“No!” he exclaimed, “never. I had rather die like a soldier than be hanged like a coward.” Covered with wounds, he was at length cut down, and his gory, mangled body was left uncared for. The castle was taken. The soldiers were destroyed. The city was at the mercy of the captors. All the surviving inhabitants of the town, who had not escaped into the woods, were driven into the castle. Then the pirates commenced a scene of carousal which pandemonium could not outrival. The nuns and all the mothers and maidens were at their mercy. A veil must be cast over their horrid deeds. When satiated with drunkenness, and every conceivable excess, they commenced plundering the city. CHAPTER XV. _The Capture of Puerto Velo, and its Results._ The Torture.--Sickness and Misery.--Measures of the Governor of Panama.--The Ambuscade.--Awful Defeat of the Spaniards.--Ferocity of the Pirates.--Strange Correspondence.--Exchange of Courtesies.--Return to Cuba, and Division of the Spoil.--Wild Orgies at Jamaica.--Complicity of the British Government with the Pirates.--The New Enterprise.--Arrival of the Oxford.--Destruction of the Cerf Volant.--Rendezvous at Samona. The wretched citizens of the captured city of Puerto Velo were exposed to every species of torture to force from them the discovery of where their riches were concealed. Many of them had no knowledge they could give of any hidden treasure. Day after day the most horrid scenes of cruelty were enacted. Multitudes of men and women died under the torture. For fifteen days the pirates remained amidst the ruins they had created. But in this world blows are seldom given without others being received in return. Sickness came, with languor, pain, and groans of agony. The deathbed is cheerless enough even when surrounded with all the attentions of sympathy and love and tender care. To these wretched men, in their homelessness and their terrible guilt, death must indeed have come as the king of terrors. A painful, pestilential disease seized them. Surrounded by the oaths and the clamor of demoniac men they passed to the seat of final judgment. In consequence of the unhealthiness of the climate at Puerto Velo, many of the merchants, who had their warehouses at that port, resided in the far more attractive city of Panama, but a few leagues distant, on the Pacific coast. The governor of the province also resided at Panama. Morgan sent two prisoners to the city to say to the residents there that unless one hundred thousand dollars were sent to him he would lay Puerto Velo in ashes.