r enemies off
their guard, began to shorten sail in a somewhat slovenly fashion, as
though we were about to bring up. Then, passing under the stern of our
quarry we luffed up into the wind, shot alongside the craft, hove our
grappling-irons into her rigging, and, whilst our boarders were still
busy driving her astonished crew below, cut her cable and dragged her a
quarter of a mile to sea before the people in the battery woke up and
fully realised what we were about. By that time, however, we were in
full possession of our prize, and were able to make sail upon her; and
although the shot from the battery flew about our ears pretty thickly
for the next ten minutes, we actually succeeded in getting out of range
without once being struck; and so completely had we surprised the French
crew that not one of our men received so much as a scratch.

The _Julie_, for such proved to be the name of our prize, though small,
turned out to be of considerable value; for she was pretty nearly full
of a rich but heterogeneous assortment of goods which I shrewdly
suspected had been taken out of ships which were subsequently scuttled
or burnt; we therefore put one of the mids with half a dozen hands on
board her, and sent her into Port Royal, where, as we afterwards
learned, she safely arrived next morning.

This little slice of good fortune, coming as it did at the very outset
of our cruise, was peculiarly gratifying to me, not so much on account
of either the honour or the profit likely to accrue to me personally
from the transaction, but because it put the crew into good spirits, and
infused into them, especially the strangers among them, an amount of
confidence in me which my extremely youthful appearance would perhaps
have otherwise failed to command.

We devoted an entire week to our projected examination of the Saint
Domingo coast, making four more captures during that time; but they all
proved to be of so little value that they were set on fire and
destroyed. Then, having worked our way as far east as Saona, we
stretched across the Mona Passage; looked into the various bays and
creeks on the south coast of Porto Rico without success, and finally
found ourselves, on our sixteenth day out, with the island of Virgin
Gorda and the Herman reefs under our lee as we stood to the northward
and eastward to weather the Virgin group.

It was about noon when--having stretched off the land some twenty miles
or so, we were about to bear u