lose under our stern, inquired whither we
were bound; to which Carera replied: "The Conconil lagoons," an answer
which appeared to be perfectly satisfactory. This felucca was quite a
formidable craft of her class, measuring, I should say, close upon two
hundred tons. She was very low and very broad on the water--due, as I
could distinctly see when she swept so closely past us, to the extreme
shallowness of her hull; there was no scale on her stern-post to show
her draught of water; but it could not have been more than eight feet,
if as much; her water-lines were the finest I had ever seen, and she
must have been a wonderfully smart vessel under canvas, judging from the
ease and the speed with which her crew swept her through the water.
There were fully sixty men on her roomy decks as she passed us--and
possibly others below--as ruffianly-looking a set of wretches as I ever
wish to see; and her armament consisted of eight long brass nines--four
in each battery--with a long eighteen between her fore and main mast.
She was rigged with three masts; and, from the great length of her
graceful tapering yards, she must have been capable of showing an
enormous spread of canvas to the breeze. With an eye to future
business, I not only noted the direction in which she was steering, but
also questioned Carera about her; but that individual was--or professed
to be--totally unacquainted with her.

Next morning at daybreak we were aroused by Carera, who requested us to
put in an appearance on deck as soon as possible, as we were off the
mouth of the Barcos Channel and he wished to run in with the first of
the sea-breeze. We accordingly dressed with all expedition and hurried
on deck, to find ourselves becalmed off a cluster of low mangrove-
covered islets, so numerous that the whole sea inshore of us seemed to
be completely covered with them. A single glance sufficed to convince
us that no more suitable spot than this for a pirate's head-quarters
could well be found, for any attempt on the part of the uninitiated to
penetrate the intricacies of these multitudinous cays must inevitably
have resulted in failure. Channel there was none--so far as we could
see--or rather, there were hundreds of them, each more hopelessly
impracticable than the other, for there appeared to be only a very few
feet of water in any of them. Had we been able to ascend to any such
elevation as, say, a frigate's mast-head, it might indeed have been
possib