the men to lie down behind the ridge of sand which formed the junction
of the beach with the grass-land; and there we crouched, with the
lightning flashing and quivering all about us for fully a quarter of an
hour. Then down came the rain, not in drops, but in sheets, with the
lightning flashing and darting and quivering hither and thither through
it, until we appeared to be enveloped in a gigantic diamond; so
exquisitely beautiful were the glancing colours of the lightning through
the rain. Of course we were wetted to the skin in an instant, but that
did not very greatly matter, as our pistols and ammunition were carried
in waterproof cases; moreover, the rain afforded us an excellent curtain
under cover of which to advance; so at a word from me the men sprang to
their feet, and we pushed rapidly forward. The battery was but a
quarter of a mile from the spot where we had landed, and so accurately
had I taken my bearings that, in about five minutes after we began to
move, the structure loomed up, dark and grim, before us. Hoard had
informed me that its landward sides were protected by a deep moat,
connected with the sea, and spanned by a drawbridge; and it was for this
bridge that I was keeping a sharp look-out. I was so close aboard of it
before I saw it that three or four paces sufficed to carry me to the
sentry-box at its landward end; and just as I reached this box a vivid
flash of lightning revealed its interior, and there, bolt upright, stood
a tall Spanish grenadier, with his musket resting in a corner of the
hut, close to his hand. I realised instantly that the briefest period
of hesitation now meant our undoing; for as I had seen the soldier, he
had also undoubtedly seen me; so the man no sooner stood revealed before
me than, with one bound, I was in the sentry-box with him, one hand
grasping his throat to prevent him from crying out, while with the other
I seized his musket and passed it out to the man next behind me. The
soldier struggled manfully, and did his utmost to free his throat, but I
held him fast, and in so fierce a grip that ere many seconds were over I
felt him sink powerless to the ground. To lash him, hands and feet
together, like a trussed fowl, with his own cross-belts, and to gag him
with a good-sized stone, secured in his mouth by a strip slashed from
his own coat, was but the work of two or three minutes; and when at
length, satisfied that the fellow was secure and harmless, I emerged
from the box, I had the satisfaction of finding that Tom Hardy,--now
acting as the schooner's second mate,--had promptly followed my example
by securing the sentry at the far side of the drawbridge.
We were now consequently in possession of this structure, and that, too,
without the slightest alarm having been given to the garrison, and in
another minute all hands of us stood inside the battery, which was a
fine, solid earthwork, with casemates, very like the battery that we had
seized at Abervrach harbour. Unlike the French battery, however, all
the casemates were open, with the exception of four, two of which were
converted into the officers' quarters, while the other two constituted
the magazine; and in the shelter of these open casemates the
artillerymen were slumbering soundly in hammocks, despite the storm,
with their muskets piled under the shelter of a verandah that ran all
along the front of the casemates. To possess ourselves of these
muskets, and to heave them into the moat was the work of but a few
minutes; and when this was done I went up on to the platform, and with
my own hands effectually spiked every one of the guns. It was a most
unaccountable thing to me that the whole garrison should have slept so
soundly through the terrific crash and roar of the thunder, and the
blaze of the lightning; but they did, perhaps because they were
accustomed to that kind of disturbance; and as the thunder was
practically continuous, I had no difficulty in carrying out my
operations without a single clink of the leather-covered hammer being
audible.
The battery was now useless for some hours at least; and, since we had
been so fortunate as to render it so without any of the garrison
becoming any the wiser, I thought it would be an advantage to leave them
in ignorance for a few hours longer, I therefore quietly withdrew my
men, and, taking the two gagged and bound sentinels with us, effected an
orderly retreat to the beach.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.
THE CAPTURE OF NOSTRA SENORA DEL CARMEN.
Arrived at the boats, we lost not a moment in tumbling into them and
getting under way again, for time was now a precious commodity, there
being still a journey of some four miles before us ere the galleon could
be reached. But, once fairly clear of the Boca, or channel, we should
be able to use our sails, which I had taken the precaution to have
placed in the boats, and then we should make good progress, while the
men would be resting.
