ngs. Here
they made a desperate attempt to scale, but the foothold was too
precarious and the pales too high. In a few roaring minutes the attack
was at an end: it had withered away before the Spanish fire. The
buccaneers were retreating in knots of one or two, leaving some seventy
of their number on the sun-bleached rocks of the gully.

When they got back to the jungle they lay down to rest, and slept there
quietly while the daylight lasted, though the Spaniards still sent shots
in their direction. As soon as it was dark, they made another furious
assault, flinging their fireballs against the palings in order to burst
the planks apart. While they were struggling in the ditch, a pirate ran
across the gully with his body bent, as is natural to a running man. As
he ran, an arrow took him in the back, and pierced him through to the
side. He paused a moment, drew the arrow from the wound, wrapped the
shaft of it with cotton as a wad, and fired it back over the paling with
his musket. The cotton he had used caught fire from the powder, and it
chanced that this blazing shaft drove home into a palm thatch. In the
hurry and confusion the flame was not noticed, though it spread rapidly
across the huts till it reached some powder casks. There was a violent
explosion just within the palisadoes, and stones and blazing sticks came
rattling down about the Spaniards' ears. The inner castle roared up in a
blaze, calling the Spaniards from their guns to quench the fire--no easy
task so high above the water. While the guns were deserted, the pirates
ran along the bottom of the ditch, thrusting their fireballs under the
palisadoes, which now began to burn in many places. As the flames
spread, the planking warped, and fell. The outer planks inclined
slightly outward, like the futtocks of a ship, so that, when they
weakened in the fire, the inner weight of earth broke them through. The
pirates now stood back from the fort, in the long black shadows, to
avoid the showers of earth--"great heaps of earth"--which were falling
down into the ditch. Presently the slope from the bottom of the gully
was piled with earth, so that the pirates could rush up to the breaches,
and hurl their firepots across the broken woodwork. The San Lorenzo fort
was now a spiring red flame of fire--a beacon to the ships at sea.
Before midnight the wooden walls were burnt away to charcoal; the inner
fort was on fire in many places; yet the Spaniards still held the
earth