y dried up, and there was only found
a small rivulet between two hills, running into the sea, the
northernmost of which hills forms the south point of Fresh Water Bay.
There is plenty of wood, but that near the shore is not large enough
for other use than firewood."

The buccaneers of other voyages than these may have landed at Cocos
Island to leave their treasure. Heaven knows they found plenty of it
in those waters. There was Captain Bartholomew Sharp, for example,
with whom Dampier had sailed several years before. He took a Guayaquil
ship called the _San Pedro_ off Panama, and aboard her found nearly
forty thousand pieces of eight, besides silver, silver bars and ingots
of gold, and a little later captured the tall galleon _Rosario_, the
richest prize ever boarded by the buccaneers. She had many chests of
pieces of eight, and a quantity of wine and brandy. Down in her hold,
bar upon bar, "were 700 pigs of plate," rough silver from the mines,
not yet made ready for the Lima mint. The pirates thought this crude
silver was tin, and so left it where it lay, in the hold of the
_Rosario_, "which we turned away loose into the sea,"[8] with the
precious stuff aboard her. One pig of the seven hundred was taken
aboard the _Trinity_ of Captain Sharp "to make bullets of." About
two-thirds of it was "melted and squandered," but a fragment remained
when the ship touched at Antigua, homeward bound, and was given to a
"Bristol man" in exchange for a drink of rum. He sold it in England
for seventy-five pounds sterling.

"Thus," says Basil Ringrose, "we parted with the richest booty we got
on the whole voyage." Captain Bartholomew Sharp may have been thinking
of something else than the cargo of silver, for aboard the _Rosario_
was a woman, "the beautifullest Creature that his Eyes had ever
beheld," while Ringrose calls her "the most beautiful woman that I ever
saw in the South Seas."

Of these wild crews that flung away their lives and their treasure to
enrich romance and tradition, it has been said:

"They were of that old breed of rover whose port lay always a little
farther on; a little beyond the sky-line. Their concern was not to
preserve life, but rather to squander it away; to fling it, like so
much oil, into the fire, for the pleasure of going up in a blaze. If
they lived riotously, let it be urged in their favor that at least they
lived. They lived their vision. They were ready to die for what they
believed