Captain George Shelvocke was one of many seamen adventurers unknown to fame who sought a quick and bloody road to fortune by laying violent hands on the golden ingots in the Spanish galleons of Mexico and Peru. A state of war made this a lawful pastime for lawless men, and such were those that sailed from Plymouth on February 13, 1720, in the little armed ship _Speedwell_, bound out from England to South America with a privateering commission. She was of two hundred tons burden, and there could have been no room to swing a cat by the tail, what with eighteen six-pounders mounted between-decks, a fourteen-oar launch stowed beneath the hatches, provisions for a long voyage, and a crew of a hundred men. Most of these were landlubbers, wastrels of the taverns and the waterside, who were so terrified by the first gale of wind that seventy of them “were resolved on bearing away for England to make a complaint against the ship. They alleged that she was so very crank that she would never be able to encounter a voyage to the South Seas.” The fact that the seventy objectors were unanimously seasick delayed the mutiny; besides which, Captain Shelvocke talked to them, and he was a persuasive man whenever he used a pair of flint-lock pistols to make his meaning clear. With calmer weather the seventy recalcitrants plucked up spirit to renew the argument, and went so far as to seize the helm and trim the yards on a course toward England. The captain was now seriously vexed. With a dozen officers behind him, he overruled the majority, tied two of them in the rigging, and ordered them handsomely flogged, and consented to forgive the others on promise of good behavior. “Nevertheless,” remarks a commentator, “it occasioned him great uneasiness to find himself with a ship’s company likely to occasion such trouble and vexation.” The _Speedwell_ almost foundered before she was a fortnight at sea, the pumps going, crew praying, and some of her provisions and gunpowder spoiled by salt water; but Captain George Shelvocke shoved her along for the South Sea, half a world away, and set it down as all in the day’s work. Seafaring in the early eighteenth century was not a vocation for children or weaklings.