At dawn the chase was upon the weather-bow of the Duke, about three miles away, and the Dutchess within a couple of miles to leeward of her. Rogers threw his sweeps over and rowed his ship for above an hour; a light breeze then sprang up and softly blew the vessel towards the enemy. There was no liquor in the ship, nothing to fortify the spirits in the shape of a dram; so a large kettle of chocolate was boiled and served out to the crew, who, when they had emptied their pannikins, went to prayers. But whilst they were in the midst of their devotions they were interrupted by a broadside from the Spaniards. It is not often that one reads of the English buccaneers going to prayers before falling to their business of slaughtering and plundering. Perhaps they had learnt to despise this kind of ceremony from the behaviour of the French freebooters, who were wont to sing Te Deum and force captive priests to celebrate Mass in the cathedrals and churches which they had despoiled. If the Spaniards saw Rogers's privateersmen on their knees, something of irony might have been intended by their manner of cutting short their worship and supplications. The Don was fully prepared; his guns loaded, his little army of men at stations, and casks of gunpowder hanging at his yard-arms ready to fall and explode when the attempt should be made to board. The action began at eight o'clock, and the Duke for some time fought the galleon single-handed. The conflict was a brief one. The Spaniards had no stomach, and after Rogers had poured in a few broadsides the enemy “struck her colours two-thirds down.” His flag was thus flying when the Dutchess came up and fired five guns at the big ship along with a volley of small shot. It was mere waste of powder; the galleon had already submitted and was silent. The victory, it must be admitted, was cheaply earned, yet there is little doubt that such was the temper of the buccaneers they would have fought to the last man for this golden prize. She was a large vessel named Nostra Seniora de la Incarnacion Disenginao, mounting twenty guns and twenty swivels, and carrying one hundred and ninety-three men, of whom nine were killed and several wounded. The fight lasted three glasses, that is three hours. Rogers was shot through the left cheek; the bullet destroyed the greater part of his upper jaw, and some of his teeth were found upon the deck where he fell. He was obliged to give his orders in writing to hinder the flow of blood, and to escape the agony of attempting to articulate. Only one man besides himself was wounded. Having repaired the trifling damage they had sustained, they steered for the harbour where the Marquis lay, and anchored. They found their consort fully equipped and ready to sail, and her people in good spirits and eager for action. At night a consultation was held respecting the disposal of the hostages, and as a second Manila ship was daily expected, they debated plans for capturing her. After some talk it was agreed that the hostages should be set at liberty; but the discussion about the expected galleon ended in something like a quarrel. Rogers, speaking in the heat of the moment, had censured Courtney for not having shown the promptitude that was necessary in attacking the Nostra Seniora. This Courtney of course resented as a reflection upon his honour. When, then, Rogers proposed to cruise in the Dutchess for the coming Manila ship, Courtney insisted upon making the search in the Marquis. The question was put to the vote, Rogers's proposal overruled, and his people obliged, to their great mortification, to remain in the harbour. This incident is related so obscurely both by Cooke and Rogers that I confess I do not fully understand it. The Duke was in good condition, and why the three instead of the two ships did not start on a cruise which, as the sequel proves, demanded even more than their united strength, is a riddle I am unable to solve.
On Christmas Day the Dutchess and the Marquis put to sea, and when they were gone Rogers posted two sentinels on the top of a hill that he might instantly be apprised of a third sail heaving in sight. Before twenty-four hours had elapsed the signal was made, and in hot haste Rogers started to the assistance of his consorts, though the stout-hearted sailor was in no condition for further adventures just then. He was indeed so weak from loss of blood that he could scarcely stand. His head and throat were swollen, and the effort to speak caused him excruciating pain; but he turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of the officers and surgeons that he would remain in harbour on board the prize. The galleon was in sight at daybreak, and by noon the Marquis had succeeded in bringing her to an engagement. The wind was light, and it was almost impossible to manœuvre the vessels; so that though the Dutchess and the Marquis continued at intervals to fire at the Manila ship until dusk, the Duke even at midnight was still at a considerable distance from the enemy. When the day broke the wind shifted, and Rogers was able to bring his guns to bear. The fighting was now severe, and continued so for four hours; the galleon was hotly defended, though her people lay so concealed in their close quarters that the privateersmen could scarcely make any use of their small arms. It was only when a head appeared or a port was opened that they found a mark for their muskets. The eagerness of the buccaneers defeated their seamanship. Their vessels were repeatedly falling foul of one another and throwing the crews into disorder. The guns of the Marquis were so small that her firing was to little or no purpose. At last it came to Rogers signalling to Courtney and Cooke to come on board him with other officers; and then every man telling of the injuries his ship had sustained, and all admitting that it would jeopardise too many lives to board or attempt to board the lofty galleon, it was resolved to let her go—that is to say, they agreed to keep her company till night, and then in the darkness to lose her, and make the best of their way back to the prize they had already