grave difficulty owed little or nothing to Dampier's address or to his popularity. It is a common saying at sea amongst sailors who dislike their captain that they will weather him out even if he were the devil himself; meaning that they will not suffer themselves to be defrauded by his tyranny of their wages or such good prospects as the voyage may promise. The sober-headed amongst Stradling's crew would not take long to see the folly of abandoning an adventure that had brought them to the very threshold of their hopes, particularly after having endured all the distress and misery of the passage of the Horn in a vessel but a very little bigger than a fishing-smack of to-day. It is more than likely then that Dampier's counsel found most of them sensible of their mistake and willing to resume work. Whilst the people were ashore busy on various jobs relating to the doctoring of their ships, the day being February 29th, 1704, a sail was sighted, an alarm raised, and a rush made on board. The two vessels instantly slipped their cables and stood out to sea. The stranger, on perceiving the canvas of the two crafts growing large upon the background of the island, bouted ship and went away under a press; but Dampier clung to his wake, and the _Cinque Ports_ made all possible haste to follow. The breeze blew briskly, and the _St. George_ was thrashed through it so fleetly that she towed her pinnace under water and was forced to cut her loose. Captain Stradling's boat, in which were a man and a dog, also went adrift, but of her and her inmates we get news later on. It was not until eleven o'clock at night that the _St. George_ came up with the chase, and Dampier wisely deferred hostilities until the day dawned. The stranger proved a Frenchman of four hundred tons and thirty guns, full of men; and at sunrise on March 1st the _Cinque Ports_ and the _St. George_ attacked her. The galley, however, was of little use, for after discharging a dozen guns she fell astern, and left the game to be played out by Dampier. “We fought her very close,” says Funnell, “Broadside and Broadside for seven Hours; and then a small Gale springing up she sheered off.” Old conflicts of this kind are quaint with the colours of an utterly extinct form of marine life. The seamen fought with guns bearing strange names. The heaviest marine-ordnance was the demi-cannon, whose bore was six and three-quarter inches, and the weight of the shot thirty pounds and a half. There were also the cannon-petro, that threw a twenty-four pound shot; the basilisk, the weight of whose shot was fifteen pounds; the sacre or sacar, as Sir William Monson spells it, a little piece of a bore of three inches and a half that cast a shot weighing five pounds; and smaller guns yet called the minion, the falcon, the serpentine, and the rabanet, the last carrying a shot of half a pound. It is difficult to conjecture the calibre of such ordnance as Dampier and his enemy were armed with.