Kidd grabbed a heavy wooden bucket, bound with iron hoops, probably the one holding the water with which the gunner wet his stone, and smote Moore upon the head. Sails sank his needle back in the canvas, the sleepers turned over on their sides, the men aloft looked a moment solemnly at each other, and the wooden bucket, bound with iron hoops, rolled redly to the scuppers. There was an opening for a gunner aboard the ship _Adventure_. Malabar, that beautiful and fertile strip of the Indian coast which fronts the Arabian Sea for some hundred and fifty miles, was a sort of way station for Kidd as he worked the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. He ran in and out of this region according to his need of victualing or repairing the now unsatisfactory _Adventure_. He was not what one would call exactly welcome there. His coming meant a disturbance in the local villages and the liberation upon them of an undisciplined and roguish company. His crew and the natives not occasionally fell out. Very likely the sailors were the beginners of the trouble,--so their general make-up of character would suggest. Gunner Moore’s death was not the only violence of the _Adventure’s_ hours at Malabar. There was, for instance, the matter of the ship’s cooper. That artisan got among the natives and never came back to the ship. It was on him the townsfolk avenged themselves in an undetermined quarrel with the pirates of which the cooper’s death was an episode. Knowing Kidd as we do, it is not astonishing that he visited his wrath upon the natives in vindicating the life even of a ship’s cooper. He swarmed his men ashore, burned down the dwellings of the people and, catching one of the inhabitants, ordered him, with crude formality, shot. It is a wonder that he did not exterminate the town. Mere ruthlessness, however, would not seem a part of his disposition. In this matter of the cooper there cannot be much question that the final responsibility must fall upon the captain, whose failure to keep order among his men made their acts of provocation possible. With these two incidents of the gunner and the cooper to lend action to his sojourn, Kidd lay about Malabar until November, 1697, was advanced. He then pulled up his anchor and breezed out to the Arabian Sea seeking what or whom he might devour. The lot fell on a Moorish ship, out from Surat, under the command of a Dutch skipper. On sighting her, Kidd went to the flag locker where he had a bundle of symbolic aliases and picked out the flag of France, and flung it brightly from his topmast. The Moor was wallowing along without any insignia of nationality, but before very long, the _Adventure’s_ men saw her shake out the French flag. Whereupon everybody laughed in deep chests and kept smoothly to the pursuit.