secured. In sober truth the enemy had proved too many for them. The Duke's mainmast was so wounded that Rogers expected every moment to see it go by the board. Her rigging, too, was so shattered by shot that she had to sheer off in order to knot and splice, being scarcely manageable. The Dutchess also had her foremast badly wounded, her sails were in rags, and the ends of her standing rigging were trailing overboard. Further, there were not above one hundred and twenty men in all three ships fit for boarding, “and those but weak,” says Rogers, “having been very short of Provisions;” and that nothing might be wanting to complete the list of the reasons of their failure, their ammunition was very nearly expended. Rogers was again wounded, this time in his left foot. In the Dutchess they had twenty men killed and disabled. The Marquis, on the other hand, came off without the loss of a single person. The galleon was a handsome ship, very large, carrying the flag of the admiral of Manila. She was making the voyage for the first time. Her name was the Vigonia; she was pierced for sixty guns, forty of which were mounted, along with an equal number of brass swivels. Her crew numbered over four hundred and fifty men, and there were many passengers besides. It was supposed that she was worth ten millions of dollars; but it is doubtful whether, even if the buccaneers had succeeded in boarding, they would have taken her, for Rogers says: “After my Return into Europe I met in Holland with a Sailor who had been on board the large Ship when we engaged her; and he let us into the Secret that there was no taking her; for the Gunner kept constantly in the Powder-room, declaring that he had taken the Sacrament to blow the Ship up if we boarded her; which made the Men, as may be supposed, exceedingly resolute in her defence. I was the more ready to credit what this Man told me because he gave as regular and circumstantial account of the Engagement as I could have done from my Journal.” [30]
On the first day of the new year, 1710, they were again in harbour alongside their great prize; and now being anxious to leave these seas, they put their prisoners on board one of the smaller captures with water and provisions enough to last them for a voyage to Acapulco, and then addressed themselves to the urgent business of repairing and making all ready for their departure. They renamed the galleon the Batchelor, and a quarrel arose touching the appointment of a commander for her, a post regarded by them all as of dignity and importance. Captain Dover, asserting his claims as a merchant adventurer, and representing the considerable sum of money he had risked in this expedition, demanded the berth. Rogers and others, among whom, no doubt, would be Dampier, objected that Dover knew nothing whatever of navigation, and voted for Cooke. Finally, at the cost of many high words and much strong feeling, it was decided at a full council that Captain Fry and Captain Stretton should have entire control of the navigation of the Batchelor under Captain Dover, Alexander Selkirk to be the master and Joseph Smith the chief mate. The island of Guam was then fixed upon as a rendezvous, and on January 10th the buccaneers weighed for a run to the East Indies.
They were when they started in no very enviable condition. Their stores were scanty; their live stock consisted of four hens; and of wine or spirits they had barely the contents of a dozen bottles. The rations were limited to a pound and a half of flour and a small piece of meat for a mess of five men, with three pints of water a man on twenty-four hours for drink and cooking. Rogers was ill with his wounds, and many of the crew were sick and weak and unfit to do the work of the ship. Hunger drove the men into robbery. A few days after they sailed some pieces of pork were missed. Fortunately, in the interests of justice, the thieves were discovered, and punished by every man of the watch giving them a stroke of the cat-o'-nine-tails.
What follows now is little more than a journal of the voyage, rendered for the most part tedious by description and by the introduction of incidents of little or no interest. Dampier's name seldom occurs; when it is mentioned it is always in reference to something that helps to accentuate characteristics noticeable in his own account of his adventures. For instance, in April, when they were off a point of land which they took to be the north-east point of Celebes, the vessel was proving very leaky; which, added to the general ignorance of the ship's situation, filled the crew with melancholy and irritation. “Captain Dampier,” says Rogers, “discouraged us very much: He had been twice here, and therefore what he said among the Seamen passed without Dispute, and he laid it down as a thing certain that if we could not reach Ternate or find the Island of Tula it was impossible for us to get any Refreshment, there being nothing to be met with on the Coast of New Guiney.” It had been thus with Dampier whilst buccaneering off the New Holland shore; thus had it been with him too when hunting for water on the sand-hills of the Western Australian seaboard, his foot on the margin of a vast region of earth which he had neither temper nor heart to explore, though he had travelled many thousands of miles in a crazy ship and with a troublesome crew for no other purpose. This trick of discouraging the people he led, or was one of, is the secret of his failure as a commander and explorer. Rogers, a bolder and more hopeful, and certainly in many respects an equally sagacious man, was not likely to feel grateful for Dampier's melancholy shakes of the head, and his gloomy, prognosticating countenance; but his own experiences left him nothing to say, for though the ships spent the best part of the month of May off the coast of New Guinea, all that Rogers could observe that seemed to him worth mentioning was, “It is most certain these Islands, which are scattered through the Streights, and few or none of which are peopled, would all of them bear Spice, and afford immense Riches to this Nation, if they were settled.”
