he narrow passage out to sea, stands the
massive fort which the buccaneers had found deserted upon their coming.
In the broader water between this passage and the bar, the four Spanish
ships were at anchor in mid-channel. The Admiral's Encarnacion, which we
already know, was a mighty galleon of forty-eight great guns and eight
small. Next in importance was the Salvador with thirty-six guns; the
other two, the Infanta and the San Felipe, though smaller vessels, were
still formidable enough with their twenty guns and a hundred and fifty
men apiece.

Such was the fleet of which the gauntlet was to be run by Captain Blood
with his own Arabella of forty guns, the Elizabeth of twenty-six, and
two sloops captured at Gibraltar, which they had indifferently armed
with four culverins each. In men they had a bare four hundred survivors
of the five hundred-odd that had left Tortuga, to oppose to fully a
thousand Spaniards manning the galleons.

The plan of action submitted by Captain Blood to that council was a
desperate one, as Cahusac uncompromisingly pronounced it.

"Why, so it is," said the Captain. "But I've done things more
desperate." Complacently he pulled at a pipe that was loaded with that
fragrant Sacerdotes tobacco for which Gibraltar was famous, and of
which they had brought away some hogsheads. "And what is more, they've
succeeded. Audaces fortuna juvat. Bedad, they knew their world, the old
Romans."

He breathed into his companions and even into Cahusac some of his own
spirit of confidence, and in confidence all went busily to work. For
three days from sunrise to sunset, the buccaneers laboured and sweated
to complete the preparations for the action that was to procure them
their deliverance. Time pressed. They must strike before Don Miguel de
Espinosa received the reenforcement of that fifth galleon, the Santo
Nino, which was coming to join him from La Guayra.

Their principal operations were on the larger of the two sloops captured
at Gibraltar; to which vessel was assigned the leading part in Captain
Blood's scheme. They began by tearing down all bulkheads, until they
had reduced her to the merest shell, and in her sides they broke open
so many ports that her gunwale was converted into the semblance of a
grating. Next they increased by a half-dozen the scuttles in her deck,
whilst into her hull they packed all the tar and pitch and brimstone
that they could find in the town, to which they added six barrels of