Avery made off to the New England colonies, where he made a division of the plunder, handing the gold to the men, but privily keeping all the diamonds for himself. The sailors scattered out through the American settlements and the British Isles, modestly changing their names. Mr. Avery went home to Bristol, where he found some honest merchants to sell his diamonds, and lend him a small sum on account. When, however, he called on them for the rest of the money, he met with a most shocking repulse, because the merchants had never heard, they said, of him or his diamonds, but would give him to the justices as a pirate unless he shut his mouth. He went away and died of grief at Bideford in Devon, leaving no money even to pay for his coffin. Meanwhile the Great Mogul at Delhi was making such dismal lamentations about the robbery of his daughter’s diamonds that the news of Avery’s riches spread to England. Rumor made him husband to the princess, a reigning sovereign, with a pirate fleet of his own--at the very time he was dying of want at Bideford. We left two sloops full of pirates mourning over the total depravity of Captain Avery. Sorely repenting his sins, they resolved to amend their lives, and see what they could steal in Madagascar. Landing on that great island they dismantled their sloops, taking their plentiful supply of guns and powder ashore, where they camped, making their sails into tents. Here they met with another party of English pirates who were also penitent, having just plundered a large and richly-laden ship at the mouth of the Red Sea. Their dividend was three thousand pounds a man, and they were resolved to settle in Madagascar instead of going home to be hanged. The two parties, both in search of a peaceful and simple life, made friends with the various native princes, who were glad of white men to assist in the butchering of adjacent tribes. Two or three pirates at the head of an attacking force would put the boldest tribes to flight. Each pirate acquired his own harem of wives, his own horde of black slaves, his own plantations, fishery and hunting grounds, his kingdom wherein he reigned an absolute monarch. If a native said impudent words he was promptly shot, and any attack of the tribes on a white man was resented by the whole community of pirate kings. Once the negroes conspired for a general rising to wipe out their oppressors at one fell swoop, but the wife of a white man getting wind of the plot, ran twenty miles in three hours to alarm her lord. When the native forces arrived they were warmly received. After that each of their lordships built a fortress for his resting place with rampart and ditch set round with a labyrinth of thorny entanglements, so that the barefoot native coming as a stranger by night, trod on spikes, and sounded a loud alarm which roused the garrison.