one captain (Captain Peter Harris), had two
green flags. The fifth and sixth companies, under Captain John Coxon,
"had each of them a red flag." A few of Alleston's and Macket's men
carried arms under Coxon in these companies. The rear-guard was led by
Captain Edmund Cook, "with red colours striped with yellow, with a hand
and sword for his device." "All or most" of the men who landed, "were
armed with a French fuzee" (or musket), a pistol and hanger, with two
pounds of powder and "proportionable bullet." Each of them carried a
scrip or satchel containing "three or four cakes of bread," or
doughboys, weighing half-a-pound apiece, with some modicum of turtle
flesh. "For drink the rivers afforded enough."

Among the men who went ashore in that company were William Dampier, the
author of the best books of voyages in the language; Lionel Wafer, the
chirurgeon of the party, who wrote a description of the isthmus; Mr
Basil Ringrose, who kept an intimate record of the foray; and Captain
Bartholomew Sharp, who also kept a journal, but whose writings are less
reliable than those of the other three. It is not often that three
historians of such supreme merit as Dampier, Wafer, and Ringrose, are
associated in a collaboration so charming, as a piratical raid. Wafer
had been a surgeon in Port Royal, but Edmund Cook had shown him the
delights of roving, and the cruise he had made to Cartagena had
confirmed him in that way of life. Basil Ringrose had but lately arrived
at the Indies, and it is not known what induced him to go buccaneering.
He was a good cartographer, and had as strong a bent towards the
description of natural phenomena, as Dampier had. He probably followed
the pirates in order to see the world, and to get some money, and to
extend his knowledge. Sharp had been a pirate for some years, and there
was a warrant out for him at Jamaica for his share in the sack of Porto
Bello. With Dampier's history the reader has been made acquainted.

The Indians, under Captain Andreas, led the buccaneers from the
landing-place "through a small skirt of wood," beyond which was a league
of sandy beach. "After that, we went two leagues directly up a woody
valley, where we saw here and there an old plantation, and had a very
good path to march in." By dusk they had arrived at a river-bank,
beneath which the water lay in pools, joined by trickles and little
runlets, which babbled over sun-bleached pebbles. They built themselves
huts in thi