The first question for consideration, however, was what to do with our
two prisoners. This was speedily settled by Hoard, who suggested that
they should be landed upon a small islet, called Brujas Island, situate
on the opposite side of the harbour, and lying but little out of our
regular way. This we did, of course first casting them loose and taking
the gags out of their mouths; but although they were thus freed from
actual physical restraint they remained as harmless as before, so far as
we were concerned, for Brujas Island was uninhabited, and separated from
the mainland by two channels which, although only narrow, were so
dangerous, in consequence of the sharks with which the harbour was
infested, that the Spaniards were not at all likely to imperil their
lives by attempting to swim them. There they were, therefore, harmless
enough, so far as we were concerned, until morning, when probably some
passing fisherman might be attracted by their cries, and would release
them. But, whether released or not, I had very little fear that they
would attempt to return to the battery and give the alarm there; the
fact that they had allowed themselves to be surprised and made prisoners
would be accounted by their officers an unpardonable crime; and the
probability was that, when released from the island, they would take to
the forest and make for the interior to escape punishment.
By the time that we had landed these two unfortunate men the thunder-
storm had passed away to seaward, the crash of the thunder had become
modulated to a booming rumble, and a steady, drenching downpour of rain
had set in; the clouds overhead, however, were not nearly so heavy and
black as they had been previous to the outbreak of the storm, and there
was sufficient light to enable us to see where we were going. We
accordingly shoved off from Brujas in high spirits, and, hoisting our
sails, headed up the harbour. The land wind was blowing, although not
very strongly, and when we had been under way about half an hour we
began to look out for the galleon. Hoard was the first to see her--
probably because he knew best of us all where to look for her,--and, the
moment that she was sighted, the gig's sails were lowered, as a signal
for the other boats to close round us. This they immediately did, when
I repeated, in a low voice, the orders that I had already given before
leaving the schooner, in order that every man might know exactly what
duty was expected of him, and do it. Then, having thus refreshed every
man's memory, I gave the order to draw cutlasses and paddle quietly
alongside.
A few minutes sufficed to take us to the galleon; and a fine, stately,
noble-looking craft she was, towering out of the water like a line-of-
battle ship; her lofty masts and wide-spreading yards seeming to pierce
the sky and lose themselves among the few stars that now came twinkling
mistily out, here and there overhead.
We got alongside without being challenged--to my great surprise; and,
half of us boarding her to port and the other half to starboard, in less
than a minute we were all on deck, and gliding softly and noiselessly as
shadows here and there; some securing the fore-scuttle, others the
companions and sky-lights; while others again were briskly swarming up
the shrouds to loose the canvas; the carpenter--with his axe specially
sharpened for the occasion--at once stationing himself by the cables,
ready to cut them at a sign from me, while two men placed themselves at
the ponderous and highly-ornamented wheel.
The singular circumstance that we had succeeded in getting alongside
without being challenged was fully accounted for by the fact that not a
single soul was on deck when we had glided in over the galleon's lofty
bulwarks. If an anchor watch had been set, the men composing it had--as
Hoard had predicted--quietly ignored their duty, in the absence of the
officers, by turning in and leaving the ship to take care of herself.
The surprise was complete; the galleon had fallen into our hands without
so much as a single blow being struck. Of course, there was the crew
below to be reckoned with still, but meanwhile they were close prisoners
and asleep; and, even in the event of their awaking at once and
proceeding to force their way on deck, it would be some time ere they
would be able to break out; and by that time, if all went well, we
should be far enough from the neighbourhood of the town to render any
prospect of assistance from that quarter practically out of the
question. What I most feared was that somebody on board one or another
of the many craft that were anchored in our immediate vicinity might
notice the operation of loosing and setting the galleon's canvas, and
suspecting something to be wrong, man a boat and go ashore to give the
alarm; in which case we should soon have three or four swift galleys
after us; when we were likely enough to find ourselves in an exceedingly
awkward scrape. That, however, was a danger that we had to face. And
after all it was not so very great; for if no anchor watch was being
kept on board the galleon, how much less likely was it that such a watch
would be kept on board the comparatively valueless coasters by which we
were surrounded.
