He selected four Englishmen--two, as it chanced, were from New York--and, directing the rest to meet him at dark in the woods behind Mananara, descended to the beach, where a broken-down native boat was staked. The party crossed the bay and Bowen himself went down to the water front to look at the newly arrived ships. It was now towards evening, and from the cookhouse rose a thin, blue spear of smoke on each ship where the supper was being prepared. Sailors were hanging over the bulwarks, smoking long pipes, and laughing and joking in the burring tongue of Scotland. They noticed the hulking white stranger loafing about the wharf, but made no comment, for one does not long knock about the waters of Madagascar without dulling the faculty of surprise. Bowen marked the names of the two vessels, _Content_ and _Speedy Return_. This latter name he thought unfortunate in view of all the circumstances. _Speedy Return_? Not if Jack Bowen knew anything about the matter. To get the full value out of this adventure, we have to know a little something about these two doomed ships and why and how they happened to be in this little port of Mananara at this particular time. If we lift the fly-blown, time-stained pages of history we get a queerish kind of a yarn in this connection. It only needs a momentary glance, and when we have taken it, we shall the more appreciate the significance of the sinister meddling of Jack Bowen, who, of course, knew nothing of what we shall know and if he had known he would not have cared two straws,--in fact, would have enjoyed his game all the more. In June, 1695, some half a dozen years before Jack Bowen comes on the stage, a group of Scotch noblemen, with some other folk of lesser influence, procured a statute from the English parliament and a charter from the English Crown, authorizing them to incorporate an African-Indian trading company. Their chief object was to found a Scotch colony in the Isthmus of Panama, or Darien, as it was then called. Everybody was going to get immensely rich out of the venture. But the noblemen were not stingy about it; they decided to offer the stock of their corporation to the public. They evidently had a wonderful advertising manager, for an old writer tells us that when the stock was put on the market “the nobility, the gentry, the merchants, the people, the royal burghs without the exception of one, and most of the other public bodies subscribed. Young women threw their little fortunes into the stock; widows sold their jointures to get command of money for the same purpose. Almost in an instant four hundred thousand pounds were subscribed in Scotland, although it be now known that there was not at that time above eight hundred thousand pounds of cash in the kingdom.” That is what you may call promoting,--to get half the cash of the kingdom. It was the last chance anybody ever had of that sort in Scotland.