It was stipulated that the first consignment should be delivered to Don Carlos himself at his headquarters near Bilbao, and before accepting the cargo I went there on an iron-ore steamer to reconnoitre. I found that the Pretender’s retreat in the mountains back from Bilbao was in the very heart of that section of Spain which was most loyal to him. Carlist sentiment was almost unanimous in the Provinces of Vizcaya, Alava, and Guipuzcoa, and strong in the adjoining Provinces of Navarre, Catalonia, and Aragon, so there was nothing to fear once we succeeded in getting up the river. Even the city of Bilbao was largely composed of Carlist supporters, but the forts which commanded the river there and at Portugalete, the deep-water port of Bilbao on the coast at the mouth of the river, were manned by unfriendly troops. The two Generals, Prim and Serrano, who were the real rulers of Spain and who placed Prince Amadeo, son of the King of Italy, on the throne a year or so later, were as much opposed to the Carlists as they had been to the Bourbons. They did not propose that the Pretender should gain any ground during the troubled period which they had brought about by the expulsion of Queen Isabella. They knew he was trying to import arms from England and they had so many warships patrolling the northern coast that it practically amounted to a blockade; but, after my experience at Charleston, I did not regard that as a serious matter. Only a small and light-draft ship could get up the river to the point at which the arms were to be delivered, which was a few miles above Bilbao. I did not care to try it with the “Leckwith” so I chartered a smaller steamer which greatly resembled the “Santa Marta,” a Spanish coastwise ship. To avoid suspicion as to their real destination the rifles and cartridges, in boxes which gave no indication of their contents, were shipped to Antwerp, and I picked them up there. As soon as we were out of sight of land I repainted my ship and made some slight changes in her upper works, until she looked almost exactly like the “Santa Marta.” That name was then painted on her bows and the Spanish flag was hoisted over her. With this precaution I figured that we would avoid any trouble with the forts or any warships we might encounter, and we did; in fact we did not see a single warship. Of course, if we had happened to meet the real “Santa Marta,” we would have had to run for it at least, and it might have been more serious than that, but I simply took a chance that we would not run into her. We saluted the forts as we passed them and they responded without taking two looks at us.