de several descents upon this nest of freebooters.
He had already made two notable captures, and it was here he hoped
eventually to capture Captain Scarfield himself.

A brief description of this one-time notorious rendezvous of freebooters
might not be out of place. It consisted of a little settlement of those
wattled and mud-smeared houses such as you find through the West Indies.
There were only three houses of a more pretentious sort, built of wood.
One of these was a storehouse, another was a rum shop, and a third a
house in which dwelt a mulatto woman, who was reputed to be a sort
of left-handed wife of Captain Scarfield's. The population was almost
entirely black and brown. One or two Jews and a half dozen Yankee
traders, of hardly dubious honesty, comprised the entire white
population. The rest consisted of a mongrel accumulation of negroes
and mulattoes and half-caste Spaniards, and of a multitude of black or
yellow women and children. The settlement stood in a bight of the beach
forming a small harbor and affording a fair anchorage for small vessels,
excepting it were against the beating of a southeasterly gale. The
houses, or cabins, were surrounded by clusters of coco palms and growths
of bananas, and a long curve of white beach, sheltered from the large
Atlantic breakers that burst and exploded upon an outer bar, was drawn
like a necklace around the semi-circle of emerald-green water.

Such was the famous pirates' settlement of San Jose--a paradise of
nature and a hell of human depravity and wickedness--and it was to this
spot that Mainwaring paid another visit a few days after rescuing the
crew of the Baltimore Belle from her shattered and sinking wreck.

As the little bay with its fringe of palms and its cluster of wattle
huts opened up to view, Mainwaring discovered a vessel lying at anchor
in the little harbor. It was a large and well-rigged schooner of two
hundred and fifty or three hundred tons burden. As the Yankee rounded to
under the stern of the stranger and dropped anchor in such a position
as to bring her broadside battery to bear should the occasion
require, Mainwaring set his glass to his eye to read the name he could
distinguish beneath the overhang of her stern. It is impossible to
describe his infinite surprise when, the white lettering starting out in
the circle of the glass, he read, The Eliza Cooper, of Philadelphia.

He could not believe the evidence of his senses. Certainly this sink