y.

Pirates, as a rule, have nothing to do with horses, either in peace or
war, and the Governor of the town no doubt thought that when his
well-armed horsemen charged upon these men, accustomed to fighting on
the decks of ships, and totally unused to cavalry combats, he would soon
scatter and disperse them. But pirates are peculiar fighters; if they
had been attacked from above by means of balloons, or from below by
mines and explosives, they would doubtless have adapted their style of
defence to the method of attack. They always did this, and according to
Esquemeling they nearly always got the better of their enemies; but we
must remember that in cases where they did not succeed, as happened when
they marched against the town of Nata, he says very little about the
affair and amplifies only the accounts of their successes.

But the pirates routed the horsemen, and, after a fight of about four
hours, they routed all the other Spaniards who resisted them, and took
possession of the town. Here they captured a great many prisoners which
they shut up in the churches and then sent detachments out into the
country to look for those who had run away. Then these utterly debased
and cruel men began their usual course after capturing a town; they
pillaged, feasted, and rioted; they gave no thought to the needs of the
prisoners whom they had shut up in the churches, many of whom starved to
death; they tortured the poor people to make them tell where they had
hid their treasures, and nothing was too vile or too wicked for them to
do if they thought they could profit by it. They had come for the
express purpose of taking everything that the people possessed, and
until they had forced from them all that was of the slightest value,
they were not satisfied. Even when the poor citizens seemed to have
given up everything they owned they were informed that if they did not
pay two heavy ransoms, one to protect themselves from being carried away
into slavery, and one to keep their town from being burned, the same
punishments would be inflicted upon them.

For two weeks the pirates waited for the unfortunate citizens to go out
into the country and find some of their townsmen who had escaped with a
portion of their treasure. In those days people did not keep their
wealth in banks as they do now, but every man was the custodian of most
of his own possessions, and when they fled from the visitation of an
enemy they took with them everything o