"The horrid apparition still draws nigh, And white with foam the whirling billows fly. The guns were primed; the vessel northward veers, Till her black battery on the column bears: The nitre fired: and, while the dreadful sound Convulsive shook the slumbering air around, The watery volume, trembling to the sky, Burst down a dreadful deluge from on high!" FALCONER. [23] Captain Woodes Rogers not only lived to write his travels, but afterwards had charge of a naval squadron, sent to extirpate the pirates who infested the West Indies. He died in 1732, just a year after the death of Defoe. [24] Rogers speaks of shipping while at Batavia "half a leaguer of Spelman's _neep_, or the best sort of arrack." Is the modern term "nip of spirit" derived from this word neep? [Illustration] APPENDIX. CONTAINING A RECEIPT FOR A SEA FIGHT, SOME DIRECTIONS FOR FINDING THE LONGITUDE, AND A SHORT COMPARISON BETWEEN SEA-STORMS ANCIENT AND MODERN. A RECEIPT FOR A SEA FIGHT. The art of naval warfare has so greatly changed since the following prescription for chasing, fighting, and taking a 60-gun ship was written in Rogers' time, that it is really doubtful whether any definite rules for a sea fight could be given to-day. But in his time such matters appear to have been as well understood as the making of a bowl of good punch was. So, at any rate, we are taught by the author of "a collection of sundry pleasant and critical questions in navigation and the fighting of ships, for the improvement and diversion of the learner in his spare hours." The writer of which tells us "he has had twenty years' experience at sea as mate, master, and sworn teacher of the mathematics to the gentlemen volunteers in her Majestie's Royal Navy." He begins his instructions with the right methods of handling a ship in various kinds of weather, from the first change for the worse, "when the wind becometh fresh and frisking," until "it bloweth a storm with a very hollow grown sea." But the storm being past, the author says cheerfully, "Let us turn to windward," which soon brings his ship "into a good latitude and her proper station;" where the young officer is advised "to hand his topsails, farthel (or furl) the foresail and mainsail, trail up the mizen, and lie his ship a hull" (under bare poles) "until fortune appear upon the horizon;" a man being sent at the same time "to the maintop masthead" to look out for her in the shape of "any ships that have been nipt with the last northerly winds."