more than the fact that the ships were going cruising.
They dumped their chests into the dinghy, and rowed aboard of them, and
'listed themselves among the sunburnt ruffians who were hoisting out the
water breakers. Dampier and Mr Hobby were left alone on their ship,
within hearing of the buccaneers, who sang, and danced to the fiddle,
and clinked the cannikin, till the moon had set. For three or four days
they stayed there, hearing the merriment of the rovers, but at the end
of the fourth day Dampier wearied of Mr Hobby, and joined the
buccaneers, who were glad to have him.

A day or two after Christmas 1679 they got their anchors and set sail.
They shaped their course for Porto Bello, which had recovered something
of its old wealth and beauty, in the years of peace it had enjoyed since
Morgan sacked it. They landed 200 men to the eastward of the town, "at
such a distance" that the march "occupied them three nights." During the
day they lay in ambush in the woods. As they "came to the town" a negro
saw them, and ran to set the bells ringing, to call out the troops. The
buccaneers followed him so closely that the town was theirs before the
troops could muster. They stayed there forty-eight hours gathering
plunder, and then marched back to their ships staggering under a great
weight of gold. They shared thirty or forty pounds a man from this raid.
Afterwards they harried the coast, east and west, and made many rich
captures. Sawkins, it seems, was particularly lucky, for he made a haul
of 1000 chests of indigo. Warrants were out for all these pirates, and
had they been taken they would most surely have been hanged.

After these adventures, the squadron made for "a place called Boco del
Toro," "an opening between two islands between Chagres and Veragua,"
where "the general rendezvous of the fleet" had been arranged. The ships
anchored here, with one or two new-comers, including a French ship
commanded by a Captain Bournano, who had been raiding on the isthmus,
"near the South Sea," but a few days before. At the council aboard
Captain Sawkins' ship, it was given out, to all the assembled
buccaneers, that the Spaniards had made peace with the Darien Indians.
This was bad news; but Captain Bournano was able to assure the company
"that since the conclusion of the said peace, they had been already
tried, and found very faithful"; for they had been of service to him in
his late foray. He added that they had offered to guide him