nerous.

Having found the Indians, we took our departure soon after, although the
Spaniards invited us to stay with them longer. All that night it rained
very hard and we found no place where we could land. About ten o'clock
the next morning, however, after a night of rowing and paddling, we
espied a canoe coming toward us at great speed. The men in it proved to
be of our old English company, who supposed us to be Spaniards and were
coming to attack us. They had given me and my companions up for lost,
but now we were all mutually rejoiced, and were soon reunited on the
shore of a deep bay which lay concealed behind a point of rocks.

On the morning of the second day after, that is, on the twenty-third of
April, the day sacred to Saint George, our patron of England, we came
before sunrise within view of the city of Panama, which makes a pleasant
show to vessels that are at sea. At that time there lay at anchor near
the Island of Perico, which is distant about two leagues from Panama,
five great ships and three smaller men-of-war called _The Little Fleet_.
The latter, it appeared, had been suddenly manned with a design to fight
us and prevent us from making any further attempts upon the city or
seacoast.

Accordingly, as soon as they spied us, they instantly weighed anchor and
came directly to meet us. Two of our boats were very heavy and could not
row as fast as the canoes, and accordingly we were already far in
advance. There were five canoes in this company, and among them only
thirty-six men in a very unfit condition to fight, being tired and worn
with so much rowing. The enemy sailed toward us directly before the
wind, and we feared greatly lest they should run us down. So we rowed
straight up into the "wind's eye," as the sailors say, and got close to
windward of them. While we were doing this, other of our boats in which
were thirty-two more men overtook us, so that altogether we were
sixty-eight men engaged in the fight that day.

In the three vessels of the Little Fleet that opposed us were altogether
two hundred and seventy-eight men, of whom more than two hundred were
native Spaniards, the rest being Indians or Mulattoes. The commanders of
these ships had issued orders that no quarter was to be given to any of
the buccaneers. But such bloody commands as these seldom or never
prosper.

The canoe of Captain Sawkins and that wherein I was were much to the
leeward of the rest. The third of the Spanish ships ca