I had carefully explained to my crew beforehand what it was that we had
to do; and I had also given instructions that the whole of the work was
to be carried forward in absolute silence, no one calling out unless the
necessity for so doing was urgent. Consequently, from the moment when
we first dropped in over the bulwarks, not a sound save the soft patter
of muffled feet was heard aboard the galleon until first the topsails
and then the courses were let fall, when, of course, there arose a sound
of canvas fluttering in the wind, which, to my excited imagination,
seemed loud enough to wake the dead. Then came the sharp cheep, cheep
of sheaves upon their pins as the topsails were sheeted home and the
yards mast-headed, followed by a still louder flapping of canvas as the
jib was hoisted. Then came the dull, heavy crunch of the carpenter's
axe as he smote at the cables. I suppose it was these sounds that
awakened the galleon's crew, for while the carpenter was still hacking
away there arose from the interior of the fore-scuttle a loud knocking,
and the muffled sounds of voices angrily demanding that the hatch should
be lifted. Hoard, however, had been standing by, in expectation of
something of this sort, and the moment that there came a pause in the
knocking and shouting I heard him informing the prisoners that the ship
was in the hands of the English, and that unless they--the Spaniards--
immediately ceased their row the whole lot of them would be quickly
subjected to certain dreadful pains and penalties which I but
imperfectly understood. The threat, however, had the desired effect of
quieting our prisoners, who promptly subsided into silence.
It was a somewhat difficult matter to get so big a ship under way in the
rather thickly crowded anchorage, and we were obliged at the outset to
make a rather long and complicated stern-board, which entailed two or
three very narrow shaves of fouling one or another of the craft that
were in our way. The sky, however, was clearing fast, the stars were
shining brightly through great and rapidly increasing rifts in the
clouds and affording us enough light to see what we were about;
moreover, the land breeze was piping up strong, and whistling shrilly
through our rigging, so that as soon as we were able to swing the yards
and get headway upon the lumbering old wagon of a craft, we managed well
enough, and contrived to scrape clear of everything; and that, too,
without attracting any very serious amount of attention, only one hail--
and that, apparently, from somebody more than half drunk--saluting us as
we glided with a slow and stately movement out of the anchorage toward
the somewhat contracted passage between the island of Tierra Bomba and
the Main.
Once fairly clear of the anchorage, and the shipping that encumbered it,
we crowded sail upon the old hooker, and were soon booming down toward
the chain of shoals at the rate of fully seven knots. And now Hoard
once more made himself useful by undertaking to pilot us through the
shoals, which he did very successfully, hugging Brujas Island pretty
closely, and then bearing almost square away for the Boca Chica channel.
A short half-hour sufficed to carry us to the inner end of it; and here
our utmost vigilance was called into play in the navigation of the
sharply-winding passage. But we managed to achieve it successfully, all
still being dark and silent in the San Fernando battery as we passed it,
and after an anxious ten minutes I had the satisfaction of feeling
_Nostra Senora del Carmen_ rising and falling ponderously upon the swell
of the open Caribbean.
In anticipation of the possibility that we might be pursued, I now
shaped a course due west, right off the land, that being, in my opinion,
the direction in which we were least likely to be looked for, and when
we had been running to leeward for about half an hour, and had made an
offing of nearly four miles, I burned three portfires simultaneously as
a preconcerted signal to the schooner that all was well and that she was
to follow us, and an hour later she came foaming up on our weather
quarter and hailed us. We now hove-to and sent alongside her the boats
that had hitherto been towing astern; and as soon as they were hoisted
in we both filled away once more, still standing straight off the land,
so that when day dawned I had the satisfaction of finding that we had
run the coast out of sight.
