ll, jiggers.
Many of the people frequently had their eyes entirely closed from the
stings of the mosquitoes. At night swarms of fleas assailed us in our
beds, while by day it afforded a kind of amusement to pull up the leg
of one's trousers and see them take flight like a flock of sparrows
from a corn-stack, while there might be a hundred congregated inside
the stocking. Those little insidious devils, the jiggers, penetrated
the skin in almost all parts of the body, forming a round ball and
causing sores which, being irritated by the sand, became most painful
and troublesome ulcers, and produced lameness to half of our number at
a time.

"Snakes were so numerous that the thatching and almost every nook of
our huts was infested with them. They were often found in the peoples'
hammocks and clothes, and several were caught on board the ship. On
one occasion, my clerk's assistant was writing in his hut when a
rustling in the overhanging growth caused him to look up and discover a
huge snake, its head extending several feet inside the hole that served
as a window. He alarmed the camp, and muskets, cutlasses, sticks, and
every other weapon were caught up. The snake escaped, but I received
numerous reports of his extraordinary dimensions. My steward insisted
that it was as big around as his thigh, the sentry said it was as big
as the _Lightning's_ bower cable, and as to length the statements
varied between twenty and thirty feet. At another time, Mr. Button,
the boatswain, went into the store, in which there was no window, to
get a piece of rope. Going in from the glare of the sun, the place
appeared dark to him, and he laid hold of what he thought was a length
of rope, pulled lustily at it, and was not undeceived until it was
dragged out into the light. Then he was horror-struck to find he had
hold of a large snake."

In May, Captain Dickinson was able to send to England in H.M.S. _Eden_,
treasure to the handsome amount of $130,000 in bullion and specie, and
had every promise of recovering most of the remainder of the precious
cargo. Then a terrific storm swept the cove, totally demolished the
derrick, carried the large diving bell to the bottom, and made hash of
the whole equipment devised with such immense toil and pains. Was he
discouraged? Not a bit of it. He straightway set his men at work to
construct new apparatus with which he fetched up more gold and silver,
to the value of half a million dollars befo