So leaving the _Revenge_ in the inlet, he journeyed overland to Bath; there he signed pledges, took oaths, and did everything that was necessary to change himself from a pirate captain to a respectable commander of a duly authorized British privateer.

Returning to his vessel with all the papers in his pocket necessary to prove that he was a loyal and law-abiding subject of Great Britain, he took out regular clearance papers for St.Thomas, which was a British naval station, and where he declared he was going in order to obtain a commission as a privateer.
Now the wily Bonnet had everything he wanted except a crew.

Of course it would not do for him, in his present respectable capacity, to go about enlisting unemployed pirates, but at this point fortune again favored him; he knew of a desert island not very far away where Blackbeard, at the end of his last cruise, had marooned a large party of his men.

This heartless pirate had not wanted to take all of his followers into port, because they might prove troublesome and expensive to him, and so he had put a number of them on this island, to live or die as the case might be.

Bonnet went over to this island, and finding the greater part of these men still surviving, he offered to take them to St.Thomas in his vessel if they would agree to work the ship to port.