The Lord was pleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast Day which was looked on as a gracious smile of Providence.

Also there had been 19 wounded men sent into Salem a little while before; also a Ketch sent out from Salem as a man-of-war to recover the rest of the Ketches.

The Lord give them Good Success." To encounter a pirate craft was an episode almost commonplace and often more sordid than picturesque.

Many of these sea rogues were thieves with small stomach for cutlasses and slaughter.

They were of the sort that overtook Captain John Shattuck sailing home from Jamaica in 1718 when he reported his capture by one Captain Charles Vain, "a Pyrat" of 12 guns and 120 men who took him to Crooked Island, plundered him of various articles, stripped the brig, abused the crew, and finally let him go.
In the same year the seamen of the Hopewell related that near Hispaniola they met with pirates who robbed and ill-treated them and carried off their mate because they had no navigator.
Ned Low, a gentleman rover of considerable notoriety, stooped to filch the stores and gear from a fleet of fourteen poor fishermen of Cape Sable.