This was great news indeed. I only lamented that I had not been on board in the action, but the pearl merchant, who, it seems, had got his information from those who had spoken with the mariners of the galleon, after they landed on the main coast, being sent back in their boats by the privateers—my pearl merchant, I say, told me that the Spaniards having been boarded in the night, and when they were in no posture of defence, had made next to no resistance, and that the galleon had been very easily secured. Of course, this intelligence made me doubly anxious to make my way to Jamaica, or to any port where I could regain my comrades, and I eagerly asked my new friend whether he could not put me in the way of getting thither. ‘Why,’ says he, ‘if I could not, I shouldn’t have made myself known to you at all, but the truth is, that I need your services as a seaman. I have got a very large decked piragua—you may see her masts as she lies there in the river—in which I have, as I may say, sailed the whole Caribbean Sea. This trip, however, I have been unfortunate, having lost a very good fellow—a negro—my prime seaman, who died about a month ago of the small-pox. I have but two men slaves of my own left with me, and I was thinking where I could get a good fourth hand, who knew somewhat about the sea, when fortune sends you to my aid.’ I protested my willingness to serve him, and we had a long discourse together. He told me that he was an Englishman by birth, but that his father was a Spaniard and his mother a Frenchwoman. Thus, he said, he had learned from his earliest youth, a smattering of all the three languages, and having lived long in London, Paris and Cadiz, in after years, pursuing his craft of a jeweller and goldsmith, he had very little difficulty, when need was, in passing himself off for a native either of England, France, or Spain. For some years back he had been, he told me, sailing about the West Indies, trafficking in precious stones and gold. He had no fixed place of abode. ‘Sometimes,’ quoth he, ‘I kneel very piously at mass, and make the sign of the cross, in the great cathedral at Havannah—and then I am as grave a Spaniard as the Cid. Again, I shall sing and dance at a merry-making in Tortuga—and, there, credit me, I bear a heart as light and as French as ever did the good king of Yvetot. Anon, I shall drink and shout with our good friends, Archemboe, Davis, and the rest at Port Royal, and not a bully of them all but shall swear I am as bluff a Briton as jolly King Hal!’ I then intimated my hopes, that his trade so venturously conducted was a profitable one.