The depredations of the buccaneers had been indeed serious enough to threaten the townspeople with absolute ruin if the sacking was not speedily arrested. Scarcely had they withdrawn from Guayaquil when they took a ship full of meal, sugar, and other commodities, making the fourteenth prize they had captured in those seas! The town itself handsomely repaid the labour and danger of assaulting it; about twelve hundred pounds' worth of plate and jewellery, many bales of valuable dry goods, and a great store of merchandise of all kinds, exclusive of wines, waggon-loads of cocoa, several ships on the stocks, and two freshly-launched vessels of four hundred tons each, valued at eighty thousand crowns. But for their approach having been discovered they might have found even a handsomer account than this in the capture of the place, for it afterwards came to their ears that the inhabitants in their flight carried away with them money, plate, and jewels to the value of two hundred thousand pieces of eight. Indeed the unhappy Spaniards seem to have been plundered on all sides, for in going the rounds the privateersmen took a number of negroes and Indians laden with goods, which they promptly confessed were stolen, “and we were afterwards informed that in the Hurry the Inhabitants had given Plate and Money to Blacks to carry out of the Town, and could never hear of it after.”
On May 11th we find Rogers, Dampier, and their companions running before a strong gale of wind for the Galapagos Islands. A number of the crew were prostrated with a malignant fever contracted at Guayaquil, where, about a month before the buccaneers' arrival, there had raged an epidemic disease of which ten or twelve persons perished every day; until the floors of the churches being filled with bodies, the people dug a great hole close to one of the structures where sailors had been stationed as guards. In this hole lay a pile of putrefied corpses, and the seamen only quitted their posts to return to their ships poisoned. On the 18th they were off a couple of large islands, and sent boats to seek for fresh water. The errand was fruitless, though the searchers went three or four miles into the country in their hunt. Their business now was to go where fresh water was to be had, for of the two crews there were no less than one hundred and twenty men down with fever; Captain Courtney was dangerously ill, and Captain Dover was devoting his leisure to prescribing for him. So they made sail for Gorgona, capturing a few vessels as they proceeded, and, anchoring on June 13th, at once distributed their sick amongst the prizes, and set to work to careen and repair the Duke and Dutchess. By the 28th they had restored their provisions and mounted their guns, having in fourteen days caulked, rigged, discharged, and reloaded their ships; a smart piece of work that greatly astonished the Spanish prisoners, who said that their people usually took a couple of months to careen a vessel at ports where every necessary appliance for this business was to be had. The unhappy captives indeed, whilst watching or assisting the English, would scarcely marvel at their triumphs by land and sea when they observed their ceaseless and vigilant activity,—how, without regard to the climate, they worked from the break of day till darkness stopped their hands, and how, with swift and unerring judgment, they devised expedients for the remedying of difficulties which in the eyes of their astonished prisoners appeared at the time to be insurmountable. “The Natives of Old Spain,” says Rogers, “are accounted but ordinary Mariners; but here they are much worse, all the Prizes we took being rather cobbled than fitted out for the Sea; so that had they such Weather as we often meet with in the European Seas in Winter, they could scarce ever reach a Port again as they are fitted; but they Sail here Hundreds of Leagues.” Admissions of this kind are as good as saying that seizures in the South Sea went, as achievements, but a very little way beyond the mere act of hailing a ship and bidding her strike. The boldness of the English buccaneers is not very conspicuous in such encounters. Most of the vessels they took were navigated by crews of yellow, nervous men, utterly worthless as seamen, with neither heart nor muscle as combatants; whilst the cabins were crowded with priests, women, and sea-sick merchants, who increased the disorder caused by the appearance of a privateer by lamentations and tears, by wild appeals to the saints, and passionate adjurations to the shivering crew. The capture of such craft was as easy as catching flies. The qualities of the English South Seamen of those days must be sought in the records of their assaults on land, their boarding of tall and powerfully armed galleons, their murderous resistance to the attacks of ships-of-state of great tonnage crowded with soldiers and sailors and carrying ten guns to the Rover's one.
