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Updated: May 3, 2025
Shortly afterward they flew over a grim-looking American battleship. It greeted them with a hoarse blast of her whistle as the flying boat shot by at the rate of two hundred miles an hour. On either side tiny islands, or cays, appeared, then vanished as if by magic.
To the northward there appeared what looked like the loom of high land, but if it was what it appeared to be, it was sufficiently distant to be of no immediate consequence, and the young commander scarcely favoured it with a second glance; it was his immediate surroundings that most insistently claimed his immediate attention, for as a matter of fact the ship had blundered up against what is now known as the Pedro Bank and its cays, and there the latter lay, not more than a mile to leeward of the ship, which was already in discoloured water, with the sea breaking heavily at no great distance to the north of her and all round four small islets within easy distance of each other.
Nothing of importance occurred until we arrived off the Cristo Cays, when the time being about three bells in the forenoon watch, and the larger island bearing about two miles on the larboard bow, a couple of miles distant O'Flaherty brought a chart on deck and, spreading it out on the companion slide, beckoned me to him.
These islands have lately been so fully described in many different journals, that I shall not burden the reader with any twice-told tales about them, but merely chronicle the fact that for a week we lay at anchor off one of the outlying cays, toiling continuously to get the vessel again in fighting trim.
There be three things offered us, Master Cockrell, to starve or go mad in this blighted hold, to sally on deck and beg mercy, which means a short shift, or to climb out softly in the night and try to swim for it." "Swim to what, Joe?" "Swim to the bottom, most likely. But we might fetch one o' them cays or the coast itself if he steers close in to find smooth water.
"Quite clear, Senor," answered the man, who, by the way, was a turtle fisher, inhabiting a hut on one of the small cays that stretched across the entrance of the lagoon which the yacht was approaching. "A gunboat has been cruising about the bay of late, but she steamed away yesterday morning, after communicating with the shore, and we have seen nothing of her since."
The coast of Florida, south of the entrance to Tampa Bay, as in many other portions, is fringed with keys, or cays as they are called in the West Indies, which are small islands, though many of them are ten miles in length. This fringe of keys extended up Tampa Bay for over twenty miles; and it was from behind one of them that the punt had put out when Christy's boat approached.
In 1710 the Spaniards made a descent on Turk's Island, which had been settled by the Bermudians for the purpose of gathering salt, and took possession of the island, making prisoners of the people. The Bermudians, at their own expense and own accord, dispatched a force under Captain Lewis Middleton to regain possession of the Bahama Cays.
Upon rejoining her, we made sail and hauled to the wind, in the hope of finding some picarooning craft hanging on to the skirts of the convoy; but although we hovered in the wake of the latter until the very last of them had disappeared beneath the southern horizon, our hopes were vain; and, finally, I decided to bear up for the Navidad, or Ship Bank, proceed through the Sea of Hayti as far as the entrance of the Windward Channel, and then, if still unsuccessful in my search for traces of the pirate, to work my way back to the Atlantic by the Crooked Island Passage, exploring some of the cays in Austral Bay on the way, they seeming to me to afford considerable facilities for the establishment of a pirate depot.
It was the intention to sail in to engage Blackbeard very early the next morning and meanwhile he would be vigilantly blockaded. Even Jack Cockrell, hopeful to the last, was compelled to agree with the crew of the brig that not a solitary man could be seen on these sea-girt cays and it seemed useless to send off a boat to explore them one by one.
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