r fighting space, and "took them such
poor weapons as they had: viz., a broken pointed rapier, one old visgee,
and a rusty caliver. John Drake took the rapier and made a gauntlet of
his pillow, Richard Allen the visgee, both standing at the head of the
pinnace called Eion. Robert took the caliver, and so boarded." It was a
gallant, mad attempt, but utterly hopeless from the first. The frigate
was "armed round about with a close fight of hides," and "full of pikes
and calivers, which were discharged in their faces, and deadly wounded
those that were in the fore ship, John Drake in the belly, and Richard
Allen in the head." Though they were both sorely hurt, they shoved the
pinnace clear with their oars, and so left the frigate, and hurried home
to their ship, where "within an hour after" this young man of great hope
ended his days, "greatly lamented of all the company." He was buried in
that place, with Richard Allen his shipmate, among the brilliant shrubs,
over which the parrots chatter.

For the next four or five weeks the company remained at Fort Diego with
the Maroons, their allies. They fared sumptuously every day on the food
stored within the magazine; while "daily out of the woods" they took
wild hogs, the "very good sort of a beast called warre," that Dampier
ate, besides great store of turkeys, pheasants, and numberless guanas,
"which make very good Broath." The men were in good health, and well
contented; but a day or two after the New Year (January 1573) "half a
score of our company fell down sick together, and the most of them died
within two or three days." They did not know what the sickness was, nor
do they leave us much information to enable us to diagnose it. They
called it a calenture, or fever, and attributed it to "the sudden change
from cold to heat, or by reason of brackish water which had been taken
in by our pinnace, through the sloth of their men in the mouth of the
river, not rowing further in where the water was good." We cannot wonder
that they died from drinking the water of that sluggish tropical river,
for in the rainy season such water is often poisonous to the fish in the
sea some half-a-mile from the shore. It comes down from the hills thick
with pestilential matter. It sweeps away the rotting leaves and
branches, the dead and drowned animals, from the flooded woods and
savannahs. "And I believe," says Dampier, "it receives a strong Tincture
from the Roots of several Kind of Trees, Herbs