Yberville, however, was frowning. 'But the Archbishop, then?'
Blood smiled with tight lips. 'The Archbishop certainly. We can do nothing without the Archbishop.' He turned to Pitt with an order that showed how fully he had already resolved not only upon what was to do, but upon how it should be done. 'Jerry you'll lay me a course for Sainte Croix.'
'Why that?' quoth Yberville. 'It's much farther east than we need to go for his Eminence.'
'To be sure it is. But one thing at a time. There's some gear we'll be needing, and Sainte Croix is the place to provide it.'
III
They did not, after all, scuttle the Spanish carack, as Captain Blood proposed. The thrifty nature of the little North Country seaman revolted at the thought of such waste, whilst his caution desired to know how he and his hands were ever to get back to England if Blood's scheme should, after all, miscarry even in part and no such tall ship as he promised should be forthcoming.
For the rest, however, the events followed the course that Captain Blood laid down. Steering in a north–easterly direction, the Arabella, with the guarda–costa following, came a couple of days later to the French settlement of Sainte Croix, of which the buccaneers were free. Forty–eight hours they remained there, and Captain Blood, with Yberville and the bald–headed little bo'sun, Snell, who knew his way about every port of the Caribbean, spent most of the time ashore.
Then, leaving the carack to await their return, Walker and his hands transferred themselves to the Arabella. She set sail, and laid a westward course once more, in the direction of Puerto Rico. After that she was seen no more until a fortnight later, when her great red hull was sighted off the undulating green hills of the northern coast of Cuba.
In the genial, comparatively temperate airs of that region she sailed along those fertile shores, and so came at last to the entrance of the lagoon on which Havana stood in a majesty of limestone palaces, of churches, monasteries, squares, and market–places that might have been transported bodily from Old Castile to the New World.
Scanning the defences as they approached, Blood realized for himself how little either Walker or Jeremy Pitt had exaggerated their massive strength. The mighty Moro Fort, with its sullen bastions and massive towers, occupied a rocky eminence at the very mouth of the channel; opposite to it stood the Puntal, with its demi–lunar batteries; and facing the entrance loomed El Fuerte, no less menacing. Whatever might have been the strength of the place in the time of Drake, he would be rash, indeed, who would run the gauntlet of those three formidable guardians now.