he enemy; and during the succeeding six months
we performed this duty, varied by occasional brief visits to Port Royal
and Barbadoes, making a few unimportant captures, but meeting with no
adventures worth recording. It was through one of these captures that
we first got news of the surrender of the island of Trinidad (on the
17th of February 1797) to the combined naval and military forces under
Rear-Admiral John Harvey and Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby.

It was some six weeks after the occurrence of the above event that,
while cruising off Cape Gallinas, on the Costa Firme, with our head to
the westward, we found ourselves so nearly becalmed that it became
necessary for us to set all our flying kites in order to retain
steerage-way. The night fell intensely dark, for the moon, well
advanced toward her third quarter, rose late, while the sky had
gradually become overcast, great masses of heavy cloud having worked up
against the wind, threatening one of those violent thunderstorms which
are so frequent in this particular part of the world.

The storm gathered slowly, and when I put in an appearance on deck to
stand my watch, at eight bells of the second dog-watch, it had not yet
broken, although an occasional faint flicker of sheet-lightning, away to
the eastward, warned us that we might expect it to do so within the next
hour or so. At the moment of my appearance on deck, however, there was
no very immediate prospect of an outbreak, for the wind although light
was steady, and the frigate, close-hauled on the port tack, was creeping
along at the rate of about three knots per hour, while the gleams of
sheet-lightning were exceedingly faint and infrequent, occurring at
about ten-minutes' intervals. Very gradually the brilliancy of the
flashes, as well as their frequency and duration, increased, until, by
two bells, the glimmer of some of them endured for perhaps as long as
three seconds, during which the entire sky, with its enormous, fantastic
cloud-shapes, from horizon to zenith, was lit up with a faint sulphurous
blue glare, strongly suggestive of the idea that we were afloat in the
heart of an enormous cavern, momentarily illuminated by the burning of a
port-fire.

It was during the flickering of one of these somewhat prolonged gleams
that the lookout on the forecastle-head reported:

"A small sail, three points on the weather-bow, headin' to the east'ard,
close under the land."

Mr Galway at once sp