of the
buildings inside the fortifications took fire, a conflagration
followed, which caused the explosion of one of the magazines, and in
the paralysis of terror that followed, the pirates forced their way
into the fortifications, and the castle was won. Most of the Spaniards
flung themselves from the castle walls into the river or upon the
rocks beneath, preferring death to capture and possible torture; many
who were left were put to the sword, and some few were spared and held
as prisoners.

So fell the castle of Chagres, and nothing now lay between the
buccaneers and the city of Panama but the intervening and trackless
forests.

And now the name of the town whose doom was sealed was no secret.

Up the river of Chagres went Capt. Henry Morgan and twelve hundred
men, packed closely in their canoes; they never stopped, saving now
and then to rest their stiffened legs, until they had come to a place
known as Cruz de San Juan Gallego, where they were compelled to leave
their boats on account of the shallowness of the water.

Leaving a guard of one hundred and sixty men to protect their boats as
a place of refuge in case they should be worsted before Panama, they
turned and plunged into the wilderness before them.

There a more powerful foe awaited them than a host of Spaniards with
match, powder, and lead--starvation. They met but little or no
opposition in their progress; but wherever they turned they found
every fiber of meat, every grain of maize, every ounce of bread or
meal, swept away or destroyed utterly before them. Even when the
buccaneers had successfully overcome an ambuscade or an attack, and
had sent the Spaniards flying, the fugitives took the time to strip
their dead comrades of every grain of food in their leathern sacks,
leaving nothing but the empty bags.

Says the narrator of these events, himself one of the expedition,
"They afterward fell to eating those leathern bags, as affording
something to the ferment of their stomachs."

Ten days they struggled through this bitter privation, doggedly
forcing their way onward, faint with hunger and haggard with weakness
and fever. Then, from the high hill and over the tops of the forest
trees, they saw the steeples of Panama, and nothing remained between
them and their goal but the fighting of four Spaniards to every one of
them--a simple thing which they had done over and over again.

Down they poured upon Panama, and out came the Spaniards to meet th