All this happened just the day before they shared their last prize among the prisoners, in which they put on such a mock face of doing justice to the several captains and mates and other men, their prisoners, whose ships they had taken away, and to whom now they made reparation, by giving them what they had taken violently from another, so that it was a strange medley of mock justice made up of rapine and generosity blended together.

Two days after this they took a Bristol ship bound from Newfoundland to Oporto with fish.  They let her cargo alone, for they had no occasion for fish, but they took out almost all their provisions, all the ammunition, arms, etc., and her good sails, also her best cables, and forced two of her men to go away with them, and then got ten of the Frenchman on board and let her go.  But just as they were parting with her, they consulted together what to do with Williams the lieutenant, who was then among the prisoners and in irons.  And after a short debate, they resolved to put him on board the Bristol-man and send him away too, which accordingly was done, with directions to the master to deliver him on board the first English man-of-war they should meet with, in order to get his being hanged for a pirate, as they jeeringly called him, as soon as he came to England, giving the master an account of some of his villainies.

The truth is, this Williams was a monster rather than a man.  He was the most inhuman, bloody and desperate creature that the world could produce, and was even too wicked for Gow and all his crew, though they pirates and murderers, as has been shown.  His temper was so savage, so villainous, so merciless, that even the pirates themselves told him it was time he was hanged out of the way.

One instance of the barbarity of Williams cannot be omitted, and will be sufficient to justify all that can be said of him.  When Gow gave it as a reason against engaging with the Martinico ship, that he had a great many prisoners on board, and some of their own men that they could not depend on, Williams proposed to have them all called up one by one, and to cut their throats and throw them overboard—­a proposal so horrid that the worst of the crew shook their heads at it.  Gow answered him very handsomely, that there had been too much blood spilled already; yet the refusing this, heightened the quarrel, and was the chief occasion of his offering to pistol Gow himself.  After which his behaviour was such as made all the ship’s crew resolved to be rid of him, and it was thought if they had not had an opportunity to send him away, as they did by the Bristol ship, they would have been obliged to have hanged him themselves.  This cruel and butchery temper of Williams being carried to such a height, and so near to the ruin of them all, shocked some of them, and as they acknowledged gave some check in the heat of their wicked progress, and had they had an opportunity to have gone on shore at that time, without falling into the hands of Justice, it is believed the greatest part of them would have abandoned the ship, and perhaps the very trade of a pirate too.  But they had dipped their hands in blood, and Heaven had no doubt determined to bring them, that is, the chief of them, to the gallows for it, as indeed they all deserved, so they went on.