By midday it blew a furious gale, accompanied by showers of blinding rain, and before long the _Gannet_ was nowhere to be seen. Even with her jury rig the _Little Gannet_ gave a good account of herself, though it was necessary to take an occasional spell at the pumps to keep down the water that made its way through her hastily patched seams. From her build and rig my craft would lay closer to the wind than the _Gannet_, so I ordered her to be kept on the starboard tack for two hours, then on the larboard tack for another two hours, and so on, hoping by these means to keep within sight of our escort when the gale moderated. There were, as I have mentioned, five men in each watch--one of the two liberated slaves, a Genoese, who spoke no English, being in mine, while the other, a negro, was placed in the second. This negro was of a gigantic stature, with powerful limbs, yet of a timorous disposition, so that directly the gale came on he could with difficulty be made to do any work at all, but lay in a heap in the weather scuppers, moaning and muttering in broken English, Spanish, and his native tongue. All that day the gale continued, but on the morrow the wind moderated, leaving us rolling in the trough of a heavy swell, with no sign of the _Gannet_. About nine in the morning we spied a sail on our starboard quarter. This we concluded was the _Gannet_, which we had evidently passed during the night; but three hours afterwards we could see that it was not our parent ship, but a smaller and speedier craft. She had already perceived us, and had altered her course slightly to come up with us, and, with every stitch of canvas set, she ploughed her way rapidly towards us. It was without doubt a hostile craft, but the knowledge that the _Gannet_ was somewhere close to us, though where we knew not, spurred us to make every preparation for flight or fight. By four in the afternoon the stranger was a mile astern, and with the aid of a glass I could see her colours--they were black, and bore the emblem of the Jolly Roger. I gathered my slender crew aft and exhorted them to make a desperate resistance, telling them that a tame surrender would be as futile as capture after a determined fight. In either case the result would be death to us all, but the longer we held out the greater chance there was of a timely rescue by the _Gannet_. They one and all expressed their willingness to resist to the last, and now commenced one of those despairing fights against overwhelming odds that were only of too frequent occurrence. Many a gallant English vessel has met her fate in a glorious but unrecorded effort in similar circumstances, her end unknown at home and her disappearance soon forgotten, save by those bloodthirsty scoundrels who have felt the fangs of an Englishman at bay.