They were in great distress whilst they were in these seas. The men mutinously resented the wise reduction in the quantity of the food served out to them; and to save serious disturbance Rogers was forced to return to the old scale. They sighted land, but did not know what it was, nor could Dampier help them. Having searched for Borou, an island of the Indian Archipelago, they resolved to steer to Batavia, touching at Bouton for provisions. Accordingly they stood away to the south-west before a strong gale of wind at east. But their progress was obstructed by some small islands, into one of which they must have run in the dead of night had the weather not cleared suddenly and discovered it to them. It was not until Tuesday, June 17th, 1710, that they arrived at Batavia. At sight of the town the crews were so rejoiced that they could do nothing but hug and shake one another by the hand, and bless their stars and question if there was such a paradise in all the world; “And this,” says Rogers, “because they had Arrack for Eight Pence a Gallon, and Sugar at a Penny a Pound.”
The ships were in a deplorable condition, particularly the Marquis, which was so rotten with worms and wear that it became necessary to hire another craft to carry her lading. They sailed from Batavia on October 14th, and proceeded direct to the Cape of Good Hope, where they arrived without misadventure and without any incident occurring in the passage that is worth repeating. Shortly after they had entered Table Bay twelve sail of Dutch ships came in, which, with the English vessels then at anchor, made altogether twenty-three ships riding in the spacious and beautiful haven. The picture is about one hundred and seventy years old, and it is difficult to realise that the ocean traffic of those dim times to the Indies by way of the Cape should have been considerable enough to crowd the spacious surface of the waters on whose margin stand the ivory-white structures of Cape Town. Retrospect is often corrective. We have a right to compliment ourselves upon what we have done and are doing; but it does not seem to me that our marine achievements can be compared as illustrations of human skill and determination with the examples of the adventurous genius of an age when the greater portion of the antipodean world lay in darkness; when navigation was little better than guesswork; when the art of shipbuilding was crude, rude, and primitive; when there was nothing but the heavens to consult for weather; when the tyranny of the winds was only to be dominated by a kind of perseverance that must be ranked among the lost qualities of human nature. Despite these conditions the early mariner crowded the oceans with fabrics laden with the produce of the known continents, and rolled stubbornly to his hundred ports, often in suffering and often in distress indeed; yet on the whole freer, in his valiant ignorance, from disaster than is the sailor of the current hour. There is no longer need for ships to halt and bait at Table Bay. The propeller thrashes them to their destination with the punctuality of the railway-train; or they are wafted by pyramids of canvas—the graceful and elegant result of centuries of experiment—on a journey to New Zealand or Japan, which they complete in less time than the old seafarer took to find his way from the English Channel to Madeira. But the very existence of the facilities of the engine-room, of the nimbleness of the clipper-moulded keel, of the capacity of the towering and exquisitely-calculated heights of cloths to snatch a desired power of propulsion from the teeth of the antagonistic gale, is, I take it, an admission of our own weakness when we contrast the ocean-machinery with which science has dowered us with the contrivances with which the early seamen triumphed over the forces of Nature and created new worlds as heritages for a self-complacent posterity. Those twenty-three ships at anchor in Table Bay, surveyed by the eyes of Dampier and his toil-worn comrades, make but a little part of a great marine pageant; yet it is a detail to constrain the gaze. Fancy reconstructs them; they cease to be visionary; they float before us as substantial fabrics, brave with pennons and the glitter of brass guns and the gay raiment of their time. They illustrate the most strenuous of all the periods of the world's maritime life; for the infancy of navigation was over, and it had already put on the proportions of a youthful giant, the impulse of whose unripened vitality was urging it to extraordinary efforts.
Before the ships under Rogers sailed, six more vessels entered the bay, along with several English Indiamen and a large Portuguese carrack from Brazil; and when the hour of departure came the homeward-bound (in all, English and Dutch, numbering twenty-five) rolled stately under swelling canvas out of Table Bay,—a spectacle that, remote as it is, and visible only to the gaze of fancy, cannot but stir the imagination when one thinks of the floating castles, with their swelling sails and their brilliant streamers, as the van of the ever-growing procession that was in time to whiten the remotest seas, and crowd the harbours of countries of which some were then without the impress of a European foot.
The ships progressed merrily. They touched at St. Helena, and seven days later at Ascension, and after a passage of three months from the Cape of Good Hope dropped anchor in the Texel. Rogers and his brother commanders had now to act with much circumspection; they were informed by letters from their owners that the English East India Company, jealous of their success, had appointed a secret committee to inspect their charter as to privileges; they were also enjoined to exercise the utmost caution in respect of the Dutch East India Company, and strict orders were issued that no officer or sailor should on any pretence whatever be suffered to take any goods on shore, or purchase the least trifle from any stranger who visited the ships. They remained in Holland until September 30th, 1711, then sailed from the Texel under convoy of four of Her Britannic Majesty's ships, and on October 14th the Duke and Dutchess arrived off Erith, at which place the Batchelor had come to an anchor some short time before. Thus ended one of the most memorable of all the voyages ever undertaken by the English buccaneers. The cargo and treasure obtained by this expedition were valued at between three and four hundred thousand pounds, and Cooke tells us that, after allowing for all deductions, such as cost of convoy, agency, lawsuits, and thefts, the net profits amounted to one hundred and seventy thousand pounds.