te, the number of passengers and
crew together on board the _Santa Theresa_ could not have fallen much,
if anything, short of a hundred. We immediately hove the schooner to,
and Dumaresq, with my four English shipmates, at once shoved off in a
boat to search among the wreckage for possible survivors, but not one
was found; which is not to be wondered at, for it afterwards transpired
that Renouf had driven the Spanish seamen below and battened them down,
while he had lashed the officers and passengers hand and foot and locked
them into the cabins the last thing before scuttling the ship!

We remained hove-to until past midnight, and then, having failed to find
even so much as a floating body, sorrowfully filled away, and shaped a
course for the West Indies, it being my intention to hand the whole crew
over to the authorities upon a charge of piracy.

A few days later, as we were running down the trade-wind, shortly after
mid-day, we sighted ahead a whole fleet of large ships steering pretty
nearly the same course as ourselves. They were under royals, with
studding-sails set on both sides, and despite the fact that they were so
much bigger than ourselves, we overhauled them so rapidly that by sunset
we had brought them hull-up, and had neared them so closely that we were
not only able to identify them as line-of-battle ships, but, with the
aid of Renouf's splendid telescope, were able to read several of the
names emblazoned upon their sterns. We made out such names as
_Argonauta_, _Espana_, _Pluton_, _Terrible_, _Bucentaure_, _San Rafael_,
and others, by means of which Dumaresq was able to identify some of them
as ships that had been blockaded in the port of Toulon by Lord Nelson.
Others were manifestly Spanish ships. Their names and appearance
generally testified to that fact, and it therefore looked very much as
though Vice-admiral Villeneuve had somehow contrived to evade the
British fleet, and, having effected a junction with a Spanish fleet, was
making the best of his way to the West Indies to work what damage might
be within his power upon our colonies and our commerce in that quarter
of the globe. There were twenty sail of them altogether. The fact that
so formidable a fleet of our enemies was ranging the Atlantic and
steering a course that would take them to some of the most valuable of
Britain's possessions in the western hemisphere was important news
indeed; and I reconnoitred the fleet as closely as I dar