Whilst Rogers and his people were at Gorgona they equipped one of their prizes named the Havre de Grace as a third ship to act with the Duke and Dutchess. She was called the Marquis, and Captain Cooke took command of her. The business of fitting her out as a war vessel occupied them from June 29th to July 9th, and when she was finished they made a holiday of it, sitting down to a hearty meal and drinking the Queen's health with loud huzzas, and then the health of the owners with more huzzas, and then their own healths until their eyes danced in their heads. Spite of the general joy, however, the Marquis proved something of a failure, for Cooke says that her masts were new and too heavy for her, and that being badly stowed she was exceedingly tender, by which is meant that she heeled or lay over unduly to light pressures, and scarcely made headway when on a wind, “so that the Duke and Dutchess were fain to spare a great deal of sail for me to keep up with them.” Before lifting their anchors the commanders and officers of the ships met together to value the plunder in order to divide it. One kind of commodities they appraised at four hundred pounds; the silver-hilted swords, buckles, snuff-boxes, buttons, and silver plate at seven hundred and forty-three pounds fifteen shillings, taking the piece of eight at four shillings and sixpence. By this time there were upwards of eighty thousand pounds' worth of property and treasure on board destined for the owners. Dampier, we may well suppose, shared in the high hopes and good spirits of his shipmates. This was the only promising privateering expedition he had ever been engaged in, and if their luck continued he might reasonably flatter himself with the belief that he would even yet snatch an independency out of the reluctant maw of the sea. They had rid themselves of their prisoners by sending them away in some of the prizes. The female captives spoke well of the treatment they had received, and ingenuously confessed that they had met with far more courtesy and civility than their own countrymen would have extended to persons in their condition. The honourable and humane behaviour of the English buccaneers towards their female prisoners became a tradition, which was perpetuated and confirmed by the wise policy of Commodore Anson. [29]
They sailed on August 11th, and nothing noteworthy happened till September 6th, on which date we find Dampier dining with Captain Rogers on board the Duke in company with Cooke and Courtney. Cooke complained bitterly of the crankness of his ship the Marquis, and objected to the evolutions of the other vessels which obliged him to tack. They were bound to the Galapagos, and he affirmed that they could have made the islands without beating to windward. Dampier said, No; he knew where those islands were, and had described them in one of his voyages; and he asserted that they were now to the westward of them. The others agreed with Cooke, but Dampier was pilot, and was therefore suffered to have his way. They were right and he was wrong; but an error of a hundred miles or so was reckoned a very trifling blunder in those hearty, plodding times. A curious old sea-picture is suggested by this discussion in the cabin of the Duke. The rough bulkheads, the low upper deck, the quaint lanthorn swinging over the table from a beam, and indicating by its oscillations the ponderous rolling of the tall, squab, round-bowed fabric; the privateersmen sitting round the table attired in the wild and picturesque apparel of the early South Seamen—these are features to bring the scene in clear outlines before the eye of the imagination. One beholds them poring upon their old-fashioned charts, pointing to the singular configurations of the mainland and islands with hairy hands, and disputing with little anxiety on a difference between easting and westing measuring as many leagues as the space from the Lizard to the Western Islands. Indeed the real flavour and charm of the buccaneer's life are not to be expressed by any mere method of historical treatment. The hand of the artist is wanted, with imagination vigorous and discerning enough to strictly correspond with the traditionary truth.
On their arrival at the Galapagos they took in a good supply of turtle, many of which were upwards of four hundred pounds in weight. Rogers writes of the turtle as if he had never seen it before. “I do not,” he says, “affect giving Relations of strange Creatures, so frequently done by others; but where an uncommon Creature falls in my Way I cannot omit it.” This is how the captain describes the “uncommon creature.”
“The Creatures are the ugliest in Nature; the Shell, not unlike the Top of an old Hackney-coach, as black as Jet; and so is the outside Skin, but shriveled and very rough. The Legs and Neck are long and about the Bigness of a Man's Wrist; and they have Clubbed Feet as big as one's Fist, shaped much like those of an Elephant, with five Nails on the Forefeet and but Four behind, and the Head little, and Visage small like Snakes; and look very old and black. When at first surprised they shrink their Head, Neck, and Legs, under their Shell.”
This is the kind of simplicity that makes the perusal of the old voyages wonderfully refreshing and delightful. The old fellows looked at life with the eyes of a child but with the intelligence of a man; and so it happens that their representations combine a most perfect and fascinating simplicity with the highest possible qualities of acuteness and sagacity.
