The regular courthouse of the city being under repair, the Admiralty Sessions were held in a large room occupied temporarily for the purpose. At one end, raised two steps above the level of the floor, was the bench, on which were seated the Judge of the Admiralty Court, supported by two post captains in full uniform, who are ex-officio judges of this court in the colonies, one on each side. On the right, the jury, composed of merchants of the place, and respectable planters of the neighbourhood, were enclosed in a sort of box, with a common white pine railing separating it from the rest of the court. There was a long table in front of the bench, at which a lot of blackrobed devil’s limbs of lawyers, were ranged--but both amongst them, and on the bench, the want of the cauliflower wigs was sorely felt by me, as well as by the seamen, who considered it little less than murder, that men in crops-black shock-pated fellows--should sit in judgment on their fellow-creatures, where life and death were in the scales. On the left hand of the bench, the motley public, white, black, and of every intermediate shade--were grouped; as also in front of the dock, which was large. It might have been made with a view to the possibility of fifteen unfortunates or so being arraigned at one time; but now there were no fewer than forty-three jammed and pegged together into it, like sheep in a Smithfield pen the evening before market-day. These were the forty thieves--the pirates. They were all, without exception, clean, well shaven, and decently rigged in white trowsers, linen or check shirts, and held their broad Panama sombreros in their hands. Most of them wore the red silk sash round the waist. They had generally large bushy whiskers, and not a few had earrings of massive gold, (why call wearing earrings puppyism? Shakspeare wore earrings, or the Chandos portrait lies,) and chains of the same metal round their necks, supporting, as I concluded, a crucifix, hid in the bosom of the shirt. A Spaniard can’t murder a man comfortably, if he has not his crucifix about him. They were, collectively, the most daring, intrepid, Salvator Rosa looking men I had ever seen. Most of them were above the middle size, and the spread of their shoulders, the grace with which their arms were hung, and finely developed muscles of the chest and neck, the latter exposed completely by the folding back of their shirt collars, cut large and square, after the Spanish fashion, beat the finest boat’s-crew we could muster all to nothing. Some of them were of mixed blood, that is, the cross between the European Spaniard and the aboriginal Indian of Cuba, a race long since sacrificed on tile altar of Mammon, the white man’s god.