unflattering_. Therefore Captain Shard decided that the time had come
to tell his men the secret.

Riding off Teneriffe one night, he called them all together. He
generously admitted that there were things in the past that might
require explanation: the crowns that the Princes of Aragon had sent to
their nephews the Kings of the two Americas had certainly never
reached their Most Sacred Majesties. Where, men might ask, were the
eyes of Captain Stobbud? Who had been burning towns on the Patagonian
seaboard? Why should such a ship as theirs choose pearls for cargo?
Why so much blood on the decks and so many guns? And where was the
_Nancy_, the _Lark_, or the _Margaret Belle_? Such questions as these,
he urged, might be asked by the inquisitive, and if counsel for the
defence should happen to be a fool, and unacquainted with the ways of
the sea, they might become involved in troublesome legal formulae. And
Bloody Bill, as they rudely called Mr. Gagg, a member of the crew,
looked up at the sky, and said that it was a windy night and looked
like hanging. And some of those present thoughtfully stroked their
necks while Captain Shard unfolded to them his plan. He said the time
was come to quit the _Desperate Lark_, for she was too well known to
the navies of four kingdoms, and a fifth was getting to know her, and
others had suspicions. (More cutters than even Captain Shard suspected
were already looking for her jolly black flag with its neat
skull-and-crossbones in yellow.) There was a little archipelago that
he knew of on the wrong side of the Sargasso Sea; there were but
thirty islands there, bare, ordinary islands, but one of them floated.
He had noticed it years ago, and had gone ashore and never told a
soul, but had quietly anchored it with the anchor of his ship to the
bottom of the sea, which just there was profoundly deep, and had made
the thing the secret of his life, determining to marry and settle down