The night is quiet and warm. Not too warm, more like a gentle spring evening with a hint of jasmine in the air. Not the setting in which you'd expect to encounter a band of marauders, or the baser-side of humanity. The brutal, intolerant or greedy certainly don't come out on balmy nights. They prefer dastardly dark and rainy ones. You make your way along the ridge as it arches south and west, guided by the ever-dimming sunlight as it winks at you from between palm trees. Your peripheral vision picks up a shadowed shape on the water in the cove just south of the westerly most point on the island. You stop to make certain of what it is you see. Not more than one hundred yards off shore sits the ominous black silhouette of a two-masted sailing vessel. The sails are tethered to the square rigging. It's smaller than most, a brig with a shallow draft, you suspect, for navigating harbor waters, yet big enough for long passages. There it sits, silent, eerily silent, as if abandoned. How it got here and from where, you trust is a mystery that may unfold around the campfire up ahead.