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Two miles away, on the eastern side of the harbor, appeared the city of Santiago a sloping expanse of red-tiled roofs, green mango-trees, and twin-belfried Spanish churches, rising from the water's edge to the crest of a range of low hills which bound the bay on that side.
A stranger thing yet: even the Spanish Bourbons, the victims of the Bayonne treachery, the princes whom Napoleon had ousted, set no limits to their adulation. Nowhere was the Emperor's marriage with Marie Louise celebrated with greater show of enthusiasm than at the castle of Valencay, where Ferdinand III. was living.
How much of that feeling was due to enthusiastic Protestantism, and how much to the fact that men hankered after the Spanish El Dorado may be matter of debate; but that the feeling was there is patent.
Half-way down it I met them with my five hundred men and engaged them, but suffered them to drive us back with some loss. As they followed they grew bolder and we fled faster, till at length we flew down the defile followed by the Spanish horse.
An American in Halifax in November, 1812, wrote home that within a fortnight twenty thousand barrels of flour had arrived in vessels under Spanish and Swedish flags, chiefly from Boston.
Shortly after I opened I could hear Young on the right, down in the valley. The fight lasted over two hours and was very hot and at rather close range. The Spanish used the volley a great deal, while my men fired as individuals. We soon found that instead of 1,500 men we had struck a very heavy outpost of several thousand.
"Two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-top" said Honey Smith, summing them up practically. "One of those brunettes, the brown one, must be a Kanaka. The other's prettier she looks like a Spanish woman. There's something rather taking about the plain one, though. Pretty snappy if anybody should fly up in a biplane and ask you!"
Another thing which disappointed and annoyed the gentlemanly de Lussan was the estimation in which the buccaneers were held by the ladies of the country through which he was passing. He soon found that the women in the Spanish settlements had the most horrible ideas regarding the members of the famous "Brotherhood of the Coast."
They had defied him once, it is true but even that had been done out of fear, as it were. Dismayed, I spoke quickly to Seraphina. With her head resting on her hand, and her eyes following the aimless tracings of her finger on the table, she said: "It shall be as God wills it, Juan." "For Heaven's sake, don't!" said Sebright, coughing behind me. He understood Spanish fairly well.
As for the dialect itself, it seems in the main to be a species of cross between old French and Spanish holding, however, I am assured, rather to the latter tongue than to the former, and constituting a bold, copious, and vigorous speech, very rich in its colouring, full of quaint words and expressive phrases, and especially strong in all that relates to the language of the passions and affections.
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