There is no telling how far this friendship might have gone, or whether the captain of the _Revenge_ might not even have adopted him for his own son, had not an incident, as they neared Carolina, severed the comradeship sharply in two. Harry was caught in the act of putting a lighted match to the powder magazine; just an inch more and the ship would have been nothing but a few broken spars and gratings drifting haphazardly upon the sands of the Carolina beach. The captain turned nasty right away. He banished his little pet into the hold, down among the bilge and the rats, and kept him there till they made port. Rather unkindly he gave the boy to a Carolina planter,--unkindly, of course, not to the boy. It took the planter three years--for he was a man of monumental patience--fully to realize the nature of the gift; and as he could not wish Harry off on anybody in the colony, the boy’s talents being pretty commonly known, he did the best thing he could and sent him back to England. Old Jack Avery had died soon after the boy’s leaving England,--some said of a broken heart. What contact Harry made with his mother is not recorded, but it has become a matter of history that young Avery grew up a rogue, and at length, finding the land too hot for him, sought the cool and obscure promenades of his first element,--the sea. If he belonged anywhere it was to the sea. He even qualified as a navigator with the rank of first mate. In the sixteen-hundred and nineties, the Spanish Government made a bargain with some English merchants to hire coast-guard ships for its troubled South American colonies. Sir James Houblon and several others outfitted a couple of brigs, the _Charles the Second_ and the _James_, for the Spaniard’s business, and it was on the former that Avery was signed as first mate. Thereafter things came about which made a matter for the King’s court of Old Bailey, sitting in admiralty. Among the persons involved was an ancient mariner by the name of William May, who on his trial has left us a story of the wickedness of Mr. Avery. Unfortunately Harry Avery was not brought to account for his crime, nor, so far as we are aware, for any piracy, but slips from the pages of history with these things unrecorded, probably to end his life as one, not the least evil, among the buccaneering hordes of the Caribbean. II Look at the sad plight of me, old Bill May, for thirty-five years in the service of my king and country! Here I lie in the hold of Newgate Gaol, condemned for a pirate and a-tremble like a loose sail in a gale of wind every time the sheriff comes in to read off the list of those appointed for the day to die.