Part 15 (1/2)

Back to the shi+ps they pulled, to return again presently with a fresh load of armed men, which similarly they conveyed to Palomas And at last one of the Spanish officers ventured an explanation: ”They are going to attack us by land - to attempt to storuessed it Whom the Gods would destroy they first ed Esteban, in his exciteh that scrub? That would be to play into their hands No, no, ait here to receive this attack Whenever it comes, it is themselves will be destroyed, and utterly Have no doubt of that”

But by evening the Aduas had made a half-dozen journeys with their loads of uel had clearly observed through his telescope - at least a dozen guns

His countenance no longer smiled; it was a little wrathful and a little troubled now as he turned again to his officers

”Who was the fool who told me that they number but three hundred men in all? They have put at least twice that number ashore already”

Amazed as he was, his amazement would have been deeper had he been told the truth: that there was not a single buccaneer or a single gun ashore on Palouess that the uas were always the same; that on the journeys to the shore they sat and stood upright in full view; and that on the journeys back to the shi+ps, they lay invisible at the bottom of the boats, which were thusfears of the Spanish soldiery at the prospect of a night attack from the landward side by the entire buccaneer force - and a force twice as strong as they had suspected the pestilent Blood to coan to be co daylight, the Spaniards did precisely what Captain Blood so confidently counted that they would do - precisely what they must do to hly simulated They set theuns ee out to sea

Groaning and sweating, urged on by the curses and even the whips of their officers, they toiled in a frenzy of panic-stricken haste to shi+ft the greater nuuns across to the landward side, there to eht be ready to receive the attack which at any ht burst upon theht fell, although in ht of those wild devils whose reckless courage was a byword on the seas of the Main, at least the Spaniards were tolerably prepared for it Waiting, they stood to their guns

And whilst they waited thus, under cover of the darkness and as the tide began to ebb, Captain Blood's fleet weighed anchor quietly; and, as once before, with no more canvas spread than that which their sprits could carry, so as to give the been painted black - the four vessels, without a light showing, groped their way by soundings to the channel which led to that narrow passage out to sea

The Elizabeth and the Infanta, leading side by side, were almost abreast of the fort before their shadowy bulks and the soft gurgle of water at their proere detected by the Spaniards, whose attention until that moment had been all on the other side And now there arose on the night air such a sound of human baffled fury as ues To heighten that confusion, and to scatter disorder a the Spanish soldiery, the Elizabeth euns into the fort as she ept past on the swift ebb

At once realizing - though not yet how - he had been duped, and that his prey was in the very act of escaping after all, the Aduns that had been so laboriously ed back to their forunners meanwhile to the slender batteries that of all his powerful, but now unavailable, armament still remained trained upon the channel With these, after the loss of some precious moments, the fort at last made fire

It was answered by a terrific broadside fro canvas to her yards The enraged and gibbering Spaniards had a brief vision of her as the line of flame spurted from her red flank, and the thunder of her broadside drowned the noise of the creaking halyards After that they saw her no more assiuns were speculatively stabbing, the escaping shi+ps fired never another shot that ht assist their baffled and bewildered enee was sustained by Blood's fleet But by the time the Spaniards had resolved their confusion into soerous offence, that fleet, well served by a southerly breeze, was through the narrows and standing out to sea

Thus was Don Miguel de Espinosa left to chew the bitter cud of a lost opportunity, and to consider in what ter that Peter Blood had got away froates that were lately the property of Spain, to say nothing of two hundred and fifty thousand pieces of eight and other plunder And all this in spite of Don Miguel's four galleons and his heavily armed fort that at one time had held the pirates so securely trapped

Heavy, indeed, grew the account of Peter Blood, which Don Miguel swore passionately to Heaven should at all costs to himself be paid in full

Nor were the losses already detailed the full total of those suffered on this occasion by the King of Spain For on the following evening, off the coast of Oruba, at the mouth of the Gulf of Venezuela, Captain Blood's fleet ca under full sail to reenforce Don Miguel at Maracaybo

At first the Spaniard had conceived that she wasfrom the destruction of the pirates When at coe soared to the Arabella's masthead to disillusion her, the Santo Nino chose the better part of valour, and struck her flag

Captain Blood ordered her crew to take to the boats, and land themselves at Oruba or wherever else they pleased So considerate was he that to assist theuas which he still had in tow

”You will find,” said he to her captain, ”that Don Miguel is in an extremely bad temper Commend me to him, and say that I venture to remind him that he must blame himself for all the ills that have befallen him The evil has recoiled upon him which he loosed when he sent his brother unofficially to make a raid upon the island of Barbados Bid hilish settleain”

With that he dismissed the Captain, ent over the side of the Santo Nino, and Captain Blood proceeded to investigate the value of this further prize When her hatches were reo was disclosed in her hold

”Slaves,” said Wolverstone, and persisted in that belief cursing Spanish devilry until Cahusac crawled up out of the dark bowels of the shi+p, and stood blinking in the sunlight

