te as to
the reasons he urged to the devout New England Puritans. He must have
chuckled to himself, and shared many a laugh with his clerk, to think
that perhaps a Levite, or a Man of God, a deacon, or an elder, would
untie the purse-strings of the sealed if he did but agonise about the
Spanish Inquisition with sufficient earthquake and eclipse. He heard of
the loss of the island before the answers came to him, and the news, of
course, "put him upon new designs," though he did not abandon the scheme
in its entirety. He had his little fleet at anchor in the harbour,
gradually fitting for the sea, and his own ship was ready. Having
received his commission from the Governor, he gave his captains orders
to meet him on the Cuban coast, at one of the many inlets affording safe
anchorage. Here, after several weeks of cruising, he was joined by "a
fleet of twelve sail," some of them of several hundred tons. These were
manned by 700 fighting men, part French, part English.

At the council of war aboard the admiral's ship, it was suggested that
so large a company should venture on Havana, which city, they thought,
might easily be taken, "especially if they could but take a few of the
ecclesiastics." Some of the pirates had been prisoners in the Havana,
and knew that a town of 30,000 inhabitants would hardly yield to 700
men, however desperate. "Nothing of consequence could be done there,"
they pronounced, even with ecclesiastics, "unless with fifteen hundred
men." One of the pirates then suggested the town of Puerto del Principe,
an inland town surrounded by tobacco fields, at some distance from the
sea. It did a thriving trade with the Havana; and he who suggested that
it should be sacked, affirmed upon his honour, like Boult over Maria,
that it never yet "was sacked by any Pirates." Towards this virginal
rich town the buccaneers proceeded, keeping close along the coast until
they made the anchorage of Santa Maria. Here they dropped anchor for the
night.

When the men were making merry over the punch, as they cleaned their
arms, and packed their satchels, a Spanish prisoner "who had overheard
their discourse, while they thought he did not understand the English
tongue," slipped through a port-hole to the sea, and swam ashore. By
some miracle he escaped the ground sharks, and contrived to get to
Puerto del Principe some hours before the pirates left their ships. The
Governor of the town, to whom he told his story, at once raised