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"Master Jeffreys shall make them clear; he hath a better gift of words than I." So the Devon man retold the story of John Oxenham's voyage; and he added many strange things that lie had heard from other Plymouth men who had gone to the Indies, and whom he had met in Raleigh's company.

All around floated the sargasso beds, clogging her bows with their long snaky coils of weed; and still he tried to sail, and tried to fancy that he was sailing, till the sun went down and all was utter dark. And then the moon arose, and in a moment John Oxenham's ship was close aboard; her sails were torn and fluttering; the pitch was streaming from her sides; her bulwarks were rotting to decay.

Now was the time to speak; and, assembling his men around him, Amyas opened his whole heart, simply and manfully. This was their only hope of safety. Some of them had murmured that they should perish like John Oxenham's crew. This plan was rather the only way to avoid perishing like them. Don Guzman would certainly return to seek them; and not only he, but land-forces from St. Jago.

The men aboard John Oxenham's pinnace answered that they would willingly follow him throughout the world, but they did not see, they said, how the pinnaces could stand such weather as they had had. Nor did they see how they were going to live with such little food aboard, for they had "only one gammon of bacon and thirty pounds of biscuit for eighteen men" a bare two days' half allowance.