After many debates it was agreed amongst the masters and crews of these vessels to attack a town the name of which Dampier says he has forgotten. The vessel into which our hero found himself drafted was a French craft of eight guns and forty men, commanded by a man named Archemboe. The fleet weighed, but during the night they were scattered by a hard gale, and when day broke Archemboe's ship was alone. Dampier, with others of his comrades who were with Archemboe, speedily learnt to hate their French associates. The sailors were utterly worthless in bad, and lazy, lounging loafers in fine, weather: “The saddest creatures that I was ever among,” writes Dampier, “but though we had bad weather that required many hands aloft, yet the biggest part of them never stirred out of their hammocks but to eat.” Later on they fell in with Captain Wright, who belonged to the fleet, and Dampier's English shipmates induced this man to fit out a prize of his for them; Dampier himself joining Wright, whose vessel, a _barco longo_, mounted four guns and carried fifty men. Shortly after this Wright, in company with the Dutchman, Captain Yanky, started on a cruise along the coast of Cartagena. Dampier's narrative here is a very close, curious, and interesting description of the islands of this part of the sea and of the shores of the mainland. He also prints pages of notes about the birds common to those parts, the pearl-fishery, and other matters of a like kind. The charm of a sailor-like simplicity is in everything he says. “I have not been curious,” he writes in his preface to a _New Voyage Round the World_, “as to the spelling of the Names of Places, Plants, Fruits, Animals, etc., which in many of the remoter parts are given at the pleasure of Travellers, and vary according to their different Humours: Neither have I confined myself to such names as are given by Learned Authors, or so much as enquired after them. I write for my Countrymen, and have therefore for the most part used such names as are familiar to our English Seamen and those of our Colonies abroad, yet without neglecting others that occur'd.” Let Dampier's literary defects be what they may, assuredly unintelligibility is not one of them. The cruise, in a buccaneering sense, was not a profitable one. They captured a few small vessels, but their prizes yielded them little more than some tons of sugar, marmalade, cocoa, hides, and earthenware. They then resolved to separate, and after dividing the plunder they parted company, having enough vessels in the shape of prizes to carry them wherever they might choose to go. Twenty of them, amongst whom was Dampier, putting their share of the booty into a small bark, set sail for Virginia and arrived there after an uneventful passage in July, 1682. In this country Dampier lived for thirteen months, but of his life he tells nothing, merely hinting that a great many troubles befell him.