ing the water, vegetables, and fresh provisions with
which we had supplied them, and the hands we had sent to assist in
navigating the ship, by which the fatigue of her own people had been
greatly diminished, their sick relieved, and the mortality abated;
notwithstanding this provident care of our commodore, they yet buried
above three-fourths of their crew, and a very small proportion of the
survivors remained capable of assisting in the duty of the ship. On
getting to anchor, our first care was to assist them in mooring,
and the next to get their sick on shore. These were now reduced, by
numerous deaths, to less than fourscore, of which we expected the
greatest part to have died; but whether it was that those farthest
advanced in the cruel distemper had already perished, or that the
vegetables and fresh provisions we had sent had prepared those who
remained alive for a more speedy recovery, it so happened, contrary to
our fears, that their sick, in general, were relieved and restored to
health in a much shorter time than our own had been when we first came
to the island, and very few of them died on shore.

Having thus given an account of the principal events relating to the
arrival of the Gloucester, in one continued narration, I shall only
add, that we were never joined by any other of our ships, except our
victualler, the Anna pink, which came in about the middle of August,
and whose history I shall defer for the present, as it is now high
time, to return to our own transactions, both on board and ashore,
during the anxious interval of the Gloucester making frequent and
ineffectual attempts to reach the island.

Our next employment, after sending our sick on shore from the
Centurion, was cleansing our ship, and filling our water casks. The
former of these measures was indispensably necessary to our future
health, as the number of our sick, and the unavoidable negligence
arising from our deplorable situation at sea, had rendered the decks
most intolerably loathsome. The filling our water was also a caution
that appeared essential to our security, as we had reason to apprehend
that accidents might intervene which would oblige us to quit the
island at a very short warning, as some appearances we had discovered
on shore, at our first landing, gave us grounds to believe that there
were Spanish cruizers in these seas, which had left the island only a
short time before our arrival, and might possibly return again, either