him money for the proper equipment of his ship the
Cinco Llagas, which he renamed the Arabella. This after some little
hesitation, fearful of thus setting his heart upon his sleeve. But his
Barbados friends accounted it merely an expression of the ever-ready
irony in which their leader dealt.

To the score of followers he already possessed, he added threescore
more, picking his men with caution and discrimination--and he was an
exceptional judge of men--from amongst the adventurers of Tortuga. With
them all he entered into the articles usual among the Brethren of the
Coast under which each man was to be paid by a share in the prizes
captured. In other respects, however, the articles were different.
Aboard the Arabella there was to be none of the ruffianly indiscipline
that normally prevailed in buccaneering vessels. Those who shipped with
him undertook obedience and submission in all things to himself and
to the officers appointed by election. Any to whom this clause in the
articles was distasteful might follow some other leader.

Towards the end of December, when the hurricane season had blown itself
out, he put to sea in his well-found, well-manned ship, and before he
returned in the following May from a protracted and adventurous cruise,
the fame of Captain Peter Blood had run like ripples before the breeze
across the face of the Caribbean Sea. There was a fight in the Windward
Passage at the outset with a Spanish galleon, which had resulted in the
gutting and finally the sinking of the Spaniard. There was a daring raid
effected by means of several appropriated piraguas upon a Spanish pearl
fleet in the Rio de la Hacha, from which they had taken a particularly
rich haul of pearls. There was an overland expedition to the goldfields
of Santa Maria, on the Main, the full tale of which is hardly credible,
and there were lesser adventures through all of which the crew of the
Arabella came with credit and profit if not entirely unscathed.

And so it happened that before the Arabella came homing to Tortuga in
the following May to refit and repair--for she was not without scars, as
you conceive--the fame of her and of Peter Blood her captain had swept
from the Bahamas to the Windward Isles, from New Providence to Trinidad.

An echo of it had reached Europe, and at the Court of St. James's angry
representations were made by the Ambassador of Spain, to whom it was
answered that it must not be supposed that this Captain Bloo