And now to return to the unfortunate sloops. Their provisions were nearly exhausted, and although fish and fowl were readily obtainable at Madagascar, whither they returned, they had no salt to cure them for a long voyage. They therefore made an encampment on the coast, where they were joined by other piratical Englishmen who had selected the island as a permanent place of settlement. When the pirates first settled there many of the native princes were very friendly, and the former, having fire-arms, which in those days the latter had not, often joined in the inter-tribal wars, carrying terror wherever they went. Half a dozen pirates with a small native army would put a much larger number of the enemy to flight, and they were therefore great personages, and were almost worshipped. By these means they became in a little time very formidable, and such prisoners as they took in war were employed in cultivating the ground, and the most beautiful of the women they married; nor were they contented with one wife, but often adopted the practice of polygamy. The natural result was, that they separated, each of them choosing a convenient place for himself, where he lived in princely style, surrounded by his family, slaves, and dependents. Nor was it long before jarring interests excited them to draw the sword against each other, and they appeared in the field of battle, at the head of their respective clans as it were. In these civil wars their number and strength were very soon greatly lessened. These pirates, in the strange manner elevated to the dignity of petty princes, and being destitute of honourable principles, used their power with the most wanton barbarity. The most trifling offences were punished with death; the victim was led to a tree, and instantly shot through the head. The negroes at length, exasperated by continual oppression, formed the determination to exterminate their masters in the course of a single night; and this was not apparently a very difficult matter to accomplish, so much were they divided. Fortunately, however, for them, a negro woman who was partial to them ran twenty miles in three hours, and warning them of their danger, they were united in arms to oppose the negroes before the latter had assembled. This narrow escape made them more cautious. By degrees the original stock of course died out, and when Captain Woods Rodgers called there about thirty years after, there were only eleven of them left, surrounded by a numerous progeny of half-breed children. The circumstance will remind our readers of the descendants of the mutineers of the _Bounty_ on Pitcairn Island.