man had deliberately practised
against his life, he had with good reason lost confidence in him, and
what he had learned from Bulger threw a new light on his past career.

One thing puzzled him. If the Pirate was such a terror to unprotected
ships, and strong enough to attack several armed vessels at once, why was
Captain Barker running into the very jaws of the enemy? In her palmy days
as an East Indiaman the Good Intent had carried a dozen nine-pounders on
her upper deck and six on the quarterdeck; and Bulger had said that under
a stout captain she had once beaten off near Surat half a dozen
three-masted grabs and a score of gallivats from the pirate stronghold at
Gheri