They had emptied a case of liquors, and broken a cheese to pieces and crumbled it on the table and the cabin floor and, elated with their prize as they called it, they had drunk so much as to make them desperately abusive. I was permitted to lie down in my berth but, reader, if you have ever been awakened by a gang of armed desperadoes who have taken possession of your habitation in the midnight hour, you can imagine my feelings. Sleep was a stranger to me and anxiety was my guest. Bolidar, however, pretended friendship and flattered me with the prospect of being set at liberty, but I found him, as I suspected, a consummate hypocrite. Indeed, his very looks indicated it. He was a stout and well-built man, of a dark swarthy complexion, with keen, ferocious eyes, huge whiskers and beard under his chin and on his lips. He was a Portuguese by birth but had become a naturalized Frenchman,--had a wife and children in France and was well-known there as commander of a first-rate privateer. His appearance was truly terrific. He could talk some English and had a most lion-like voice. [Illustration: THE PIRATE CAPTAIN BOARDING THE CAPTURED “EXERTION”] Next day the scurvy knaves began plundering the _Exertion_ of her cargo of potatoes, butter, apples, beans, and so on, ripped up the floors in search of more liquor, found some hard cider, and guzzled it until officers and men were in a fight, all tipsy together, and then simmered down to sing sentimental ditties in the twilight. Soon after this both schooners got under way and sailed to another haven in the lee of Brigantine Cay. Captain Lincoln now saw something more of the roving scapegrace of a Scotchman who called himself Nikola. He was a pirate with a sentimental streak in him and professed himself to be unhappy in his lawless employment and declared he had signed articles in the belief that he was bound privateering. A theatrical person was the bewhiskered Nikola, who properly belonged to fiction of the romantic school. Sympathetic Captain Lincoln wrote that he lamented most deeply his own situation, for he was one of those men whose early good impressions were not entirely effaced. He told me that those who had taken me were no better than pirates and their end would be the halter, but he added, with peculiar emotion, “I will never be hung as a pirate,” showing me a bottle of laudanum which he had found in my medicine chest and saying, “If we are overtaken, this shall cheat the hangman before we are condemned.”