riven to rebellion by the cruelty and oppression of the
Spaniards, accompanied the marauders and would have massacred the
prisoners, especially the religious, had they not been told that the
English had no intentions of retaining their conquest. The news of the
exploit produced a lively impression in Jamaica, and the governor
suggested Central America as the "properest place" for an attack from
England on the Spanish Indies.[257]

Providence Island was now in the hands of an English garrison, and the
Spaniards were not slow to realise that the possession of this outpost
by the buccaneers might be but the first step to larger conquests on the
mainland. The President of Panama, Don Juan Perez de Guzman, immediately
took steps to recover the island. He transferred himself to Porto Bello,
embargoed an English ship of thirty guns, the "Concord," lying at anchor
there with licence to trade in negroes, manned it with 350 Spaniards
under command of Jose Sanchez Jimenez, and sent it to Cartagena. The
governor of Cartagena contributed several small vessels and a hundred or
more men to the enterprise, and on 10th August 1666 the united Spanish
fleet appeared off the shores of Providence. On the refusal of Major
Smith to surrender, the Spaniards landed, and on 15th August, after a
three days' siege, forced the handful of buccaneers, only sixty or
seventy in number, to capitulate. Some of the English defenders later
deposed before Governor Modyford that the Spaniards had agreed to let
them depart in a barque for Jamaica. However this may be, when the
English came to lay down their arms they were made prisoners by the
Spaniards, carried to Porto Bello, and all except Sir Thomas Whetstone,
Major Smith and Captain Stanley, the three English captains, submitted
to the most inhuman cruelties. Thirty-three were chained to the ground
in a dungeon 12 feet by 10. They were forced to work in the water from
five in the morning till seven at night, and at such a rate that the
Spaniards themselves confessed they made one of them do more work than
any three negroes; yet when weak for want of victuals and sleep, they
were knocked down and beaten with cudgels so that four or five died.
"Having no clothes, their backs were blistered with the sun, their heads
scorched, their necks, shoulders and hands raw with carrying stones and
mortar, their feet chopped and their legs bruised and battered with the
irons, and their corpses were noisome to one anothe