ts, bound to the various
West Indian ports. I informed the commodore of the nature of the duty
upon which I had been sent out by the Admiral on the station, and
inquired whether any suspicious craft had been sighted during the
passage; to which he grimly replied in the affirmative, but added that
they had all been accounted for, and would be found, with prize-crews
aboard them, in the main body of the fleet. I stayed on board the
seventy-four for a couple of hours, gathering what news the inmates of
the ward-room could give me; during which the _Wasp_, under
boom-foresail and fore-staysail only, easily kept company with the
ponderous two-decker, looking in comparison with her "no bigger as my
thumb," as the negroes would say. She excited a great deal of
curiosity, on account of her very peculiar model, and likewise a very
considerable amount of admiration as she swept along lightly and
buoyantly as a seagull over the long undulations of the heavy swell that
was running. It was the first time that I had ever beheld her under
sail, from outside her own bulwarks, and although, looked down upon from
the lofty poop of the _Goliath_, she seemed to be the merest
cockle-shell, small enough to be hoisted inboard and stowed upon the
two-decker's main hatch, there was still a look of staunchness about her
that, coupled with the beauty of her form and the rakish sauciness of
her entire appearance, made me feel very proud of the fact that I
commanded her, as well as very anxious for an opportunity to show of
what she and her crew were capable.

Having extracted all the information I could obtain--which, after all,
was not very much--I made my adieux, descended the side, stepped into my
boat, and returned to the schooner. Upon rejoining her, we made sail
and hauled to the wind, in the hope of finding some picarooning craft
hanging on to the skirts of the convoy; but although we hovered in the
wake of the latter until the very last of them had disappeared beneath
the southern horizon, our hopes were vain; and, finally, I decided to
bear up for the Navidad, or Ship Bank, proceed through the Sea of Hayti
as far as the entrance of the Windward Channel, and then, if still
unsuccessful in my search for traces of the pirate, to work my way back
to the Atlantic by the Crooked Island Passage, exploring some of the
cays in Austral Bay on the way, they seeming to me to afford
considerable facilities for the establishment of a pirate depot.