After an uneventful voyage of several days the ship anchored in Habana harbor. Mr. Campbell came ashore with the captain and about the first person the captain saw was the sailor they sought. They invited him to the tavern, where dinner was ordered for the three. After they had been eating some time, the captain noticing that John, who had ordered the dinner, had not included wine, which all Spaniards drink at dinner, supplemented the meal by a liter of strong red wine. Then turning to John asked in English: “Just what is it you desire to learn from the sailor? In a few minutes he will grow quite talkative; nothing loosens a Spaniard’s tongue like a good dinner and a bottle of wine.” Having learned what was wanted the captain put several questions to the sailor, which he answered in monosyllables, as he was not quite through eating. When he had eaten a little more and finished the wine, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, tilted back the chair on which he sat, lighted a long cigarette and gave a grunt of contentment. Then the captain knew he was ready to talk and asked him to tell of his shipwreck off the African coast. “You see it was this way: we were about three days out from the Strait of Gibraltar when it came on to blow the hardest I have ever seen in my fifteen years before the mast. We would have gone down in the first few hours, except that our frigate was the stanchest of the navy. For a while we pointed her nose angling to the wind and as best we could kept our course. It was no use, we had to turn tail and run with the wind; and that frigate under bare poles made greater speed than she would sailing in a fair wind before a stiff breeze with all sail set. On the second night, near daybreak, when it was so dark because of the spray and rain and clouds that you could not see your hand before you, nor hear a sound because of the roar of the wind and the pounding of the waves and the creaking of the ship, she was suddenly thrown in the air and seemed to come down in a thousand pieces. Many of the boys were killed outright as she was crushed as a nail keg by a sledge. Quite a few of those on deck were thrown clear over the rock into a quieter sea and swept upon a sandy beach, even into the desert grass, where the water rarely reached. There we lay waiting in the darkness until the day, too exhausted and wounded to move. With daylight all clouds vanished and the moisture of the spray and storm was soon wiped out by a hot, drying sun. We seemed in a land where it never rained. There was a fringe of salt water grasses on the edge of the beach and beyond nothing but gray and brown sand; a land as bare as the palm of your hand; of sand hills that shifted over night, riftling and moving like the surface of the ocean, riled by a squall.