Adventure Magazine Cover — page 164: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

_ “Who’s afraid of Kidd?” gage their opportunity. He used few ‘abstractions, everything and everybody he painted in quick, certain colors. _ Perhaps, after all, there was a chance for the gunner. If he had meekly bowed assent and driven along with his chisel- grinding it might have been well for him. But it is to be taken that Gunner Moore had passed himself for a man of some character anrong his fellows. He was a sort of gang leader, apparently; had he not spoken up, had not his attitude been, He was, really, but had not imagination enough to know it. And now he was tumbled low before all men with these rough words. To swal- low them was to creep about the ship for- ever humble. He rallied, did the gunner, but instead of rallying with words he should have resorted to the chisel in his hand or a marlinspike. No, he did not understand the piratical trade. He mistook it as a calling in which one could still talk. Tt am a lousy dog,” he cried desper- ately, “you have made me so; you have brought me to ruin and many more.’ “And many more.’ Notice that—it is an ap to that gaping sail-maker, those wide-eyed sleepers, those staring men in the rigging. Here am I, it says, your spokesman, telling the captain now just what we have all been saying about him _and the way we all feel—stick by me; some- body up there in the yards please drop a block on his head. - | Gangs, being untrained and undirected are necessarily uncertain and do not en- stration of sympathy might have saved the - gunner; the captain was only one man. The ship rocked, the wind blew sluggish from Malabar, a eord smacked thinly against the spars and the moment passed. “Have I ruined you, ye dog?’”’ replied his formidable opponent. “Take that!” Kidd grabbed a heavy wooden bucket, bound with iron hoops, probably the one holding the water with which the gunner wet his stone, and smote Moore upon the head. ; Sails sank his needle back in the canvas, the sleepers turned over on their sides, the ~ men aloft looked a moment solemnly at each other, and the wooden bucket, bound with iron hoops, rolled redly to the scuppers. There was an opening for a pannet aboard the ship Adventure. | A brisk demon-: Adventure Ore MALABAR, that beautiful and ' ahi fertile strip of the Indian coast <3 which fronts the Arabian Sea for some hundred and fifty miles, was a sort of way-station for Kidd as he worked the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. He ran in and out of this region according to his need for victualing or repairing the now unsatis- factory Adventure. He was not what one would call exactly welcome there. His coming meant a dis- turbance in the local villages and the libera- tion upon them of an undisciplined and roguish company. His crew and the na- tives not occasionally fell out... Very likely the sailors were the beginners of the trouble —so their general make-up of character would suggest. was not the énly violence of the Adventure’ s hours at Malabar. There was, for instance, the matter of the ship’s cooper. That artisan got among the natives and never came back to the ship. It was on him the townsfolk avenged themselves in an undetermined quarrel with the pirates of which the cooper’s death was an episode. Knowing Kidd as we do, it is not astonishing that he vistted his wrath upon the natives in vin- dicating the life even of a ship’s cooper. He swarmed his men ashore, burned down the dwellings of the people “and, catching one of the inhabitants, ordered ‘him, with crude formality, shot. It is a wonder that he did not exterminate the town. Mere ruthlessness, however, would not seem a part of his disposition. In this matter of the cooper there cannot be much question that the final responsi- bility must fall upon the captain, whose failure to keep order among his men made ~ their acts of provocation possible. With these two incidents of the gunner and the cooper to lend action to his sojourn, Kidd lay about Malabar until November, 1697 was advanced. He then pulled up his anchor and breezed out to the Arabian — Sea seeking what or whom he might devour. The lot fell on a Moorish ship, out from Surat, under the command of a Dutch skipper. On sighting her, Kidd went to. the flag locker where he had a bundle of symbolic aliases and picked out the flag of France, Gunner Moore’s death. and flung it brightly from his top-mast. — The Moor was wallowing along without any —COMICDOOKS (E@)