Captain Quelch, now, if you please, by the law and usage of the sea. Anthony Holding bobbed his tarry pigtail low in grimacing courtesy--place was little to him, power everything. And he was the power on this ship. He ordered the captain’s body thrown overboard like so much rubbish. Then he called all hands together in the waist of the brig and openly declared that which undoubtedly he had long secretly prepared for,--piracy. The proposal was acclaimed with a unanimity which indicated premeditation. It was no time for Pimer or Clifford to talk, though manfully they made an effort at protest with no result but to endanger their own safety. That they were not tossed over the side at once is a marvel. The only question that agitated this bandit conference was where to pirate, one suggesting this field and another that. Somebody, probably Holding, persuaded them that Brazil, then a colony of Portugal, and the South American coast gave the most promise of gain. This policy and its execution were really masterly. They must have been the products of careful pondering based upon information more or less exact. Consider it geographically. From Cape San Augustine, where Brazil thrusts its elbow into the Atlantic Ocean, away down to Rio de Janeiro is one long, continuous coast line, well populated even in the early eighteenth century with numerous ports of small and great importance. Starting then at the cape, a pirate need only drop continually down the latitudes, pausing as occasion suggested to pick up prizes, never staying in a vicinity or returning to it to be captured. At Rio, where the cruise was to be finished, swing out far from the coast and make a bee line for home. It was an able plan and strong because so simple. Holding, or whoever the proponent of the South American cruise might have been, had without question made a close study of the methods of Captain Kidd, hanged some two years before in London. The parallel between the Kidd and Quelch piracies is so exact as to be more than coincidental. Both perverted the use of a commissioned ship; both journeyed thousands of miles to their fields of operation; both sought to make one quick, strong strike at fortune and return to respectability. Neither Kidd nor Quelch had a notion of being conventional pirates, that is, of infesting some given locality and preying on passing traffic, spending their gains riotously and expecting not to leave the business except perhaps unluckily by way of the king’s rope. Kidd had made a fortune which was the talk of the colony; and the incident that he was hanged for it only proved his subsequent mismanagement and did not impugn his actual methods of pirating.