hor and send a small boat back to his ships for food and
assistance. Barthelemy and his companions remained on the sloop.

According to the closest estimate the boat would need three days to
reach the ships and the same time to return. So Barthelemy must stay six
days at one point in the ocean.

A week before they were revelling in luxury, while wine flowed in
rivers, now, under the rays of a scorching sun, they divided their last
biscuit and longed for a drink of water.

At last Barthelemy thought of lashing some masts together into a raft,
on which he sent two men with a cask to seek land. They were almost
dying of thirst when the raft returned; the men had reached the shore
and filled the cask with muddy water. They also brought a bunch of some
plant which resembled a radish.

Miry water and radishes! A royal banquet for the pirates! But soon this,
too, was exhausted, the six days had expired, the boat had not returned,
and the adverse tide made it impossible for the raft to reach the shore
a second time.

The men grew desperate and began to murmur.

"Worthless fellows!" blustered Moody. "Degenerate pirates, who succumb
to hunger after fasting only three days. The world is going to ruin.
Even pirates turn cowards. It wasn't so when I was young and Olonais was
captain.

"For a whole week we ate nothing but dry roots, and then we got food
from the governor's table in the heart of Vera Cruz."

"And you ventured to fight on land?" asked Asphlant, with an incredulous
look.

"The ground certainly didn't tremble under our feet as it does under
yours when you go ashore; once, twenty of us, under Olonais, pushed
forward to the gates of Havana."

"I didn't hear that you ever captured the city."

"We came within an ace of it. Luckily for himself, the governor found
out how few of us there were in the party before we got our hands on his
throat."

"So you returned whence you came."

"It's easy enough for you to talk; the governor sent two hundred men
after us in a warship, while we had only two boats. He also sent along
an executioner to hang us to the trees on the coast when we were
caught."

"So you managed to escape."

"We waited for them and, after having lured them far enough from Havana,
I and another dare-devil, who, however, did not live to grow old, like
me, slipped overboard and, swimming under the ship with our augers,
bored eight holes in her bottom. Ho! ho! how quickly she sunk, how the
soldiers