ca,
rounded the Horn and, after eighteen months of adventure, peril and
hardship, reached the West Indies again.

"The log of the voyage," writes Treves, "affords lurid reading. It
records how they landed and took towns, how they filled the little
market squares with corpses, how they pillaged the churches, ransacked
the houses and then committed the trembling places to the flames.

"It tells how they tortured frenzied men until, in their agony, they
told of hiding places where gold was buried; how they spent an unholy
Christmas at Juan Fernandez; how, in a little island cove, they fished
with a greasy lead for golden pieces which Drake is believed to have
thrown overboard for want of carrying room. It gives account of a cargo
of sugar and wine, of tallow and hides, of bars of silver and pieces of
eight, of altar chalices and ladies' trinkets, of scented laces, and of
rings torn from the clenched and still warm fingers of the dead.

"The 'valiant commander' had lost many of his company on the dangerous
voyage. Some had died in battle; others had mumbled out their lives in
the delirium of fever, sunstroke or drink; certain poor souls, with
racked joints and bleeding backs, were crouching in Spanish prisons; one
had been marooned on a desert island in the Southern Pacific Ocean." At
the last, Sharp turned over the ship to the remainder of his crew and
set sail, rich and respected (!) for England.

On the way from St. Kitts to St. Thomas, Stuart passed the two strange
islands of St. Eustatius and Saba, remnants of the once great Dutch
power in the West Indies. Statia, as the first island is generally
called, is a decadent spot, its commerce fallen to nothing, the
warehouses along the sea-front of its only town, in ruins. Yet once,
strange as it may seem, for a few brief months, Statia became the scene
of a wild commercial orgy, and the place where once was held "the most
stupendous auction in the history of the universe."

It happened thus: When the American Revolulutionary War broke out,
England being already at war with France, commercial affairs in the West
Indies became complicated by the fact that the Spanish, the French and
the English, all enacted trading restrictions so stringent that
practically every port in the West Indies was closed. The Dutch, seizing
the opportunity, made Statia a free port. Immediately, the whole of
French, English, Spanish, Dutch and American trade was thrown upon the
tiny beach of For