Much of his narrative here is devoted to accurate and well-written descriptions of the character of the country, and of its animals, reptiles, and the like. There is an amusing quaintness in some of his little pictures, as, for instance: “The Squash is a four-footed Beast, bigger than a Cat: Its Head is much like a Foxes; with short Ears and a long Nose. It has pretty short Legs and sharp Claws; by which it will run up trees like a Cat. The skin is covered with short, fine Yellowish Hair. The flesh is good, sweet, wholesome Meat. We commonly skin and roast it; and then we call it pig; and I think it eats as well. It feeds on nothing but good Fruit; therefore we find them most among the Sapadillo-Trees. This Creature never rambles very far: and being taken young, will become as tame as a Dog; and be as roguish as a Monkey.” The minuteness of his observation is exhibited in a high degree in his account of the beasts, birds, and fish of Campeché and the district. He uses no learned terms. A child might get to know more from him about the thing he describes than from a dozen pages of modern writing on the subject supplemented even by illustrations. It was wonderland to him, as it had been to other plain and sagacious sailors before him. His accounts remind us again and again of the exquisitely naïve but admirably faithful descriptions of beasts and fish by the navigators whose voyages are found in the collections of Hackluyt and Purchas. It is not very long after he had quitted Campeché that we find him associating with privateers, and becoming one of their number. He writes of this in a half-apologetic manner, complaining of failure through a violent storm and of a futile cruise lasting for several months, and talks of having been driven at last to seek subsistence by turning pirate. There is no hint in his previous narrative of any leanings this way. Probably thoughts of the golden chances of the rover might have been put into his head by chats with the logwood-cutters. The Spaniard had long been the freebooter's quarry. His carracks and galleons, laden almost to their ways with the treasure of New Spain, had handsomely lined the pockets of the marauding rogues, and such was the value of the booty that scores of them might have set up as fine gentlemen in their own country on their shares but for their trick of squandering in a night what they had taken months to gain at the hazard of their lives. The temptation was too much for Dampier; besides, he was already seasoned to hardships of even a severer kind than was promised by a life of piracy. For, as we have seen, he had out-weathered the bitter cold of Newfoundland, he had worked as a common sailor before the mast, he had served against the Dutch, he had knocked about in Mexican waters in a vessel as commodious and seaworthy as a Thames barge, and he was now fresh from the severe discipline of the logwood trade. His associates consisted of sixty men, who were divided between two vessels.