The number found on board the two vessels—one hundred and thirty-four, including the dead—and the implication that some corpses had been thrown overboard, making up the total to, say, one hundred and forty, points to the conclusion that there must have been a large number of passengers. The St. Francisco was only entitled to have fifty souls on board, all told, and her consort probably not above sixty at the outside; so there is a surplus of thirty or so between the two to be accounted for. No doubt the skippers, in the absence of any strict inquisition, carried more passengers than they were licensed for. The captains of ferry-boats and coasting steamers do so to this day, in spite of the very stringent regulations of the Board of Trade—and they do not very often get found out, except by the supervention of some dire catastrophe, due to overloading and panic.
The futile Spanish bravado, in refusing to lower their sails to any Englishman, after having displayed the white flag in token of surrender, is decidedly amusing; one cannot help wondering whether any one of them really persuaded himself that he had "saved his face" by such a piece of tomfoolery.
[3] This traffic in "Bulls" from the Pope was, of course, a gross abuse of papal prerogative, which was probably engineered by some of his underlings for their own enriching. A packet of nearly one million and a half of such documents obviously could not have been signed by the Pope himself.
[4] The fly-boat was a flat-bottomed Dutch vessel, with a high stern; probably the term is used loosely here, to distinguish between the two vessels; the St. Peter more nearly resembling a fly-boat.
PRIVATEERING IN THE SOUTH SEAS
WILLIAM DAMPIER, THE FAMOUS CIRCUMNAVIGATOR