bitter struggle was captured. Morgan
was as good as his word: every man in the castle was shut in the guard
room, the match was set to the powder magazine, and soldiers, castle,
and all were blown into the air, while through all the smoke and the
dust the buccaneers poured into the town. Still the governor held out in
the other castle, and might have made good his defense, but that he was
betrayed by the soldiers under him. Into the castle poured the howling
buccaneers. But still the governor fought on, with his wife and daughter
clinging to his knees and beseeching him to surrender, and the blood
from his wounded forehead trickling down over his white collar, until a
merciful bullet put an end to the vain struggle.

Here were enacted the old scenes. Everything plundered that could be
taken, and then a ransom set upon the town itself.

This time an honest, or an apparently honest, division was made of
the spoils, which amounted to two hundred and fifty thousand pieces of
eight, besides merchandise and jewels.

The next towns to suffer were poor Maracaibo and Gibraltar, now just
beginning to recover from the desolation wrought by l'Olonoise. Once
more both towns were plundered of every bale of merchandise and of every
plaster, and once more both were ransomed until everything was squeezed
from the wretched inhabitants.

Here affairs were like to have taken a turn, for when Captain Morgan
came up from Gibraltar he found three great men-of-war lying in the
entrance to the lake awaiting his coming. Seeing that he was hemmed in
in the narrow sheet of water, Captain Morgan was inclined to compromise
matters, even offering to relinquish all the plunder he had gained if he
were allowed to depart in peace. But no; the Spanish admiral would hear
nothing of this. Having the pirates, as he thought, securely in his
grasp, he would relinquish nothing, but would sweep them from the face
of the sea once and forever.

That was an unlucky determination for the Spaniards to reach, for
instead of paralyzing the pirates with fear, as he expected it would do,
it simply turned their mad courage into as mad desperation.

A great vessel that they had taken with the town of Maracaibo was
converted into a fire ship, manned with logs of wood in montera caps and
sailor jackets, and filled with brimstone, pitch, and palm leaves soaked
in oil. Then out of the lake the pirates sailed to meet the Spaniards,
the fire ship leading the way, and bea