We had, of course, long ere this secured our prisoners, numbering in all
two hundred and twenty-six men, and now the problem was how to get rid
of them; for I did not at all care to have so many men aboard who would
require to be constantly watched in order that they might not rise upon
and overpower us at some unguarded moment. Happily, the problem was
soon solved; for about noon we sighted a trading felucca, bound from
Porto Bello to Santa Marta, which the schooner brought to, and as she
proved to be a fine, roomy craft I hove-to, lowered the boats, and
transhipped our prisoners into her, despite the protests of her unhappy
captain, who called all the saints to witness that the food he had on
board would not suffice to feed so many men more than a couple of days
at most. This objection I met by pointing out to him that he could bear
up for Tolu, on the Gulf of Morrosquillo, which he could easily fetch in
twenty-four hours, and so left him to settle the matter in whichever way
seemed best to him.
As soon as we had parted company with the felucca, and were fairly under
way again, I set to work to search for the treasure, of the actual
presence of which on board I had as yet had no time to satisfy myself.
Hoard was of opinion that it would be found stowed away in a strong-room
beneath the cabin deck, in the position usually occupied by the
lazarette, and there, sure enough, I found such a room--a solidly built
structure of hard timber, fully six inches thick, plated with iron, the
door being secured by three massive iron bars passed through thick iron
bands, and secured at either end by heavy iron padlocks, six in all, the
keyholes of which were sealed with great seals the size of the palm of
my hand. These seals I broke without a particle of hesitation or
reverence for the great personage who had caused them to be placed
there, and then instituted a hunt for the keys, which resulted, as I had
feared it would, in failure. The keys were doubtless at that moment at
Cartagena, in the possession of the unfortunate captain of the ship, or
in the hands of the official to whose custody the treasure had been
confided. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to set the armourer
to work upon the padlocks, and by dint of hard work he managed to get
them off and the door open by eight bells in the afternoon watch.
The room, when opened, proved to be an apartment measuring about five
feet each way, and it was lined inside as well as outside, with thick
sheets of iron. But it was more than half full of gold ingots; that is
to say the ingots were packed in rows of twenty each athwart the room.
There were five rows of twenty each, constituting a tier, and the ingots
were stored eight tiers high; so that, if the lower tiers contained the
same number of ingots as the top tier, as was pretty certain to be the
case, there were eight hundred ingots of solid gold, each weighing
approximately half a hundredweight! the ingots being made uniformly of
this size and weight in order that they might be conveniently
transported from the mines to the coast by means of trains of Indians.
I was struck dumb with astonishment and admiration as I stood gazing at
the pile of dingy packages, each ingot being tightly sewn up in a
wrapper of raw hide. I could scarcely believe my eyes for the moment.
Twenty tons of gold! Why, there was a fabulous fortune before me! I
reckoned its value roughly, and found that, at the then ruling price of
gold, the value of the packages before me approximated well on toward
three millions sterling.
Nor was this all. There was a heavy, oaken, iron-bound case, measuring
about two feet square by about a foot and a half high. This, I
presumed, contained the uncut gems which Hoard had told me were to be
sent home in this lumbering old treasure-tub. Man alive! when I came to
realise in a measure the approximate value of all this wealth, I tell
you I was frightened; fairly terrified to think that I was now
responsible for it all. For upon me devolved the task of conveying this
enormous wealth safely across the ocean and delivering it into the hands
of my owner, to be by him subdivided into the shares to which each of us
was entitled. I believe I never realised so vividly as at that moment
the manifold perils of the sea: the peril of fire, of tempest, of
shipwreck, and of the enemy. And to think that it had all been
intrusted to a bottom that, under the most favourable circumstances,
could hardly be expected to get up a speed of ten knots, and that
consequently was open to capture by the first fast-sailing picaroon that
happened to fall in with her. It was positively frightful to merely
contemplate such a very likely eventuality. "But, thank goodness,"
thought I, "that danger is easily provided against!" And, going on
deck, I immediately ordered the ship to be hove-to, and the launch
hoisted out, and I also signalled the schooner to close.
