table to my valour. Besides which, as I was always a creature of
the nicest sensibility, the scenes that must follow on our success
tempted me as little as the chances of defeat. Twice we found women on
board; and though I have seen towns sacked, and of late days in France
some very horrid public tumults, there was something in the smallness of
the numbers engaged, and the bleak dangerous sea-surroundings, that made
these acts of piracy far the most revolting. 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 be telling
up their shares or glooming over the result. I have said we were pretty
fortunate. But an observation falls 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 spirits.