Morgan visited the lady with smiles and bows and costly presents. He flooded her chamber with robes, jewels, and perfumes. She was not deceived. And when he ventured to propose that she should abandon her husband, and become virtually his wife, and accompany him to the home of splendor with which he would provide her, she repelled him with indignation and loathing. Replying to him with all the eloquence of impassioned innocence, she said: “Sir, my life is in your hands. But sooner shall my soul be separated from my body than I will surrender myself to your demands.” This repulse stirred up the rage of the infamous pirate. He stripped her of her rich attire, left her only the coarsest garments, and threw her into a dark and loathsome dungeon. She was supplied with only enough food to support life. By these brutalities he hoped to break her spirit, and to compel her to acquiesce in his wishes. Even demons can appreciate true nobility of character. The beauty and virtues of this lady had won, in some degree, the sympathy of the vilest of these wretches. Morgan could not conceal his treatment from them. They began to murmur, to denounce him, to curse him as a brute. “I myself,” says Esquemeling, “was an eye-witness of the lady’s sufferings, and could never have believed that such constancy and virtue could have been found in the world, had I not been assured thereof by my own eyes and ears.” Morgan became alarmed by the threatening aspect assumed by his men. Various causes had been for some time undermining his authority. He knew full well that there was not one of these desperadoes who would hesitate, for one moment, to thrust a poniard into his heart, or to pierce his brain with a bullet. These pirates were all consummate villains. There was no sense of honor among them. There was no crime from which they would shrink did they deem it for their interest to commit it. Even their sympathy for the beautiful captive lady resolved itself mainly into jealousy of the captain. Had they seized her unprotected in the halls of a nunnery, she would have experienced no mercy whatever at their hands. The pirates, flushed with their great victory, and the vast amount of wealth, of every kind, at their disposal, had formed a conspiracy, in which more than a hundred were implicated. Their plan was to get rid of Morgan, then to seize one of the islands in the neighborhood as their rendezvous, and to make it their stronghold. With the vessels they already had, and the ships they would soon capture, they would have an invincible fleet. Then they would sweep the Pacific Ocean, and ravage all the coasts of Chili and Peru. After they had acquired sufficient plunder to make them all millionnaires, they would return to Europe, by the way of the East Indies, picking up ships by the way, and would then disperse to seek new homes and riot in luxury for the remainder of their days.