The subsequent adventures of Dampier need not take long to relate. As we have seen, his crew consisted of twenty-eight men only; the _St. George_ was in a pitiable condition, her seams open, every timber in her decayed, her sails and rigging worn out, and in no sense was she fit to keep the sea. Dampier was in the situation of a gambler who has lost all but the guinea which he now proposes to stake. Indeed, we find him throughout confiding a great deal too much in luck. It is seldom that he attempts to force fortune's hand by prompt, vigorous, and original measures. One by one his brother officers had abandoned him; his crew had deserted him by the score at a time; and yet in a ship rotten to the heart of her, and with a beggarly following of twenty-eight gaunt and dissatisfied men, he clings to the scene of his distresses and his disappointments with no further expectation than the gambling hope that, since he is at the very bottom of the wheel, the next revolution must certainly raise him. Had he and his twenty-eight men come fresh to these seas, they might have flattered themselves with brilliant prospects; smaller companies of buccaneers had achieved incredible things, enlarged their ranks as they progressed, shifted their flag from ship to ship, until they found themselves in possession of a fleet equal to any such force as the enemy in those waters had it in his power to send against them. But Dampier's men were dissatisfied and miserable, surly and despondent with disappointment, and exhausted by privation and severe labours. They looked at the future as promising but a darker picture of what they had already suffered. It was indeed time for them to go home; the privateering spirit amongst them was moribund; all heart had been taken out of them. It speaks well for Dampier's personal influence, whilst it also illustrates his singular genius of persuasion, that he should have succeeded in keeping these men together by representations in which possibly he had as little faith as they. He told them that there was nothing easier than to make their fortunes by surprising some small Spanish town, and that the fewer there were of them, the fewer there would be to share the booty. They listened and sullenly acquiesced—animated, perhaps, by a faint expiring gleam of their old buccaneering instincts. Thereupon Dampier attacked Puna in Ecuador, then a village formed of a small church and about thirty houses. The night was dark when he landed, the inhabitants were in bed; no resistance was offered, and the place was captured without trouble. Having plundered this town, they sailed to Lobos de la Mar, where they let go their anchor, whilst they deliberated what they should do next. On the way to this island they captured a small Spanish vessel full of provisions. Dampier called a council, and it was resolved that they should quit the _St. George_ and sail away to the East Indies in their prize. It is manifest from this resolution