maize, but then the Indians were "very melancholy and thoughtful" and plainly designed by God as game for logwood cutters. In the end the Spaniards fell upon the logwood men and carried them away to Mexico and Vera Cruz, sending some to the silver mines, and selling the others to tradesmen. As slaves they passed the next few years, till they escaped to the coast. One of those who escaped told how he saw a Captain Buckenham, once a famous man at those old drinking bouts, and owner of a sugar ship, working as a slave in the city of Mexico. "He saw Captain Buckenham, with a Log chained to his Leg, and a Basket at his Back, crying Bread about the Streets for a Baker his Master." In this society of logwood cutters Dampier served a brief apprenticeship. He must have heard many strange tales, and jolly songs, around the camp fires of his mates, but none of them, apparently, were fit to print. He went hunting cattle, and got himself "bushed," or marooned--that is, lost--and had a narrow escape from dying in the woods. He helped at the cutting and trimming of the red wood, and at the curing of the hides of the slaughtered steers. When ships arrived he took his sup of rum, and fired his pistol, with the best of them. Had he stayed there any length of time he would have become a master logwood merchant, and so "gotten an Estate"; but luck was against him. In June 1676, when he was recovering from a guinea-worm, a creature which nests in one's ankle, and causes great torment, a storm, or "South," reduced the logwood cutters of those parts to misery. The South was "long foretold," by the coming in of many sea-birds to the shore's shelter, but the lumbermen "believed it was a certain Token of the Arrival of Ships," and took no precautions against tempest. Two days later the wind broke upon them furiously, scattering their huts like scraps of paper. The creek began to rise "faster than I ever saw it do in the greatest Spring Tide," so that, by noon, the poor wretches, huddled as they were in a hut, without fire, were fain to make ready a canoa to save themselves from drowning. The trees in the woods were torn up by the roots, "and tumbled down strangely across each other." The ships in the creek were blown from their anchors. Two of them were driven off to sea, dipping their bows clean under, and making shocking weather of it. One of them was lost in the bay, being whelmed by a green sea.