whole time of their absence; that when they finished their
cruise before Acapulco, and had just begun to ply to the westward in
order to join the squadron, a strong adverse current had forced them
down the coast to the eastward in spite of all their efforts; that at
length their water being all expended, they were obliged to search
the coast farther on to the eastward, in quest of some convenient
landing-place, where they might get a fresh supply; that in this
distress they ran upwards of eighty leagues to leeward, and found
every where so large a surf, that there was not the least possibility
of their landing; that they passed some days in this dreadful
situation without water, and having no other means left them to allay
their thirst than sucking the blood of the turtle which they caught;
and at last, giving up all hopes of relief, the heat of the climate
augmenting their necessities, and rendering their sufferings
insupportable, they abandoned themselves to despair, fully persuaded
that they should perish by the most terrible of all deaths; but that
they were soon after happily relieved by a most unexpected incident,
for there fell so heavy a rain, that by spreading their sails
horizontally, and by putting bullets in the centres of them to draw
them to a point, they caught as much water as filled all their casks;
that immediately upon this fortunate supply they stood to the westward
in quest of the commodore; and being now luckily favoured by a strong
current, they joined us in less than fifty hours, from the time
they stood to the westward, after having been absent from us full
forty-three days. Those who have an idea of the inconsiderable size of
a cutter belonging to a sixty-gun ship, (being only an open boat
about twenty-two feet in length,) and who will attend to the various
accidents to which she was exposed during a six weeks continuance
alone, in the open ocean, on so impracticable and dangerous a coast,
will readily own that her return to us, after all the difficulties
which she actually experienced, and the hazards to which she was each
hour exposed, was little short of miraculous.

I cannot finish this article without remarking how little reliance
navigators ought to have on the accounts of the Buccaneer writers:
For though in this run eighty leagues to the eastward of Acapulco,
she found no place where it was possible for a boat to land, yet
those writers have not been ashamed to feign harbours and conve