“But who’s the girl?” I queried. “Some one you [[255]]met this trip, I suppose. What is she—black, brown, or yellow, Sam?”

“Lordy, Chief!” exclaimed Sam, in genuine surprise. “Ah can’ say. Ah ain’ foun’ her as yet, Chief! Ah’m goin’ for to—”

But whatever Sam was “goin’ for to” do was left untold, for at this stage of the conversation the man who had been sent aloft called out that land was in sight, and all attention was turned to the faint and misty outlines that rose, dream-like and unreal, like pearly shadows against the sky.

Rapidly the mountains took on form and shape, though still many miles away, and presently we spied ahead a slender column of sooty smoke, the first sign of a ship we had seen since leaving Navassa astern. Soon the masts and funnels of the steamer rose above the horizon, below them a shimmering white hull developed, and half an hour later we swept past one of the “great white fleet” of the United Fruit Company, outward bound from Kingston. Upon her decks were scores of passengers and her rails were lined with curious tourists as the Vigilant, burying her bows under the sparkling froth-capped waves and reeling onward before the trade-wind like a drunken man, passed the big liner to which the tumbling seas were merely ripples.

Perhaps they took us for some island packet; [[256]]perchance they thought us fishermen; or, maybe, when we ran up the Stars and Stripes in salute, they realized that we were simply cruising. Probably not a soul among the hundreds that crowded the steamer’s deck dreamed that they were gazing at an historic craft; that the little schooner—a mere speck beside the towering fruit boat—had sailed the seas a century and more before the first sailing-vessel of the fruit company carried bananas from Jamaica to New York. For that matter, a life-time before Fulton’s first steamboat trundled slowly up the Hudson.

The Towne of Puerto del Principe taken & sackt

SPANISH COINS USED IN BUCCANEER DAYS