I made no remark, and he proceeded: “When I had taken a peep into the main hold I caused the after hatch under the roundhouse to be raised, and here I found a number of cases. They were stowed one on top of another, with pieces of timber betwixt them and the ship’s lining--an awkward looking job of stevedoring, but good enough, no doubt, to satisfy a Spanish sailor. I left my men above, and descended alone into this part of the hold, and stood looking for a short time around me, roughly calculating the number of these cases, the contents of which I could not be perfectly sure of, though one of two things I knew those contents must consist of. I called up through the hatch to the men to hunt about the ship and find me a chopper or saw, and presently one of them handed me down an ax. I put down the lantern, and letting fly at the first of the cases, with much trouble split open a part of the lid. I would not satisfy myself that all those cases were full until I had split the lids of five as tests or samples of the lot. Then finding that those five cases were full, I concluded that the rest were full. To make sure, however, I beat upon many of them, and the sound returned satisfied me that the cases were heavily full.” “Of what?” said I. “My men,” he continued, taking no notice of my interruption, “were, no doubt, considerably astonished to observe me hacking at the cargo with a heavy ax, as though I had fallen mad, and splintering and smashing up what I saw through sheer lunatic wantonness. I did not care what they thought so long as they did not form correct conclusions. I regained the deck, and bid the fellows put the hatches on while I explored the cabins for the ship’s papers. There was a number of cabins under the roundhouse, and in one of them, which had, undoubtedly, been occupied by the captain, I found a stout tin box, locked; but I had a bunch of keys in my pocket, and, strangely enough, the key of a tin box in which I kept my own papers on board the _Hero_ fitted this box. I opened it, and seeing at once that the contents were the ship’s papers, I put them into my pocket and called to my men to bring the boat alongside. But I had not yet completed my explorations. I threw the ax into the boat, entered her, and pulled into the harbor to look at the weather and to see where the _Hero_ was. The _Hero_ lay at the distance of a mile, hove-to. The weather was wonderfully fine and calm. We pulled into the cave again to the bows of the ship, and cut off a short length of the hemp cable that was hanging up and down from the hawse-pipe, having parted at about two feet above the edge of the water. The cable was perfectly dry. We unlaid the strands and worked them up into torches and set fire to three of them--that is to say, I and two of the men held aloft these blazing torches, while the other two pulled us slowly into the cave past the ship. There was not much to see after all. The cavern ended abruptly at