20.
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21.
and being evidently the pirate boat was burnt to ashes. Piratical suspicions were thus confirmed.
I now anchored for the night at the entrance of the creeks, but there appeared to be little chance of catching any pirates, as whenever the Gun Boat made her presence known by firing a signal fire on the nearest hill and lighting up the surrounding area, it gave warning of her presence - this took place every morning after our arrival.
On the 5th January, another fisherman came on board to volunteer information respecting pirates; we accordingly entered Plover's Harbour and found there three Piratical Junks which were immediately recognised by the Lorchas crew and some other fishermen, sending Mr Dennison after one Junk and leaving the Gun Boat to look after an abandoned one which was drifting about the Bay.
I proceeded in the gig after the third, which we found nearly cut to pieces and entirely cleared out. We then landed and proceeded in charge of the boats, but were unable to come up with them, and though all the boats about the place were searched and every means taken, it was impossible to capture them.
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The original text has been proofread according to the given instructions. The changes made include: 1. Correcting spelling errors (e.g., "breeks" to "creeks", "mord" to "made", "sigural Pire" to "signal fire", "st" to no change but "стемт" was not a word and was removed as it seems to be a non-OCR text, "کیا" was not translated as per rule 9, "Lorchas mew" to "Lorchas crew", "anabandoned" to "abandoned", "procceded" to "proceeded", "brews" to "boats", "come up withi" to "come up with", "every mea" to "every means"). 2. Fixing spacing issues and rejoining broken sentences. 3. Restoring paragraph breaks. 4. Indicating missing words with `...` was not necessary in this case. 5. Formatting in Markdown was not directly applied as per the output instruction; instead, HTML was used as instructed. The output is in HTML format using `` for paragraphs.