Trifling as these incidents are, it is proper to relate them as examples of the life and experiences of Dampier during this period of his career. Unfortunately, until one opens his own books one does not know where to look for him. In whose troop he marched, in whose canoe he sat, in what special adventures he was concerned, whether he was favoured for his intelligence above the others by the commanders of the expedition, cannot be ascertained. When Ringrose wrote, Dampier was still a mere privateersman, a foremast hand, a man without individuality enough to arrest the attention of the sturdy, plain, and honest historian of the voyage in which they both took part. Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that Dampier at this time was regarded by his fellows as better than the humblest of the shaggy, sun-blackened men who, with fuzees on their shoulders and pistols in their girdles, tramped in little troops through the swamps and creeks and over the swelling lands of the Isthmus, or who in their deep and narrow canoes floated silent and grim upon the hot and creeping river in search of the unexpectant Don and his almost fabulous wealth. Dampier introduces a curious story in connection with Panama and the South Seas in his first volume. He says that when he was on board Captain Coxon's ship, there being three or four privateers in company, they captured a despatch boat bound to Cartagena from Porto Bello. They opened many of the letters, and were struck by observing that several of the merchants who wrote from Old Spain exhorted their correspondents at Panama to bear in mind a certain prophecy that had been current in Madrid and other centres for some months past, the tenor of which was—_That there would be English privateers that year in the West Indies, who would make such great discoveries as to open a door into the South Seas_. This door, Dampier says, was the passage overland to Darien through the country of the Indians, a people who had quarrelled with the Spaniards and professed a friendship for the English. At all events, these Indians had been for some time inviting the privateers to march across their territory and fall upon the Spaniards in the South Seas. Hence when the letters came into their hands they grew disposed to entertain the Indians' proposal in good earnest, and finally made those attempts to which I have referred in quoting from the pages of Ringrose. The cause of the friendship between the English buccaneers and the Darien Indians is a story of some interest. About fifteen years before Dampier crossed the Isthmus a certain Captain Wright, who was cruising in those waters, met with a young Indian lad paddling about in a canoe. He took him aboard his ship, clothed him, and, with the idea of making an Englishman of him, gave him the name of John Gret. Some Mosquito Indians, however, begged the boy from Captain Wright, who gave him to them. They carried him into their own country,