many rich purchases might very easily be taken and no one the wiser.

To be sure, those stories and ballads made our captain to be a most
wicked, profane wretch; and if he were, why, God knows he suffered and
paid for it, for he laid his bones in Jamaica, and never saw his home
or his wife and daughter again after he had sailed away on the Royal
Sovereign on that long misfortunate voyage, leaving them in New York to
the care of strangers.

At the time when he met his fate in Port Royal Harbor he had obtained
two vessels under his command--the Royal Sovereign, which was the boat
fitted out for him in New York, and the Adventure galley, which he was
said to have taken somewhere in the South Seas. With these he lay in
those waters of Jamaica for over a month after his return from the
coasts of Africa, waiting for news from home, which, when it came, was
of the very blackest; for the colonial authorities were at that time
stirred up very hot against him to take him and hang him for a pirate,
so as to clear their own skirts for having to do with such a fellow. So
maybe it seemed better to our captain to hide his ill-gotten treasure
there in those far-away parts, and afterward to try and bargain with it
for his life when he should reach New York, rather than to sail straight
for the Americas with what he had earned by his piracies, and so risk
losing life and money both.

However that might be, the story was that Captain Brand and his gunner,
and Captain Malyoe of the Adventure and the sailing master of the
Adventure all went ashore together with a chest of money (no one of them
choosing to trust the other three in so nice an affair), and buried the
treasure somewhere on the beach of Port Royal Harbor. The story then has
it that they fell a-quarreling about a future division or the money,