Two ships were promptly fired and sunk
The battered, patched old galleon sailed southward around Cape Horn
“Since leaving the tropics in the Pacific not a mouthful of meat, save a few oily penguins and a seal or two, had passed their lips. The only meat upon the ship was a sow which had been taken aboard as a suckling pig in the far-off Gulf of Nicoya, and on Christmas Day this was slaughtered for the men’s dinner. Starvation was staring them in the face, but on January 5th they captured a hundred-and-twenty-pound albicore and great was the rejoicing. Two days later they took an even larger one, and now they discovered that their water casks had sprung leaks and that only [[169]]a few pannikins of the precious liquid remained. Only a quart a day was allowed to a man, and sweltering under the equatorial sun, baffled with light winds and calms, the men’s plight was pitiable. In order to keep afloat they toiled ceaselessly at the pumps, falling exhausted on the sizzling decks, cursing and moaning, crying for water, and several dying raving mad.
“But now they were well north of the equator. Somewhere ahead, Ringrose felt sure, were the Caribbean isles they longed to see, and Captain Sharp offered a reward to the first man to sight land.
“On the 28th of January the glad cry came ringing from the masthead and, straining their eyes, the half dead men saw the faint and hazy outline of land upon the horizon. Then cheer after cheer rose from those thirst-cracked throats, the men forgot their troubles, their hunger, their ceaseless toil, for all recognized the welcome bit of earth as the island of Barbados.
“Marvelous indeed had been Ringrose’s navigation. Had he been equipped with a modern sextant, with the latest nautical almanacs and the most perfect chronometer, he could not have done better. By sheer dead reckoning for his longitude, [[170]]and by his crude instruments to find his latitude, he had won within ten miles of the goal for which he had made—truly an almost incredible piece of seamanship.
“Weather-beaten, patched, her rigging frayed and spliced; her masts awry, her sails mended and discolored, with gaping holes in her bulwarks, with the charred marks of fire still upon her hacked-off poop and with her crew more like ghosts than living men, the Blessed Trinity headed for Bridgetown with the frayed and faded British ensign at her peak and Sharp’s red banner with its green and white ribbons at her masthead.
“But the homesick, sea-weary buccaneers were not to set foot upon the green shores of Barbados, for within the bay lay a British frigate. Sharp realized that, in the eyes of the law, he and his men were pirates, and so, with clanging pumps, the Trinity swept by the island, while the wondering folk ashore gazed in amazement at this strange ship, this vision that, gaunt and gray and battered, slipped by like a wraith, and to their superstitious minds savored of the Flying Dutchman. But the buccaneers’ ‘most dangerous voyage’ was almost at an end. At Antigua, two days later, Ringrose and thirteen of the men went ashore and secured [[171]]passage on the Lisbon Merchant for England, while Sharp and the others sailed to Nevis. There the ‘great sea artist and admirable captain,’ as Ringrose calls him, presented his men with the ship and sailed for Bristol.