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This is why Marcombes often lets fall into his letters to the Earl of Cork items such as these: "I have made a compleat black satin sute for Mr Robert: ye cloake Lined with plush, and I allow them every moneth a peese ye value of very neare two pounds sterlings for their passe time." The only disturbing elements in the satisfactory state of Marcombes and his pupils were the Killigrews.
Bully and Peese sailed for the Ellice and Gilbert groups, and soon news reached Sydney that they had been playing havoc with the traders there. With the traders of Captain Eury, and those of Captain Daly, of the Sydney brig Lady Alicia, they were very rough, appropriating all their oil and other native produce and giving them sarcastically written receipts.
For a thousand dollars Peese agreed to stand by them and save all he could, including her four guns. The guns were rafted to the Waterlily, then the small arms and stores followed in the boats belonging to the gunboat. At dusk Hayes went aboard the wrecked ship and took the brig's Chinese carpenter with him.
Peese and Hayes then arranged to bring in the Waterlily at next tide, lay her alongside the gunboat, and put the guns and stores aboard again, agreeing to take the captain's order on Macao for 700 dollars and 800 dollars in cash.
An inquiry was held, and Hayes, so it was stated, came out of it well. The Old Dominion was sold, and Hayes entered the Imperial Chinese service as commander of a gunboat. Another gunboat was commanded by one Ben Peese. Of this period of his life Hayes never cared to speak, but the story of Peese and himself was given as follows:
Shortly after her departure Hayes resigned and went to Macao. Here he was joined by his colleague, in command of the Waterlily. How Peese had got possession of her was not known. Hayes told people that his friend had bought her, but those intimate with Peese knew a great deal better.
And then with a new ship, a new crew many of whom were Hayes's and Peese's former Chinese naval service pirates the partners sailed for the Bonin Islands, where Peese was well known, and had lived before. Two days ere making the Bonins a ship was sighted ashore on a reef.
Peese soon got into trouble, however, and when a number of merchants who had been despoiled had succeeded in proving that his gunboat was a worse terror to them than the pirates whom he worried, he disappeared for a time. The Waterlily, which was then on the point of sailing for Calcutta, was, at this time, chartered at a big figure by some rich merchants to take a cargo of provisions to Rangoon.
It was a gunboat from Macao with an official on board, bound to the Bonin Islands to investigate the murder of a Portuguese captain and mate. A boat was lowered from the Waterlily, and Peese, who spoke Spanish well, learned from the captain that the gunboat, which was then hard and fast, had run ashore in the night and bumped a big hole in herself just amidships.
In those days did a German trading-vessel in the Islands sight a white-painted brig with yacht-like lines and carrying Cunningham's patent topsails, the Teutonic skipper cracked on all his ship could stagger under, and thanked heaven when he saw the stranger hull-down; for Bully, with his fidus achates, the almost equally notorious Captain Ben Peese, had a penchant for boarding Dutchmen and asking for a look at their chronometers, and in his absent-minded way, taking these latter away with him.
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