Captain Lincoln hove the Exertion to and hoped for the best, having only five men and seven muskets with which to repel boarders. The United States was at peace with Mexico and Spain, and he tried to believe, as he tells us, that “the republican flag indicated both honor and friendship from those who wore it.” Alas! it was soon discovered that these were common pirates, for they sent a boat aboard in charge of the first lieutenant, Bolidar, with six or eight Spaniards, “armed with as many of the aforementioned weapons as they could well sling about their bodies.” The Exertion was ordered to follow the other schooner, the Mexican by name, and the two vessels came to anchor off Cay Largo, about thirty leagues from Trinidad.
There one of the pirates, the sailing-master, who called himself Nikola, remained in the Exertion to examine the captain’s papers. This forbidding person was, in fact, a Scotchman, as his speech readily disclosed, and he was curiously out of place among the dirty crew of Spanish renegades. In him the unlucky skipper of the Exertion had found a friend, of whom he said:
This Nikola had a countenance rather pleasing, although his beard and mustachios had a frightful appearance,—his face, apparently full of anxiety, indicated something in my favor. He gave me back my papers, saying, “Take good care of them, for I am afraid you have fallen into bad hands.”
The pirates then sent a boat to the Exertion with more men and arms, leaving a heavy guard on board and taking Captain Lincoln and his Yankee seamen off to their own low, rakish craft, where they served out the rum and vainly tried to persuade them to enlist, with promise of dazzling booty. Captain Lincoln was not at all attracted by this business opportunity, and sadly he returned to his schooner, where he found Lieutenant Bolidar in the cabin and the place in a sorry mess. It is well known that, whatever their other virtues, pirates as a class had no manners. With a few exceptions the best of them lived like pigs and behaved like hooligans. The captain’s narrative declares:
They had emptied a case of liquors, and broken a cheese to pieces and crumbled it on the table and the cabin floor and, elated with their prize as they called it, they had drunk so much as to make them desperately abusive. I was permitted to lie down in my berth but, reader, if you have ever been awakened by a gang of armed desperadoes who have taken possession of your habitation in the midnight hour, you can imagine my feelings. Sleep was a stranger to me and anxiety was my guest. Bolidar, however, pretended friendship and flattered me with the prospect of being set at liberty, but I found him, as I suspected, a consummate hypocrite. Indeed, his very looks indicated it.
He was a stout and well-built man, of a dark swarthy complexion, with keen, ferocious eyes, huge whiskers and beard under his chin and on his lips. He was a Portuguese by birth but had become a naturalized Frenchman,—had a wife and children in France and was well-known there as commander of a first-rate privateer. His appearance was truly terrific. He could talk some English and had a most lion-like voice.
THE PIRATE CAPTAIN BOARDING THE CAPTURED “EXERTION”
Next day the scurvy knaves began plundering the Exertion of her cargo of potatoes, butter, apples, beans, and so on, ripped up the floors in search of more liquor, found some hard cider, and guzzled it until officers and men were in a fight, all tipsy together, and then simmered down to sing sentimental ditties in the twilight. Soon after this both schooners got under way and sailed to another haven in the lee of Brigantine Cay. Captain Lincoln now saw something more of the roving scapegrace of a Scotchman who called himself Nikola. He was a pirate with a sentimental streak in him and professed himself to be unhappy in his lawless employment and declared he had signed articles in the belief that he was bound privateering.
A theatrical person was the bewhiskered Nikola, who properly belonged to fiction of the romantic school. Sympathetic Captain Lincoln wrote that he