vice to the king, he
sailed for Providence with about 200 men,[251] and approaching the
island in the night by an unusual passage among the reefs, landed early
in the morning, and surprised and captured the Spanish commander. The
garrison of about 200 yielded up the fort on the promise that they would
be carried to the mainland. Twenty-seven pieces of ordnance were taken,
many of which, it is said, bore the arms of Queen Elizabeth engraved
upon them. Mansfield left thirty-five men under command of a Captain
Hattsell to hold the island, and sailed with his prisoners for Central
America. After cruising along the shores of the mainland, he ascended
the San Juan River and entered and sacked Granada, the capital of
Nicaragua. From Granada the buccaneers turned south into Costa Rica,
burning plantations, breaking the images in the churches, ham-stringing
cows and mules, cutting down the fruit trees, and in general destroying
everything they found. The Spanish governor had only thirty-six soldiers
at his disposal and scarcely any firearms; but he gathered the
inhabitants and some Indians, blocked the roads, laid ambuscades, and
did all that his pitiful means permitted to hinder the progress of the
invaders. The freebooters had designed to visit Cartago, the chief city
of the province, and plunder it as they had plundered Granada. They
penetrated only as far as Turrialva, however, whence weary and footsore
from their struggle through the Cordillera, and harassed by the
Spaniards, they retired through the province of Veragua in military
order to their ships.[252] On 12th June the buccaneers, laden with
booty, sailed into Port Royal. There was at that moment no declared war
between England and Spain. Yet the governor, probably because he
believed Mansfield to be justified, _ex post facto_, by the issue of
commissions against the Spaniards in the previous February, did no more
than mildly reprove him for acting without his orders; and "considering
its good situation for favouring any design on the rich main," he
accepted the tender of the island in behalf of the king. He despatched
Major Samuel Smith, who had been one of Mansfield's party, with a few
soldiers to reinforce the English garrison;[253] and on 10th November
the Council in England set the stamp of their approval upon his actions
by issuing a commission to his brother, Sir James Modyford, to be
lieutenant-governor of the new acquisition.[254]

In August 1665, only two mo