same cargo with the Carmelo we had taken before, except that her silver amounted only to about 5000 pounds sterling. (*Note. Ave Maria (Hail Mary!) are the opening words of a Roman Catholic prayer to the Virgin Mary.) THE TRIAL DISABLED. But to balance this success we had the misfortune to find that the Trial had sprung her mainmast, and that her maintopmast had come by the board; and as we were all of us standing to the eastward the next morning, with a fresh gale at south, she had the additional ill-luck to spring her foremast; so that now she had not a mast left on which she could carry sail. These unhappy incidents were still further aggravated by the impossibility we were just then under of assisting her; for the wind blew so hard, and raised such a hollow sea, that we could not venture to hoist out our boat, and consequently could have no communication with her; so that we were obliged to lie to for the greatest part of forty-eight hours to attend her. The weather proving somewhat more moderate on the 27th, we sent our boat for the captain of the Trial, who, when he came on board us, produced an instrument, signed by himself and all his officers, representing that the sloop, besides being dismasted, was so very leaky in her hull that even in moderate weather it was necessary to keep the pumps constantly at work, and that they were then scarcely sufficient to keep her free; so that in the late gale, though they had all been engaged at the pumps by turns, yet the water had increased upon them; and, upon the whole, they apprehended her to be at present so very defective that if they met with much bad weather they must all inevitably perish, and therefore they petitioned the Commodore to take some measures for their future safety. But the refitting of the Trial and the repairing of her defects was an undertaking that in the present conjuncture greatly exceeded his power; and besides, it would have been extreme imprudence in so critical a juncture to have loitered away so much time as would have been necessary for these operations. The Commodore, therefore, had no choice left him but that of taking out her people and destroying her; but at the same time, as he conceived it necessary for His Majesty's Service to keep up the appearance of our force, he appointed the Trial's prize (which had been often employed by the Viceroy of Peru as a man-of-war) to be a frigate in His Majesty's Service, manning her with the Trial's crew and giving new commissions to the captain and all the inferior officers accordingly. This new frigate, when in the Spanish service, had mounted thirty-two guns, but she was now to have only twenty, which were the twelve that were on board the Trial, and eight that had belonged to the Anna pink. When this affair was thus far regulated, Mr. Anson gave orders to Captain Saunders to put it in execution, directing him to take out of the sloop the arms, stores, ammunition, and everything that could be of