On May 11th we find Rogers, Dampier, and their companions running before a strong gale of wind for the Galapagos Islands. A number of the crew were prostrated with a malignant fever contracted at Guayaquil, where, about a month before the buccaneers' arrival, there had raged an epidemic disease of which ten or twelve persons perished every day; until the floors of the churches being filled with bodies, the people dug a great hole close to one of the structures where sailors had been stationed as guards. In this hole lay a pile of putrefied corpses, and the seamen only quitted their posts to return to their ships poisoned. On the 18th they were off a couple of large islands, and sent boats to seek for fresh water. The errand was fruitless, though the searchers went three or four miles into the country in their hunt. Their business now was to go where fresh water was to be had, for of the two crews there were no less than one hundred and twenty men down with fever; Captain Courtney was dangerously ill, and Captain Dover was devoting his leisure to prescribing for him. So they made sail for Gorgona, capturing a few vessels as they proceeded, and, anchoring on June 13th, at once distributed their sick amongst the prizes, and set to work to careen and repair the _Duke_ and _Dutchess_. By the 28th they had restored their provisions and mounted their guns, having in fourteen days caulked, rigged, discharged, and reloaded their ships; a smart piece of work that greatly astonished the Spanish prisoners, who said that their people usually took a couple of months to careen a vessel at ports where every necessary appliance for this business was to be had. The unhappy captives indeed, whilst watching or assisting the English, would scarcely marvel at their triumphs by land and sea when they observed their ceaseless and vigilant activity,—how, without regard to the climate, they worked from the break of day till darkness stopped their hands, and how, with swift and unerring judgment, they devised expedients for the remedying of difficulties which in the eyes of their astonished prisoners appeared at the time to be insurmountable. “The Natives of Old Spain,” says Rogers, “are accounted but ordinary Mariners; but here they are much worse, all the Prizes we took being rather cobbled than fitted out for the Sea; so that had they such Weather as we often meet with in the European Seas in Winter, they could scarce ever reach a Port again as they are fitted; but they Sail here Hundreds of Leagues.” Admissions of this kind are as good as saying that seizures in the South Sea went, as achievements, but a very little way beyond the mere act of hailing a ship and bidding her strike. The boldness of the English buccaneers is not very conspicuous in such encounters. Most of the vessels they took were navigated by crews of yellow, nervous men, utterly worthless as seamen, with neither heart nor muscle as combatants; whilst the cabins were crowded with