It was a lovely evening; the water quite smooth, and a gentle westerly
breeze blowing. I determined, therefore, to seize that opportunity to
transfer the whole of the treasure to the _Sword Fish_, in the hold of
which craft I considered it would be far safer than where it was then.
And, that done, I determined to make my way, first to Jamaica, to pick
up a few more hands to help in working the galleon, and then to make the
best of my way home without risking the loss of all by engaging in any
more fighting, however tempting might be the opportunity. The men went
to work cheerily; easily divining my motive for transhipping the
treasure, and being, of course, each in his own degree, as anxious for
its safety as I was. Moreover, the galleon's launch was a fine big lump
of a boat; so we managed to tranship the whole and get it safely stowed
away before sundown. That night I resumed command of the schooner, and
turned the command of the galleon over to Saunders, who was a thoroughly
steady, reliable fellow.
At midnight, as arranged by me prior to leaving the galleon, both craft
hauled up to the northward for Jamaica, and we then found that--so slow
was the galleon, with the wind anywhere but on her quarter--the
schooner, under mainsail, stay foresail, and jib, was quite able to keep
pace with her even when she was carrying topgallant-sails, above which
the galleon set nothing. This promised a long, wearisome voyage across
the Atlantic, and doubly justified me in transhipping the treasure to
the schooner. Nevertheless I looked forward with a great deal of pride
to the day when I should take the prize into Weymouth harbour. It was
early days, however, to think of that as yet, for there was the whole of
the Atlantic and two-thirds of the Caribbean between ourselves and home,
with who could say how many chances of shipwreck or capture before that
distance could be traversed.
And, as though to enforce the recollection of the latter contingency
more effectively upon us, the dawn next morning revealed a long, snake-
like two-masted craft hovering some five miles to windward, which I by
and by made out to be one of those pestilent war-galleys which were apt
to prove such formidable antagonists, and to give so much trouble in
such moderate weather as we were then experiencing. I judged that this
galley, which was under sail when first sighted, had come out from
Cartagena in search of us, and from the fact that she did not at once
bear down upon us, but hung persistently to windward, I conjectured that
she was not alone, that she had one or more consorts somewhere to
windward, and that, upon fully identifying the galleon, she would lower
her sails, out sweeps, and be off to windward for help to tackle us.
This I was most anxious to prevent, if possible, and after considering
awhile I hit upon a plan which I thought might serve. I accordingly
closed with the galleon, and ordered Saunders to at once bear up before
the wind and run away to leeward, piling all the sail possible upon the
old tub, to convey the impression that he was terribly frightened, and
was exceedingly anxious to escape recapture. At the same time all sail
was crowded upon the schooner, the precaution being taken, however, to
tow an old spare foresail overboard, abreast the lee gangway, which had
the effect of causing the schooner to sail as if she were water-logged.
I also shaped a course with the schooner diverging about four points
from that of the galleon.
The latter now, of course, ran away from us, hand over hand; while now
the galley manifested a disposition to edge down a little and get a
nearer look at us both. This was precisely what I wanted, my hope being
that our precipitate retreat would be construed by the Spaniards as a
sign of weakness and fear on our part, and that the commander of the
galley would thus be inveigled into attempting the recapture of the
galleon single-handed, instead of sharing the honour with his consorts.
I anticipated that, if he should yield to my blandishments, he would
make a dash straight for the galleon without troubling himself about the
schooner, the sluggish movements of which would render her in his eyes
an altogether contemptible adversary, utterly beneath his notice, and
only to be tackled and submitted to an exemplary punishment after the
recapture of the galleon had been achieved. And, should I prove correct
in this line of reasoning, he would run away to leeward after the
galleon, when I should have him exactly where I wanted him, namely, to
leeward of the schooner, when it would be my business to see that he did
not again get to windward of us.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.
I END MY CAREER AS A PRIVATEERSMAN.