The masterstroke of his disguise was permanent⁠—that he carried no guns. Guns can be hidden or thrown overboard, it is true: but the grooves they make in the deck cannot, as many a protesting-innocent sea-robber has found to his cost. Jonsen not only had no guns to hide, he had no grooves: any fool could see he had no guns, and never had had any. And who ever heard of a pirate without guns? It was laughable: yet he had proved again and again that one could make a capture just as easily without them: and further, that the captured merchantman, in making his report, could generally be counted on to imagine a greater or less display of artillery. Whether it was to save their faces, or pure conservatism⁠—presumption that there must have been guns⁠—nearly every vessel Jonsen had had dealings with had reported masked artillery, manned by “fifty or seventy ruffians of the worst Spanish type.”