On May 26, 1701, the _Speedy Return_ and the _Content_ had sailed from Glasgow for the East Indies. What great things they were to accomplish! How they were to return soon--speedily, as the name would seem to hope--laden with gold and gain! The name of John Bowen did not mean a thing in Glasgow. Such is life. They lumbered, after the fashion of the blunt ships of that age, first to Guinea, then to the Cape of Good Hope--propitious name--and there, as well as at Guinea, they discovered there was not a little profit to be had by postponing their arrival at Malabar and the Indian trade proper and diverting themselves to the slave business. In this traffic then they came over from the mainland of Africa to the island of St. Mary’s, in Madagascar, where they loaded their holds with the negroid Sakalaves sold to them by the Hovitas and other superior tribes of the island. So cargoed, they went on from St. Mary’s, Madagascar, to Mauritius, where they discharged their load of slaves and in March, 1702, were back again in Madagascar, at a place they called Maritan, but which has probably become Mananara, ready for another batch of blacks, and, though naturally this was beyond their expectation, the thunderbolt of as desperate a gang of pirates as ever cast dice with the hangman. Gradually Bowen’s shipless crew gathered in the woods back of the town and impatiently waited for morning. When the tropic sun at length surged up abruptly from beneath the far, thin, eastern line of the Indian Ocean, they girded their belts about them, looked to their weapons, hefting their cutlasses and attending to the priming of their pistols, and waited the cheerful word of onslaught. Bowen called together the four English-speaking men he had first selected the day before, on the chance of being able to make immediate use of them, and left with them for the very outskirts of the town, where they settled themselves in the lush vegetation and watched their prey. Before separating from the main group, Bowen, like a true general, addressed his troops. “If it comes to trouble,” he said succinctly, “and ye find ye against a man bigger than ye, take your tools quickly”--here he tapped his cutlass, “and cut him down to your size.” The plan was for the four men and Bowen to board the ship _Speedy Return_ by stratagem, when, if the chance was good, Bowen would sound the bo’sun’s whistle which he carried for that purpose and the reserves were to come up in full force.