Note 9 — PIRACY OF BARTHOLOMEW ROBERTS.

They seem to have been painfully destitute of corkscrews. A year later, on the West African coast, when they had captured in a ship of the Royal African Company the chaplain of Cape Coast Castle, and had asked him to join them, "alledging merrily, that their Ship wanted a Chaplain", and he had declined, they gave him back all his possessions, and "kept nothing which belonged to the Church, except three Prayer-Books, and a Bottle-Screw, which, as I was inform'd by one of the Pyrates himself, they said they had Occasion for, for their own Use". Ibid., p. 198.