A moment’s thought concerning the conditions of piracy suggests Gow’s difficulty. A pirate’s main resource was in merchant cargoes; only luck threw him the fabled treasure ships. For all he could tell about, a pirate might have to plug along in a quiet way of trade, hoping for the time when a _Quedagh Merchant_ or a _Gunsway_ would reward his patient application. But the successful raiding of merchant ships put the pirate in the same situation that the honest shore trader was in,--to make any profit at all he had to keep his stock turned over. Now, in the Indies, while a pirate was waiting his big haul, a system of coast “fences”, or buyers of stolen freight, made possible his continuance in business. Kidd and Avery and all the rest of them used these folk for the disposal of their plunder, for, as we have seen, one of these gentlemen, Cogi Commodo, boasted to the steward of poor Captain Green’s ill-fortuned ship that he had been “merchant” on the Malabar coast, to the eminent Kidd. These illicit traffickers supplied the interlopers and other competitors of the British East India Company, as well as catering to the native markets. The arrangement suited everybody except John Company. But in European waters the only possible opening for a pirate’s wares--that is of the usual merchant sort--was in methods akin to smuggling. That, however, was already a complicated and preëmpted business, and in taking any ship it would always be questionable whether her freight were dutiable and therefore worth-while contraband. Smuggling could never flourish so haphazardly. Last of all, but sufficiently troublesome, was the stricter policing of the European coasts. Without these guardians, of course, the customs would have entirely collapsed and piracy rather than smuggling would have prospered by maintaining a sort of cheap local bazaar, such as Blackbeard did in the Carolinas. The lack of effective policing made possible the brisk trip of John Quelch, the Boston boy, down the Brazil coast, for a cargo taken in one latitude was auctioned off in another and no “fence” was needed to aid in dodging a vigilant authority. The _Revenge_ thus was driven off the coasts of Spain and Portugal by lack of a market and incidentally by the police patrol. Gow and his crew turned the matter over and over in a long debate, which resulted in a determination to sail away to Gow’s native Orkney Islands, a decision which can only be laid to the peculiar fatality which seems to work the self-destruction of wickedness. The meeting must have discussed the possibilities of the East and West Indies, Madagascar, Africa and the Red Sea, not to mention a flyer in slaving on the Guinea Coast; in other words, all the available opportunities for a rising young pirate, but why, against these, were chosen the lean and foggy Orkneys, where even the poor copper penny was worked to death, is a puzzler. Could it be that pirates sometimes grew homesick?