When entering the bay, light enough remained to let them see that they had caught the miscreants in their lair. Closing in with the land the cruisers quietly ran in and anchored close aboard the outer vessel belonging to the pirates. Having ascertained the character of the visitors, the pirate slipped his cables, and proceeded to make sail, but was boarded and secured just as the rapid blackness of a tropical night buried every thing in obscurity. Every sound was watched during the darkness of the night, with scarcely the hope that the other two pirates would not take advantage of it to make their escape; but the short gray dawn showed them still at their anchors. The cruisers getting under way and closing in with the pirates produced no movement on their part, and some scheme of cunning or desperate resistance was prepared for. They had in fact made a draft from one vessel to man the other fully for defence. Into this vessel the smaller of the cruisers, the _Swallow_, threw her broadside, which was feebly returned. A grape-shot in the head had killed Roberts. This and the slaughter of the cruiser’s fire prepared the way for the boarders, without much further resistance, to take possession of the pirate. The third vessel was easily captured. The cruisers suffered no loss in the fight, but had been fatally reduced by sickness. The larger vessel, the _Weymouth_, which left England with a crew of two hundred and forty men, had previously been reduced so greatly as scarcely to be able to weigh her anchors; and, although recruited often from merchant vessels, landed but one hundred and eighty men in England. This rendered the charge of their prisoners somewhat hazardous, and taking them as far as Cape Coast Castle, they there executed such justice as the place could afford, or the demerits of their prey deserved. A great number of them ornamented the shore on gibbets--the well-known signs of civilization in that era--as long as the climate and the vultures would permit them to hang. Consequent on these events such order was established as circumstances would admit, or rather the progress of maritime intercourse and naval power put an end to the system of daring and regulated piracy by which the tropical shores of Africa and the West Indies had been laid waste. This, however, was slight relief for Africa. It was to secure and systematize trade that piracy had been suppressed, and the slave-trade became accordingly cruelly and murderously systematic. The question what nation should be most enriched by the guilty traffic was a subject of diplomacy. England secured the greater share of the criminality and of the profit, by gaining from her other competitors the right by contract to supply the colonies of Spain with negroes.