On October 1st the ships were off the Mexican coast. When the form of the land grew visible Dampier told Rogers that it was hereabouts he attacked the Manila ship in the St. George. He might have been right, but Rogers does not speak as if he thought so, for he says: “Captain Dampier indeed had been here, but it was a long time ago, and therefore he seemed to know but little of the Matter; yet when he came to land in Places he recollected them very readily.” They suffered much from scarcity of fresh water, and sent the pinnace to explore some islands—the Tres Marias—lying off Cape Corrientes. On one of them they found a human skull, which was supposed to have belonged to an Indian who, with another poor wretch of his own race, had been left there by Captain Swan some twenty-three years before. Dampier of course well remembered the circumstance; he had been with Swan in the Cygnet at the time, and could recollect that provisions being scarce they had left the unhappy Indians to make, as Rogers says, a miserable end on a desert Island. To judge, however, from the refreshments these uninhabited spots yielded, the Indians could not have perished from starvation. The buccaneers met with hares, turtle-doves, pigeons, and parrots, on all of which they fared sumptuously. The sick thrived, and the general health of the crews was never better. On November 1st they were in view of the high coast of California. It was much about the date when Sir Thomas Candish had taken the Manila ship, and, strangely enough, their keels ploughed the very tract of water in which that remarkable feat had been achieved. The memory, aged to us, but lacking nothing of its old lustre, was to those men comparatively recent, and the recollection was one to animate them with great hopes and stern resolves. They were indeed bent now on the adventure whose successful issue had loaded Candish's ship with treasure. They were on the look-out for the galleon, and that nothing might be omitted to render fortune propitious, they again put in force the rules which had formerly been laid down for cruising, established fresh regulations, and made clear every dubious item in their programme of proceedings and plunder. It was this galleon that was to make their fortunes; she it was also that formed the grand hope of the Bristol committee of merchant adventurers; and the design of capturing her was the mainspring of the whole expedition. After a consultation it was agreed that they should dispose themselves thus: the Marquis was to keep off the land at a distance of from six to nine leagues at least; the Duke was to cruise at a range that would cover forty-five miles; and the Dutchess was to occupy the waters between her consorts. There were, of course, false alarms; as, for instance, on the 28th the Marquis fired a gun, which was promptly answered by the Dutchess, on which the Duke hauled her wind for the coast. It then turned out that the Marquis had mistaken the Duke for the Manila ship, and fired as a signal for the Dutchess to chase. They had to wait a long time before the vessel they wanted hove in sight. It was now a month later than the usual time of her appearance in this part of the sea where she was being waited for, and the anxiety of the buccaneers was increased by their inability to obtain any intelligence of her. Provisions were again scarce, and even on short allowance there was barely bread enough to last for seventy days,—a serious matter in the face of the inevitable run later on to the Ladrone Islands, which promised to occupy fifty days at the very least. This most unfortunate dearth of stores, coupled with the growing dejection and mutinous sulkiness of the men, determined Rogers and his brother commanders to give themselves another week's chance, and then, if the galleon did not appear, to sail away to the Indies.
In order to save time the Dutchess was despatched to a convenient bay to take in water and wood, etc., that as one ship obtained these stores another might take her place, thus always leaving two on the look-out. By the 4th she had taken in what was necessary, and the Marquis replaced her to refit. Until December 21st nothing happened; then on the morning of that day, when the Duke was in the act of shifting her helm for the place where the Marquis was refitting, the look-out man aloft hailing the deck, shouted that he saw a sail bearing west about twenty miles distant. The English ensign was immediately hoisted, and in a few minutes both the Duke and the Dutchess were standing towards the stranger; but on a sudden it fell stark calm, and as conjecture was hopeless and expectation insupportable, the pinnace was manned and sent to see what she could make of the distant ship. In reading Rogers's account, you find your sympathies curiously enlisted on behalf of those two stagnated buccaneering vessels, and witness with but little effort of imagination the crowds of weather-darkened, fiery-eyed men, some in the rigging, some at the masthead, some leaning in impetuous pose against the rail, staring their very hearts out under the sharp of their hands at the cotton-white outline, glimmering like the tip of a sea-bird's pinion on the edge of the distant gleaming horizon, whence the swell rolls in folds of oil to the wet and flashing sides of the ships; the officers on the quarter-deck peering their hardest through the lean and unsatisfying perspective-glasses of those days; Dampier and Rogers together rehearsing their intentions and recalling their experiences in voices subdued by excitement; above all, the old, worn, but gallant Duke wearily dipping her faded, blistered bends to the swing of the breathless sea, making in anticipation of the withering roar of her ordnance, now grinning mutely along her sides, a little thunder of her own with the beating of her dark and well-patched canvas against the huge tops and massive cross-trees of her swaying masts. “All the rest of the Day,” says Rogers, “we had very little Wind, so that we made no great Way; and the Boat not returning, kept us in a languishing Condition, not being able to determine whether the Sail was our Consort, the Marquis, or the Acapulco Ship. Our Pinnace was still in Sight, and we had nothing to do but to watch her Motions: We could see that she made towards the Dutchess's Pinnace, which rowed to meet her. They lay together some time, and then the Dutchess's Pinnace went back to their Ship which gave us great Hopes.” An officer was sent to the Dutchess to ascertain what the stranger was, and to concert measures, if she should prove an enemy, for engaging her. When he was gone Rogers hoisted the French colours and fired a gun; the strange vessel answered, which satisfied them that she was not the Marquis. It is manifest from this that these privateersmen had no private code of signals amongst them. Indeed detection seems to have been entirely a matter of the exhibition of the national bunting, in which there was just the same sort of deception then as there was in later years, and as there ever will be. Shortly after the ship had responded, the officer returned with the report that she was the Manila galleon. The statement fired the spirits of the crew; they hove all their melancholy reflections on the shortness of their provisions overboard, and could think of nothing but the figures they would make when they arrived home with the vast treasure out yonder, stowed snugly away under their hatches. “Every moment,” says Rogers, “seemed an hour till we came up with her.” It was arranged that the two pinnaces should stick to her skirts all night and burn flares, that their own and the position of the chase might be known; and it was further settled that if the Duke and Dutchess were so fortunate as to come up with her together they were to board her at once: a resolution which Dampier, recalling his experiences in the St. George, was pretty sure to strengthen by his advice.