to Mendouca's great
gratification. Indeed, so delighted was he with his own brilliant idea,
that he did that night what I had never known him to do before, he
indulged rather too freely in the contents of the rum-bottle. And, as a
consequence, he grew garrulous and good-humouredly sarcastic over the
efforts made for the suppression of the slave-trade, which he
emphatically asserted would never be put down.

"One very serious disadvantage which you labour under," he remarked,
referring particularly to the operations of the British slave-squadron,
"is that you are altogether too confiding and credulous; you accept
every man as honest and straightforward until you have learned, to your
cost, that he is the reverse. Take the case, for example, of your
attack upon Chango Creek. You were led to undertake it upon the
representations made and the information given by Lobo, the Portuguese
trader of Banana Point, weren't you? Oh, I know all about it, I have
heard the whole story," he interrupted himself to say, in reply to my
ejaculation of surprise. "You were all very much obliged to Lobo, of
course; and your captain paid him handsomely for his information and
assistance. I suppose there was not one of you, from the captain
downward, who ever had the ghost of a suspicion that the fellow was
playing you false, and that the affair was a bold yet carefully arranged
plot to exterminate the whole of you, and destroy your ship, eh? No; of
course you hadn't; yet I give you my word that it _was_. Ay; and the
only wonder to me was that it did not succeed. I suppose it was that
you had a good deal more fight in you than any of them gave you credit
for; and that is where so many excellently arranged traps have failed;
the plotters have never made sufficient allowance for the fighting
powers of the British, as I have told them over and over again. It was
just that important oversight that caused what ought to have been a
splendid success to result in a serious disaster; the intention was
good, but, as is much too often the case, they had reckoned without
their host."

"But I do not understand," I cut in, as Mendouca paused. "What was the
plot? and how was Lobo concerned in it? It appears to me that the man
acted in perfect good faith; he gave us certain information which proved
to be substantially correct--except that he was mistaken as to the force
that we should have to encounter--and he safely piloted us to the spot
from