with Captain Sharp.

The expedition was organized with a general design to pillage and
plunder on the Isthmus of Darien and the continent of South America. At
the original rendezvous there were seven ships containing four hundred
and seventy-seven men under the command of experienced pirate captains.
The natural leaders were Captains Coxon, Sawkins and Sharp. At first the
expedition met with comparatively little opposition, and they captured
the town of Santa Maria, but the plunder was so small here that they
were dissatisfied with what they were doing and decided again to take
and plunder Panama. It is at this point that we take up the narrative of
Ringrose.

Where the account appears in the first person, it is practically as it
came from the pen of Ringrose, though omissions have been made and
occasionally the phraseology has been changed.

DAVID CROCKETT

Unique among the characters in American history and one of the most
interesting men of pioneer days was David Crockett, who was born on the
17th of August, 1786, in the backwoods district of what has since become
the State of Tennessee. His father, who was of Irish parentage, during
his youth lived with his parents in Pennsylvania, but afterwards moved
to North Carolina and thence into the Tennessee country. David's
grandparents were both murdered in their own house by the Creek Indians.
At the same time, one uncle of David's was badly wounded, and a second,
a younger one, who was deaf and dumb, was captured by the Creeks and
kept in captivity for seventeen years, when he was met and recognized by
an elder brother, who purchased him from the Indians that held him.
Hearing of such atrocities must have affected the young David, and
undoubtedly accounts for some of the fierce hatred which the
backwoodsman felt for the Creeks, and the callous way in which he looked
upon their sufferings when later he fought against them with the militia
from his neighborhood.

David had five brothers and three sisters; his father was a poor man who
tried farming and other pioneer occupations, who built a mill and lost
it in a freshet just as it was completed, and who finally established a
little roadhouse or tavern on one of the Tennessee trails. So poor were
they that much schooling was impossible for the children, yet David was
sent at the proper time, and applied himself diligently for a few days
to his letters. However, he was so unfortunate as to quarrel with one of
h