There was ht to make the Breton pirate blink And those that crawled out after him - the remnants of his crew - cursed hiht the their deliverance to those whom they had deserted as lost beyond hope

Their sloop had encountered and had been sunk three days ago by the Santo Nino, and Cahusac had narrowly escaped hangingthe Brethren of the Coast

Fortaunt: ”Where do you spend the gold that you brought back from Maracaybo?”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MILAGROSA

The affair at Maracaybo is to be considered as Captain Blood's buccaneering h there is scarcely one of the ht - recorded in such particular detail by Jereenius for naval tactics, yet in none is this euel de Espinosa had sprung upon hireat as it already was, is dwarfed into insignificance by the fame that followed It was a faan - has ever boasted, before or since

In Tortuga, during thethe three shi+ps he had captured froone out to destroy him, he found himself almost an object of worshi+p in the eyes of the wild Brethren of the Coast, all of who under hi able to pick and choose the crews for his augmented fleet, and he chose fastidiously When next he sailed away it ith a fleet of five fine shi+ps in which went so over a thousand men Thus you behold him not merely famous, but really formidable The three captured Spanish vessels he had renamed with a certain scholarly huri to the world that he made them the arbiters of the fate of any Spaniards he should henceforth encounter upon the seas

In Europe the news of this fleet, following upon the news of the Spanish Ad of a sensation Spain and England were variously and unpleasantly exercised, and if you care to turn up the diploed on the subject, you will find that it is considerable and not always amiable

And uel de Espinosa ht be said - to use a terrace into which he had fallen as a result of the disasters suffered at the hands of Captain Blood had driven the Admiral all but mad It is impossible, if we impose our uel Hate was now this unfortunate eance an obsession to hisup and down the Caribbean seeking his enemy, and in the meantime, as an hors d'oeuvre to his vindictive appetite, he fell upon any shi+p of England or of France that loomed above his horizon

I need say no more to convey the fact that this illustrious sea-captain and great gentleman of Castile had lost his head, and was becoht anon condemn him for his practices But how should that matter to one who already was condemned beyond redemption? On the contrary, if he should live to lay the audacious and ineffable Blood by the heels, it was possible that Spain ularities and earlier losses with a more lenient eye

And so, reckless of the fact that Captain Blood was now in vastly superior strength, the Spaniard sought hiht him vainly The circumstances in which eventually they ent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will, and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the ht have averted Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the very tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations

Observe it noork in the affairs of Captain Blood and of some others

On the 15th Septeland - three shi+ps were afloat upon the Caribbean, which in their co conjunctions were to work out the fortunes of several persons

The first of these was Captain Blood's flagshi+p the Arabella, which had been separated from the buccaneer fleet in a hurricane off the Lesser Antilles In so, she was beating up for the Windward Passage, before the inter for Tortuga, the natural rendezvous of the dispersed vessels

The second shi+p was the great Spanish galleon, the Milagrosa, which, accoa, lurked off the Cay peninsula that thrusts out frorosa sailed the vindictive Don Miguel

The third and last of these shi+ps hich we are at present concerned was an English iven was at anchor in the French port of St Nicholas on the northwest coast of Hispaniola She was on her way frouished passenger in the person of Lord Julian Wade, who caed by his kinsman, my Lord Sunderland, with aout of that vexatious correspondence between England and Spain

The French Governlish, excessively annoyed by the depredations of the buccaneers, and the constant straining of relations with Spain that ensued, had sought in vain to put theainst theovernors But these, either - like the Governor of Tortuga - throve out of a scarcely tacit partnershi+p with the filibusters, or - like the Governor of French Hispaniola - felt that they were to be encouraged as a check upon the power and greed of Spain, which e of the colonies of other nations They looked, indeed, with apprehension upon recourse to any vigorousrounds in the South Sea

To satisfy King James's anxiety to conciliate Spain, and in response to the Spanish Arievous expostulations, my Lord Sunderland, the Secretary of State, had appointed a strongman was that Colonel Bishop who for some years now had been the most influential planter in Barbados

Colonel Bishop had accepted the post, and departed fro aerness that had its roots in a desire to pay off a score of his oith Peter Blood

Fro to Jamaica, Colonel Bishop had ht, the one buccaneer whom he made his particular quarry - that Peter Blood who once had been his slave - eluded hireat force to harass the Spaniards upon sea and land, and to keep the relations between England and Spain in a state of perpetual fererous in those days when the peace of Europe was precariously maintained

Exasperated not only by his own accurin, but also by the reproaches for his failure which reached him from London, Colonel Bishop actually went so far as to consider hunting his quarry in Tortuga itself andan attempt to clear the island of the buccaneers it sheltered Fortunately for himself, he abandoned the notion of so insane an enterprise, deterred not only by the enorth of the place, but also by the reflection that a raid upon as, norave offence to France Yet short of some such measure, it appeared to Colonel Bishop that he was baffled He confessed as much in a letter to the Secretary of State