My last real adventure had ended with the burial of the “Leckwith,” for there had been nothing thrilling in the delivery of the arms I had carried to Montenegro and Peru, and I was hungry for some new excitement, the very essence and sole enjoyment of my life. While casting about for something to satisfy my appetite the recollection of the Yarmouth outrage came over me and I decided to steal a ship and let the underwriters pay for her, as partial compensation for the one they had stolen from me. After a survey of the available supply, following my return to London from Peru, late in the Summer of 1879, I hit on the “Ferret,” a handsome and fairly fast little passenger steamer belonging to the Highland Railway Company, which was lying at Gourock Bay on the Clyde. They would not let her out on a general charter, which was what I wanted, so I concluded to charter her for a year for a cruise in the Mediterranean, with the option of purchase for fourteen thousand pounds at the end of that time. All of the negotiations were conducted and the deal closed by Joe Wilson, my trusted aide, and I was careful to impress him with the necessity for the insertion of the option of purchase clause. I had so much confidence in him that I did not closely examine the charter papers and not until it was too late did I discover that he had neglected to cover the one vital point. My plan was to go back out East and dig up the guns which Frank Norton and I had buried on a little island when we left the China Sea, and perhaps, if I found that I could stand it to revisit the scenes of the supreme joy and sadness which had come to me with the discovery of the Beautiful White Devil, resume the unholy occupation of preying on the pirates between Singapore and Hong Kong. I wanted the option of purchase clause inserted in the charter partly as a sop to my conscience and partly with the idea that if we were, by any remote chance, apprehended before we reached the China Sea, I could announce that I had exercised my option and was prepared to pay for the ship. I was not sure that my conscience, for I still had one, would let me carry the deal through, and I figured that I could comfort it, if it troubled me too much, with the assurance that I might really buy the ship after all, though I am frank to say I had no such intention.