The night-breeze was very faint and feeble, so ‘Out sweeps’ was the word; and presently all the crew, myself among the rest, were tugging at our great heavy oars, and slowly urging the small bark out to sea. We were not alone upon the water—close to us, another vessel of our own rig and size, and bound upon the same voyage, was making head in the same way—the blades of her long oars sparkling in the sea, and both crews singing and shouting cheerily to each other. Every year there sails from Carthagena to the pearl banks of the Rio de la Hacha, about a dozen or a dozen and a half small vessels, called the Pearl Fleet. The greater part of the squadron had already gone, with a man-of-war to guard them. We were laggards, but Garbo, so the captain of our bark was named, trusted in a few days to join his comrades upon the banks. The Pearl Fleet is composed of small ships generally used for coasting. When I describe our craft, called the Pintado, the reader will have a good notion of all. She was, then, a two-masted vessel, of about thirty tons burthen, very shallow, and of great beam. Her mould was beautifully designed, sharp and wedge-like at the bows, with her sides towards the gunwale gently curved, as it were, like the lips of a bell, so that let her lie over before a smart gale, as much as she would, it was next to impossible to capsize her. She was but partially decked, towards the stem and stern, having an open space amidships, which was used when fishing for heaping the oysters in. Her crew consisted of four Spanish seamen, the captain, and two negro divers, of whom more anon. Thus there were eight of us in all, and we lived stowed away as we could best manage it, in the two little choky cabins, forward and aft, there being no distinction made between captain and crew. My up-bringing was not, as you may guess, much calculated to make me squeamish about where I lived and where I lay, but I confess, that the sweltering holes, all greasy and foul, with their brown swarms of cockroaches, and every now and then their stray centipedes, in which the Spanish sailors ate their garlic-smelling messes, and in which they flung themselves down often in their wet frowzy steaming clothes to sleep—I say these cabins were so horribly choky and miserable that, day and night, I kept upon deck, although, from the sharpness of the bark’s model forward, and the quickness of her pitch, she was very wet. Indeed, when it blew stronger than common, we shipped so much water, that we had to cover the open waist with a species of grating on which tarpaulings were stretched tightly, otherwise we would speedily have filled and gone down. The bark carried two tall, slim masts, raking very much aft, and supporting a couple of large lug or square sails, over which two broad, but low topsails, could be hoisted. Round her decks, at stem and stern, was a low iron rail, but no bulwark, so that the washing of the sea over us, in a breeze, was almost incessant.