The Comoros was a pretty good guess. At Mayotta, one of those islands, they found a ship commanded by George Weoley, which was loading with sugar, rum, cocoa oil and taking in fresh beef. The fact that Weoley’s vessel was in harbor did not mean anything to John Bowen; if the island itself had been navigable he would have put a crew on it and sailed it away. The _Speedy Return_ shoved alongside their victim, and casually, as men doing an easy job away below their real abilities, a handful of fighters dropped to her decks. Nobody interfered with them but the unimaginative first mate, and his protest was met with a crack on the head which created an immediate promotion for the second mate. A little more than a year after this misfortune Captain Weoley wrote a plaintive letter to Mr. Pennyng, “Chief of the English East India Company’s Factory at Calicut,” giving a full and detailed account of the naughtiness of John Bowen, wherein he states that at Mayotta he fell into Bowen’s hands and was “detained by him after they had slain my chief mate and plundered what they pleased.” Poor Mr. Weoley and the rest of his people were taken into the forecastle of the _Speedy Return_ and thus recruited that ship’s list of able seamen. Whether Bowen burnt, scuttled or simply abandoned Weoley’s craft the good captain does not inform us, but we may be sure that when he headed off for India, he left that unfortunate vessel no better for his visit. During the long and uneventful voyage--uneventful, that is, so far as the piracy game went--Captain Bowen, alas! did not observe those little amenities between brother captains which so pleasantly mitigate the sternness of the sea. Doubtless Mr. Weoley had to do many things aboard which drove a bitter iron into his soul. One day he might be lending a hand with the art of navigation if the load of rum captured at Mayotta should happen temporarily to incapacitate Captain Bowen; next day he might pitiably have to fetch and carry water at the behest of the sprawling villains, or again bend his elderly and stiffening back at the eternal task of pumping, and pumping ship in the Indian Ocean must have been--well, hot. He says himself that he received “many hazards of life and abuses from those villains.” Not the least of his grievances was that of listening through the long hours of a torrid night to the liquored Bowen boasting of his wickedness. That remark of Weoley’s places Bowen as the true, deliberate, almost romantic pirate and approximates him to the traditional pirate of fiction.