Dammit, Jugg had been the only Royal Navy Quartermaster's Mate in port, hadn't he? The court officers said the man had worn a Navy man's uniform, had an easy, gruff air of command about him as a Mate should, and sounded fluent in his English, so who else could it have been?

Waving his Admiralty Orders as an "independent ship" as a license to steal, Lewrie had taken Proteus in search of his missing men (and the value of the prize and her cargo!) with a vengeance. It had been a blow to his pride, to his offered trust, a slap in the face as bad as if his whole crew had mutinied! In point of fact, the missing Toby Jugg was becoming about as huge a bete noire to him as Guillaume Choundas had ever been!

Now, after weeks and weeks of searching, of quartering the sea, it appeared that the trail had gone completely cold, and any hope Lewrie had of rescuing his missing people was completely dashed. His last, best, hope had been here on Barbados, in the hills.

Lewrie, Padgett, and Cox'n Andrews had boated ashore, talked to officials, tradesmen, dock workers, and idlers. His clerk, Padgett, proved most useful in discovering that, for a while, a man named Tobias Hosier, formerly a seaman by trade, had farmed a small patch of land inland, in Saint Thomas parish, near a tiny place called Welsh Hell Gully, south of Mount Hillaby. Said Tobias Hosier had been slightly remiss in the tax collectors' books at Government House here in Bridgetown, but… his shortfall of 6s/8p had been made good about seven months before, which happily coincided with the time it would have taken for the note-of-hand on his Joining Bounty to have arrived by mail-packet from Jamaica, where it had been posted!

Any more information, especially a physical description of this Tobias (or Toby), as opposed to the two or three hundred other settlers anointed with that Christian name, any further information about him, would be the preserve of the parish authorities, Padgett was told.