On a morning in early July, in open waters west of the Bermudas, the _Dread_ had picked up one Pieter Van Anda, single survivor of the sloop _Schouven_ out of Amsterdam, who had clung all night to the smashed fragment of a mast. The _Schouven_ had been attacked by a fast ketch flying no flag, boarded, plundered, her captain and most of her crew butchered in a rapid engagement where no quarter was given--but later, before the sloop was set afire, the mad captain of the ketch had harangued, even pleaded with the three who still lived, to throw in their lot with him, for he was bound to the other side of the world as soon as he could acquire two or three other vessels as good as his own, and was in need of good men. The sloop was worthless except for her provisions and so must be burned, but would they not go with him? One consented; the other and Van Anda, then expecting nothing worse than being set adrift, would not; they were thrown into the sea. This, the tall, sweet-voiced, black-haired captain told them--they being crushed against the rail of the sloop by four men who seemed not mad but merely rabble of the baser sort, pirates--this was an evil thing he did and he knew it, but the end he served was beyond their understanding, and could he allow them to bear witness to his acts before the time was ripe? Perhaps the sea would be kind, at any rate he must do as his inner voice commanded and could do no other. As he told them this, he rubbed a copper coin, and his blue eyes spread into black, burning into them. "And since I cannot be trusting you now, Mother of God, the time's past for any change of heart, and so God keep you, gentlemen"--and the sea (said Van Anda) in its most furious mood was surely kinder than such a man. The ketch carried two small guns--six-pounder falconets, Van Anda thought--handled with great skill or great luck, for the first shot, delivered with no warning as the ketch glided to windward of her, sliced off the _Schouven's_ mast and left her in a welter of confusion while the ketch's boat shot across the gap and the pirates boarded her like starved rats. The _Schouven_ carried only seven hands; it was soon over. An infernal vessel, Van Anda said--the airs had been light that evening, the _Schouven_ making not much more than steerage way, yet the ketch ran down on her out of the eye of the late sun as if the Devil himself had lent her a capful of wind. Clinging to that fragment of the mast, Van Anda had seen her for a while, speeding southward, in the light of sunset and of the burning sloop. A beautiful, wild, unnatural thing, her bowsprit low-slung, her figurehead a white maiden, her name _Diana_.