By the 7th of January 1622, the _Exchange_, with her twelve good cannon, her munitions and provisions, was ready for sea, and the same day she was hauled out of the Mole. In her went a full ship’s company, consisting of sixty-three Turks and Moors as soldiers, nine English slaves, one Frenchman, four Hollanders and two English soldiers as gunners, as well as one English and one Dutch renegado. The good ship, with this miscellaneous crew, put to sea. It was better than slaving away ashore, but it was galling to John Rawlins, a fine specimen of an English sailor, to have to serve under these dogs. Rawlins, you must understand, was one of those hot-tempered, blunt and daring seamen such as had made England what she was in the time of Elizabeth. Forceful, direct, a man of simple piety, of great national pride, he was also a sailor possessing considerable powers of resource and organisation, as we shall presently see. The _Exchange_ was as fine and handsome a ship as England had built during the Elizabethan or early Stuart period. As she began to curtsey to the swell of the Mediterranean Sea, the slaves were at work looking after the guns and so on. Rawlins, in his brusque, fierce manner which is so typical of Drake and many another sailor of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, was working and raging at the same time. While he was busying himself among his fellow-countrymen, pulling ropes and looking after the cannon, he complained in no measured terms of the indignity of having to work merely to keep these Moslem brutes in a life of wickedness. He broke out into a torrent of complaint, as the other slaves besought him to be quiet “least they should all fare the worse for his distemperature.” However, he had firmly resolved to effect an escape from all this, and after mentioning the matter cautiously to his fellow-slaves he found they were similarly minded. From now onwards there follows one of the best yarns in the history of piracy, and the story is as true as it is exciting. On the 15th of January the morning tide had brought the _Exchange_ near to Cape de Gatte, and they were joined by a small Moslem ship which had followed them out of Algiers the day after. This craft now gave information that she had sighted seven small vessels in the distance, six of them being sattees. (A sattee was a very fast, decked species of galley, with a long, sharp prow and two or three masts, each setting a lateen sail.) The seventh craft was a polacca, a three-masted type of Mediterranean ship which usually carried square sails on her mainmast, but lateen sails on her fore and mizzen, though some of these vessels had square sails on all three masts.