“I cannot tell what awaits us, but it appears to me that the worst is to come.”
This is how Captain Lincoln quoted it in his diary, but the mate of the schooner, sorely tried as he must have been, was more likely to exclaim:
“I can’t fathom all their —— —— tricks, but it looks to me as if the bloody rogues had made up their minds to scupper us, and may they sizzle in hell for a million years!”
The pirate chief and his officers held a whispered conference and then spent the last night ashore in gambling, the diminutive leader “in hopes of getting back some of the five hundred dollars he had lost a few nights before; which made him unusually fractious.”
Before they were marooned, Captain Lincoln took pains to note down that the pirates were sporting new canvas trousers made from the light sails of the Exertion and that they had cut up the colors to make fancy belts to keep their money in, and he added this vivid little touch to the portrait of the chief, “The captain had on one of my best shirts, a cleaner one than I had ever seen him wear before.”
At sunset the crew of the Exertion, with several prisoners taken out of a Spanish merchant prize, were put into a boat. At this lamentable moment, Nikola stepped to the front again and said to Captain Lincoln:
“My friend, I will give you your book,” (a volume of Rev. Mr. Coleman’s sermons). “It is the only thing of yours that is in my possession. I dare not attempt anything more. Never mind, I may see you again before I die.”
There were eleven prisoners in all, without arms, and to sustain life only a ten-gallon keg of water, part of a barrel of flour, one ham, and a little salt fish, not forgetting the precious volume of Mr. Coleman’s sermons. They were carried to a tiny key, or islet, no more than a shoal of white sand an acre in extent and barely lifted above high tide, forty miles off the Cuban coast and well out of the track of vessels. No wonder that Captain Lincoln was moved to ejaculate:
“Look at us now, my friends, left benighted on a little spot of sand in the midst of the ocean, with every appearance of a violent thunder tempest and a boisterous night. Judge of my feelings and the circumstances which our band of sufferers now witnessed. Perhaps you can, and have pitied us. I assure you we were very wretched, and to depict the scene is beyond my power.”
They found a fragment of a thatched hut built by turtle fishermen, but now whipped bare by the winds, and it served as a slight shelter from the burning sun. Fire they kindled by means of a piece of cotton-wick yarn and a flint and steel. They dug holes for fresh water, but it was too salty to drink. At bedtime the captain read aloud selections from the Rev. Mr. Brooks’s Family Prayer-Book, and they slept in the sand when the scorpions, centipedes, lizards, and mosquitoes permitted.