For this expedition Drake selected fifteen of his men and the Cimaroons with him before, so that the whole company, exclusive of the natives, numbered but thirty-five, besides the two captains. Leaving his “Pasha” and the French ship in a safe road, he manned the reformed Spanish frigate and his two pinnaces, and sailed toward “Rio Francesco.” The frigate was left at Cabecas, with a crew of English and French, the pinnaces alone continuing to Rio Francesco. Here the band landed and took up their march, Drake charging the masters of the pinnaces to be back at this place without fail on the fourth day following, when they expected to return. They proceeded in covert through the woods toward the highway over which richly laden “recuas” were now coming daily from Panama to Nombre de Dios. When they had marched, as in the previous journey to Panama, to a “convenient point” between Rio Francesco and Nombre de Dios, they bivouacked for that night. As they rested “in great silence” they could hear the distant sounds of many carpenters working on the ships at Nombre de Dios, which was customarily done in the night time because of the great heat of the day; and their ears were charmed with the music of the bells of the trotting mule teams on the road. Early the next morning, April first, a jangle of bells nearing their cover told the approach of an unwonted number of recuas. Putting themselves in readiness they cautiously moved down toward the highway. Three great teams from Panama were coming along together. One consisted of fifty mules, the other two of seventy each, and each mule carried three hundred pounds’ weight of silver: one hundred and ninety mules in all with a total of fifty-seven thousand pounds of the metal; while some were also laden with a small quantity of gold. Their guards comprised forty-five soldiers, fifteen to each recua. At the moment the teams were abreast them Drake’s band sprang out, and took such hold of the heads of the foremost and hindmost mules that the rest stopped short and lay down. There followed a quick exchange of bullets and arrows, and then the flight of the guard “to seek more help abroad.” In the skirmish the French captain was painfully wounded and one Cimaroon was killed. The raiders hurriedly relieved the mules of their burden, taking all of the treasure that they could well carry, including a few bars and quoits of gold, and burying a large part of the rest in various places—in burrows which great land crabs had made, beneath the trunks of fallen trees, and in the sand and gravel of a shallow river—to be taken away later as occasion might offer. Two hours were consumed in this business. Then the return march was started by the way they had come. They had scarcely re-entered the woods when they heard both horse and foot clattering along the road behind them. This force, however, did not pursue them, and it was supposed that they tarried to repossess the mules and the rifled packs.