If he resisted so long, it was, I think, the thought of Arabella Bishop that restrained him.  That they should be destined never to meet again did not weigh at first, or, indeed, ever.  He conceived the scorn with which she would come to hear of his having turned pirate, and the scorn, though as yet no more than imagined, hurt him as if it were already a reality.  And even when he conquered this, still the thought of her was ever present.  He compromised with the conscience that her memory kept so disconcertingly active.  He vowed that the thought of her should continue ever before him to help him keep his hands as clean as a man might in this desperate trade upon which he was embarking.  And so, although he might entertain no delusive hope of ever winning her for his own, of ever even seeing her again, yet the memory of her was to abide in his soul as a bitter-sweet, purifying influence.  The love that is never to be realized will often remain a man’s guiding ideal.  The resolve being taken, he went actively to work.  Ogeron, most accommodating of governors, advanced him money for the proper equipment of his ship the Cinco Llagas, which he renamed the Arabella.  This after some little hesitation, fearful of thus setting his heart upon his sleeve.  But his Barbados friends accounted it merely an expression of the ever-ready irony in which their leader dealt.

To the score of followers he already possessed, he added threescore more, picking his men with caution and discrimination — and he was an exceptional judge of men — from amongst the adventurers of Tortuga.  With them all he entered into the articles usual among the Brethren of the Coast under which each man was to be paid by a share in the prizes captured.  In other respects, however, the articles were different.  Aboard the Arabella there was to be none of the ruffianly indiscipline that normally prevailed in buccaneering vessels.  Those who shipped with him undertook obedience and submission in all things to himself and to the officers appointed by election.  Any to whom this clause in the articles was distasteful might follow some other leader.

Towards the end of December, when the hurricane season had blown itself out, he put to sea in his well-found, well-manned ship, and before he returned in the following May from a protracted and adventurous cruise, the fame of Captain Peter Blood had run like ripples before the breeze across the face of the Caribbean Sea.  There was a fight in the Windward Passage at the outset with a Spanish galleon, which had resulted in the gutting and finally the sinking of the Spaniard.  There was a daring raid effected by means of several appropriated piraguas upon a Spanish pearl fleet in the Rio de la Hacha, from which they had taken a particularly rich haul of pearls.  There was an overland expedition to the goldfields of Santa Maria, on the Main, the full tale of which is hardly credible, and there were lesser adventures through all of which the crew of the Arabella came with credit and profit if not entirely unscathed.