ere was now
no looking back; and therefore, as they had not been concerned in what
was past, they had nothing to do but to act in concert, do their duty as
sailors, and obey orders for the good of the ship, and no harm should
come to any of them.

As they all looked like condemned prisoners brought up to the bar to
receive sentence of death, so they all answered by a profound silence,
which Gow took as they meant it, viz, as a consent because they durst
not refuse. So they were then permitted to go up and down everywhere as
they used to do, though such of them as sometimes afterwards showed any
reluctance to act as principals, were never trusted, always suspected
and very often severely beaten. Some of them were in many ways inhumanly
treated and that particularly by Williams, the lieutenant, who was in
his nature a merciless, cruel, and inexorable wretch, as we shall have
occasion to take notice of again in its place.

They were now in a new circumstance of life, and acting upon a different
stage of business, though upon the same stage as to the element, the
water. Before they were a merchant ship, laden upon a good account, with
merchants' goods from the coast of Barbary, and bound to the coast of
Italy; but they were now a crew of pirates, or as they call them in the
Levant, Corsairs, bound nowhere but to look out for purchase and spoil
wherever they could find it. In pursuit of this wicked trade they first
changed the name of the ship, which was before called the _George_
galley, and which they called now the _Revenge_, a name, indeed,
suitable to the bloody steps they had taken. In the next place they made
the best of the ship's forces. The ship had but twelve guns mounted when
they came out of Holland, but as they had six more good guns in the hold
with cartridges and everything proper for service (which they had in
store through being freighted for the Dutch merchants, and the Algerians
being at war with the Dutch), they supposed they might want them for
defence. Now they took care to mount them for a much worse design, so
that now they had eighteen guns, though too many for the number of hands
they had on board. In the third place, instead of pursuing their voyage
to Genoa with the ship's cargo, they took a clear contrary course, and
resolved to station themselves upon the coasts of Spain and Portugal,
and to cruise upon all nations; but what they chiefly aimed at was a
ship with wine, if possible, for that the