ouvenirs d'un Echappe de Panama." A. Reclus: "Panama et Darien."
A. Radford: "Jottings on Panama." J. de Acosta: "Voyages." S. de
Champlain: "Narrative." Cieca de Leon: "Travels." Exquemeling:
"Bucaniers of America." Don Perez de la Guzman: "Account of the Sack
of Panama."

I am also indebted to friends long resident in the present city of
Panama.

CHAPTER XIII

CAPTAIN DAMPIER

Campeachy--Logwood cutting--The march to Santa Maria

William Dampier, a Somersetshire man, who had a taste for roving, went
to the West Indies for the first time in 1674, about three years after
the sack of Panama. He was "then about twenty-two years old," with
several years of sea-service behind him. He had been to the north and to
the east, and had smelt powder in a King's ship during the Dutch wars.
He came to the West Indies to manage a plantation, working his way "as a
Seaman" aboard the ship of one Captain Kent. Planting sugar or cocoa on
Sixteen-Mile Walk in an island so full of jolly sinners proved to be but
dull work. Dampier tried it for some weeks, and then slipped away to sea
with a Port Royal trader, who plied about the coast, fetching the
planters' goods to town, and carrying European things, such as cloth,
iron, powder, or the like, to the planters' jetties along the coast.
That was a more pleasant life, for it took the young man all round the
island, to quiet plantings where old buccaneers were at work. These were
kindly fellows, always ready for a yarn with the shipmen who brought
their goods from Port Royal. They treated the young man well, giving him
yams, plantains, and sweet potatoes, with leave to wander through their
houses. "But after six or seven Months" Dampier "left that Employ," for
he had heard strange tales of the logwood cutters in Campeachy Bay, and
longed to see something of them. He, therefore, slipped aboard a small
Jamaica vessel which was going to the bay "to load logwood," with two
other ships in company. The cargo of his ship "was rum and sugar; a very
good Commodity for the Log-wood Cutters, who were then about 250 Men,
most English." When they anchored off One Bush Key, by the oyster banks
and "low Mangrovy Land," these lumbermen came aboard for drink, buying
rum by the gallon or firkin, besides some which had been brewed into
punch. They stayed aboard, drinking, till the casks gave out, firing off
their small-arms with every health, and making a dreadful racket i