That Kidd had no option but to stay on at Madagascar after Culliford had left is obvious. The faithful thirteen who remained behind with him were clearly an insufficient ship’s company to bring the _Quedagh Merchant_ with her freight safely to America. When he left her off the coast of Hispaniola, nearly a year afterwards, denuded of the specie and goods which he had taken from her to Boston, she carried besides her thirty mounted guns, taken from the _Adventure Galley_, twenty more guns of her own, stowed away in her hold, some two hundred bales of calicoes, silks, and muslins, between eighty and ninety tons of refined sugar, forty tons of saltpetre, and ten tons of iron “in short junks.” No reason, other than stern necessity, can have induced him to prolong his stay at Madagascar. He and his men must have wished to get home as soon as might be. Had they been able to start at once, they might have been in time to put an end to the suspicions of their honesty, which were already accumulating in England owing to the protracted absence of news as to their movements, and the complaint of the East India Company of the seizure of the _Quedagh Merchant_. Unfortunately Madagascar was one of the last places in the world in which Kidd was likely to find the men required to bring his ship home. The majority of such English-speaking men as were there were by no means desirous of bringing themselves within the grasp of the law. In the course of the next five months, to quote his own words, “he picked up here a man and there a man,” and “some passengers presented that were bound for these parts,” _i. e._, America. At last, still under-manned, he started on his homeward voyage, and reached Anguilla in the West Indies in April, 1699. By this time he had been condemned unheard by the home authorities; and the hue and cry had been raised against him and such of his crew as had remained faithful. The lords justices had sent instructions to the governors of all the English colonies in America “to apprehend him and his accomplices, whenever he or they should arrive in any of the said plantations,” and “to secure his ship and all the effects therein, it being their Excellencies’ intention that right be done to those who have been injured and robbed by the said Kidd, and that he and his associates be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law.” Consequently when, in all innocence, he sent his boat on shore, to quote again from his own artless narrative, “his men had the news that he and his people were proclaimed pirates, which put them into such consternation that they sought all opportunities to run the ship ashore upon some reef or shoal, fearing the Narrator should carry them into some English port.”