"The man brought it; Alvarez took out a white-hot iron, and--oh, sirs, I cannot describe what then happened, but I can hear that man's shrieks now, as I tell of it! It was awful; and would shrivel my tongue to relate, and your ears to hear. Well, sirs, not to harrow you further by those fearful methods of making us work, we at last got into Cadiz, and escaped the English ship; but more than half of the remaining slaves died from their exertions. "Our diminished crew was replenished by a lot of men from the prisons of Spain, and among them was a man named Jose Leirya. This man was my evil genius; and, as he marked the turning-point in my life from good to evil, I may as well describe his appearance; for he is on these seas now, and I wish you to know the man, so that if you should meet him with a sufficient force to capture him, you may recognise the villain. He was sent down to the galley one morning with a number of other men, to make up her complement afresh after the encounter with the Englishman. I recognised him for a leader of men the moment he came aboard the galley, and, as he was chained next to me on the same tier, I had ample opportunity for observing his appearance. He was an enormously tall and broad man, of extremely dark complexion. He said he was of Portugal, but I should say he had more Moorish blood in him than anything else. He wore his hair long, and it fell in thick black ringlets over his broad shoulders. A huge moustache concealed his lips, and a long black beard hid his chin; indeed the man was so hairy that he had the appearance of being an ape rather than a man. One of his eyes--which were jet black in colour, with whites which turned red when he flew into a rage--had a very perceptible cast in it; the left eye, I remember it was. His nose had been broken, and had a tremendous twist to starboard; and he had lost his right ear in a stabbing affray in the streets of Lisbon. In the left he now wears a huge gold ear-ring, shaped something like a nut, with an enormous emerald set in it. Such was the exterior appearance of the man who was to change both my life and that of others, Jose Leirya, murderer and galley-slave, then mutineer, and, lastly, pirate and villain of villains, slayer of hundreds of innocent folk, slave-dealer, incendiary, and bloodthirsty monster, for whom no death is bad enough. Remember my description of the man, sirs, for he presents the very same appearance at the present day. I should know, for but two short months since I was on his vessel; and, God forgive me, I believe I was not much better than he. But to continue my yarn. This man came aboard with about a hundred others; and I perceived at once--although our jailers did not seem to notice the fact--that there was some kind of arrangement or understanding between Jose Leirya and a number of the new galley-slaves. What it meant I did not know until afterwards. We left