On the 27th of December we discovered a sail in the offing, and not knowing but she might be a Spaniard, the eighteen-oared boat was manned and armed, and sent under the command of our second lieutenant, to examine her before she arrived within the protection of the forts. She proved to be a Portuguese brigantine from Rio Grande; and though our officer, as it appeared on inquiry, had behaved with the utmost civility to the master, and had refused to accept a calf which the master would have forced on him as a present, yet the governor took great offence at our sending our boat, and talked of it in a high strain as a violation of the peace subsisting between the crowns of Great Britain and Portugal. We at first imputed this ridiculous blustering to no deeper a cause than Don Jose's insolence; but as we found he proceeded so far as to charge our officer with behaving rudely, and opening letters, and particularly with an attempt to take out of the vessel by violence the very calf which we knew he had refused to receive as a present (a circumstance which we were satisfied the governor was well acquainted {59} with), we had thence reason to suspect that he purposely sought this quarrel, and had more important motives for engaging in it than the mere captious bias of his temper. What these motives were it was not so easy for us to determine at that time; but as we afterwards found by letters which fell into our hands in the South Seas that he had dispatched an express to Buenos Ayres, where Pizarro then lay, with an account of our squadron's arrival at St. Catherine's, together with the most ample and circumstantial intelligence of our force and condition, we thence conjectured that Don Jose had raised this groundless clamour only to prevent our visiting the brigantine when she should put to sea again, lest we might there find proofs of his perfidious behaviour, and perhaps, at the same time, discover the secret of his smuggling correspondence with his neighbouring governors, and the Spaniards at Buenos Ayres. But to proceed.