Partnership was dissolved soon after leaving Charles Town. Blackbeard had already apparently decided to abdicate the cocked hat of an admiral and assume the subordinate rank of a captain. He planned to concentrate his power in his one vessel. So without concern he returned the dissatisfied Bonnet to the _Revenge_ and recalled Richards and the hardiest members of the _Revenge’s_ personnel, leaving Bonnet with half a dozen hands of indifferent expertness to work the sloop. That accounted for one of his three tenders. The second he resolved to abandon at Topsail Inlet, on his way to Ocracoke. This he effected in the regular Blackbeard fashion by ordering it driven ashore at Topsail Inlet and wrecked. Her crew might make what escape they could from the mess. They could not argue with the forty muzzles of his guns, so crack went the sloop’s hull upon the rocks, while Blackbeard lay by and laughed at the men struggling in the surf. These unfortunates at once went to work saving the sloop’s food and powder, which hard labor was no sooner ended than Blackbeard stood in and came ashore in the boat. He took all the salvaged stores and every first-class seaman among the men and left, leaving nearly a score of his late followers destitute and marooned on a wild and isolated beach. In this way Blackbeard paid for faithfulness. The castaways had nothing to do but huddle about the sand and hope for help. It did not occur to them to go back into the wilderness behind them, perhaps because, as sailors, they would not trust themselves to any but their wonted environment, perhaps also for the reason that the unsettled interior promised them even scantier succor than the wide sea before them, on which a coastwise ship might possibly be attracted by their signals. So they lay around listening to the _creak-creak-creak_ of the occasional sea gull, the thumping and swirling of the inrushing waves and the cracking of the ship’s gear and planking. Before serious privation befell them, however, the hoped-for sail fluttered out of the horizon. They took the shirts from their backs and hopped vehemently up and down the beach and flew to the headlands in a frenzy of inarticulate appeal. Joy unspeakable; they saw the topsails heaved back and the ship come to! Saved! The men massed at the very edge of the water and stared hard at the boat which now put off and came swinging in toward them. “If it ain’t Major Bonnet!” There was a kind of pleasure in the way they said this as the boat’s crew could be identified. They had never expected that the commander of the old _Revenge_ could ever have looked so good to them. A dozen welcoming hands pulled at the bow of his boat when it grated on the sand. “A dirty deal, boys,” said the major; “a dirty deal to leave ye all like this--all governors of a maroon island.”