The captors took off hides, tallow and beef and then left the Portuguese. They were ready for home now, and the little tender which had journeyed a thousand miles with them was dismantled and set adrift to float upon some Brazilian beach. The _Charles_ swung round and drove northward for Boston, home and--not mother. The end of February, 1704, was when they struck off from the Rio Region, concluding just about three months of active piracy, perhaps three and a half. It surely looked reckless for Quelch to come back to Boston with the good merchants’ brig and with no trophies in his hold of England’s enemies but shamefully of England’s ally, Portugal. It was as reckless as it looked; but mere recklessness never bothered John Quelch. Perhaps the yarn that Anthony Holding and he had spun together gave him a confidence that he would not otherwise have had. It was a plausible thing. All hands were to say that Captain Plowman had died naturally, true only in part; that thereafter while cruising for Frenchmen according to Plowman’s commission, now executed by Quelch, they beat down as far as Brazil way. Here they met with coast Indians who told them that a rich Portuguese brig had been recently wrecked in those parts, from which the Indians had obtained great treasure, of which the gold dust and doubloons on the _Charles_ were a part, having been given to Quelch and his men by the pleasant natives, who had little notion of the worth of those things. There was more than a good chance that the gang could have got away with this story. Nobody could have checked them up, and the incident in itself was not so utterly improbable; a circumstance like that _might_ happen in those far-off seas. The trouble for Quelch was that he carried informers with him all the time and brought them back with him to Boston. Pimer and Clifford and the one or two other loyal men were only waiting their time. And Quelch knew it. Off the Bermudas, coming home, Quelch called for a journal Pimer was known to be keeping and tore from it five or six leaves containing a record of the various piracies from St. Augustine to Rio. Quelch probably calculated that fear for their own safety would keep all hands quiet when they reached Boston. He was wrong. The _Charles_ was not long docked after her far-flung cruise when Quelch and a number of the seamen were arrested and the ship appropriated. There can be little question that Pimer and Clifford or one of them hurried to the governor and informed. The jig was up. Anthony Holding, the evil genius of the adventure, shrewdly packed up his portion of the plunder and fled without waiting for what he no doubt foresaw as inevitable and imminent, the approach of the officers of the law.