is crew in the cabin of the Spanish vessel he
had first captured, he now sang wilder songs, and passed more flowing
bowls, for this prize was a much greater one than the first. If
Bartholemy could have communicated his great good fortune to the other
buccaneers in the West Indies, there would have been a boom in piracy
which would have threatened great danger to the honesty and integrity of
the seafaring men of that region.

But nobody, not even a pirate, has any way of finding out what is going
to happen next, and if Bartholemy had had an idea of the fluctuations
which were about to occur in the market in which he had made his
investments he would have been in a great hurry to sell all his stock
very much below par. The fluctuations referred to occurred on the ocean,
near the island of Pinos, and came in the shape of great storm waves,
which blew the Spanish vessel with all its rich cargo, and its
triumphant pirate crew, high up upon the cruel rocks, and wrecked it
absolutely and utterly. Bartholemy and his men barely managed to get
into a little boat, and row themselves away. All the wealth and
treasure which had come to them with the capture of the Spanish vessel,
all the power which the possession of that vessel gave them, and all the
wild joy which came to them with riches and power, were lost to them in
as short a space of time as it had taken to gain them.

In the way of well-defined and conspicuous ups and downs, few lives
surpassed that of Bartholemy Portuguez. But after this he seems, in the
language of the old English song, "All in the downs." He had many
adventures after the desperate affair in the bay of Campeachy, but they
must all have turned out badly for him, and, consequently, very well, it
is probable, for divers and sundry Spanish vessels, and, for the rest of
his life, he bore the reputation of an unfortunate pirate. He was one of
those men whose success seemed to have depended entirely upon his own
exertions. If there happened to be the least chance of his doing
anything, he generally did it; Spanish cannon, well-armed Spanish crews,
manacles, imprisonment, the dangers of the ocean to a man who could not
swim, bloodhounds, alligators, wild beasts, awful forests impenetrable
to common men, all these were bravely met and triumphed over by
Bartholemy.

But when he came to ordinary good fortune, such as any pirate might
expect, Bartholemy the Portuguese found that he had no chance at all.
But he was