Here the guides came rushing back to the main body with the announcement that they had discovered an ambuscade. The half-starved men were delighted. They knew that the Spaniards, on all their expeditions, provided themselves luxuriously with food. Examining their muskets, their priming, and their sabres, that they might be prepared for a resistless charge, they pressed eagerly yet cautiously forward. They soon came in sight of an intrenchment, which was shaped like a half-moon. Their practised eyes told them that it would protect a garrison of about four hundred men. Twelve hundred men, impelled by rage and hunger, with hideous yells rushed upon it. Bitter was their disappointment when they found no foe there. They had captured but an abandoned and crumbling rampart. There were some coarsely tanned, hairy leather bags scattered around. Their hunger was so great that these were cut up, cooked, and eaten. We have a minute account of the cookery of these unsavory morsels. First they took the leather and sliced it in pieces. Then they beat the pieces between two stones rubbing them and dipping them in the water, to render them supple and tender. Lastly they scraped off the hair, and roasted or broiled the pieces upon the fire. Being thus cooked, they cut it into very fine pieces, which “they helped down with frequent gulps of water, which by good fortune they had nigh at hand.” “I can assure the reader,” writes Oexemelin, “that a man can live on such food, though he can hardly get very fat.” Esquemeling adds, “Some who were never out of their mothers’ kitchens may ask how these pirates could eat, swallow, and digest those pieces of leather so hard and dry? Unto whom I would answer that could they once experience what hunger, or rather famine is, they would certainly find the manner, as the pirates did, by their own experience.” On the morning of the fifth day the weary march was resumed. Having had but little food, save the leather bags, they were in a deplorable condition. The pirates were not amiable men. They staggered along, in their weakness, over the rough ways, murmuring, quarrelling, and cursing each other. As night approached they came to a place called Barbacoa. Here they found another abandoned ambuscade. Not a particle of food was to be obtained. Loud and bitter were their oaths against the Spaniards. Dreadful would have been the fate of any of them who might have fallen into their hands. Esquemeling says that they were so consumed by hunger, that if they had caught any of the Spaniards they would certainly have roasted and eaten them.