Garbo, the captain, was a good fellow, and a prime seaman, and he only on board knew that I was an Englishman, and what my real intentions were. The rest of the crew were told that I was a mariner of the Low Countries, who had also served in Spanish ships at home. They were a wild-looking set of fellows, with short trousers, not reaching much below the knee, broad leathern belts, in which were stuck formidable knives, and round their heads they wore yellow silk kerchiefs, over which they clapped broad straw hats during the heat of the day. All of them carried crucifixes of a black wood ornamented with gold, and if they did not pray much to the saints, at least they swore sufficiently by them. The two negroes took no part in the management of the ship, except it might be now and then lending a hand to their shipmates when a rope required an extra strain. One of them was very tall and gaunt, the other was short and stout. The latter, who was called by some common Spanish name, which I forget, was, or pretended to be, a Christian. He had a crucifix slung round his neck by a bit of rope yarn, and gabbled away about the saints like the European part of the crew. Further, he was quite ‘Hail fellow, well met,’ with the Spaniards. He played a sort of wooden drum, and sung strange uncouth songs of his country to them, and sometimes he would mimic the manners and voice of some one of the Spaniards very skilfully, and to the great delight of the rest. In fact, he was a fat, little, good-natured, hearty soul, with a grin almost always upon his black mug, and, except when he was asleep, his chattering tongue never lay still. He would go gambolling about the deck like an overgrown monkey, whooping, and grinning, and singing, so that not a soul on board but he would set at last to laughing as loudly as himself. His comrade was a man of a very different sort, and him I would describe particularly. He was the blackest negro I ever saw, not having anything of the brown copper colour which some of that people and the Indians show. On the contrary, his skin was of a most sooty black hue, without the least redness of tinge. I have seen many big and strong men, but a vaster, a more gaunt, yet sinewy form, than that of this black, saw I never. He was more than six feet high; his great spreading shoulders were lumps of bone and hardened muscle, and his huge chest rose and fell so slowly, that he seemed to breathe but half as often as other men on board. His limbs were immensely gaunt and spare, and nothing but his great splay feet, which covered more than two streaks of the deck, could support the pile of bone and sinew which they bore erect. The face of the diver was most ill-favoured and lowering. It was a broad, flat visage, like the face of a grim and grisly idol. Just under the low, wrinkled forehead, two little pig eyes winked forth, half hidden by the patches of eyebrow which scowled in hairy folds above them. The