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"But, colonel," suggested Captain Applegarth, "you might have gone direct to England by one of the West India mail steamers which touch at La Guayra on their route homeward from Colon." "I know that, my friend," said the other. "I could have caught one of them the following week. This would not have suited my purpose, however, sir.
Before proceeding further, I will here subjoin a description of La Guayra, and the extraordinary road which leads from thence to the town of Caracas, adding thereto all the observations made by M. Bonpland and myself, in an excursion to Cabo Blanco about the end of January 1800. La Guayra is rather a roadstead than a port.
About nine o'clock, Roger, who was away up in the bows of the leading boat, keeping a lookout, passed the word aft to the officer in charge that they had just opened up a light, apparently on shore. "That's our goal, then," said the officer; "that's La Guayra! And now to find out whether there is anything in there that it may be worth our while to attack."
"I have shown your excellency this morning of what I am capable," he wrote. "Although outnumbered by more than two to one in men, in ships, and in guns, I have sunk or captured the vessels of the great fleet with which you were to come to Maracaybo to destroy us. So that you are no longer in case to carry out your boast, even when your reenforcements on the Santo Nino, reach you from La Guayra.
"Well," remarked Roger, "if they do here, as they did at La Guayra that is, always pass our food in through a trap in the wall, and never enter the cell, we might risk doing it and see what happens. They can but open the hole once more. And we can make no plans, nor indeed can we do anything, while we are watched constantly; so we might try it at all events."
If it was she, she must have run past them to La Guayra in the night, and have now returned, perhaps, to search for them along the coast. She crept along slowly. He was in hopes that she might pass the river's mouth: but no. She lay-to close to the shore; and, after a while, Amyas saw two boats pull in from her, and vanish behind the mangroves. Sliding down a liane, he told what he had seen.
It was a little after midnight when Roger, who was, as usual, on the lookout, and who was credited with the sharpest pair of eyes in the ship, saw for the second time the lights of La Guayra opening up.
"Yes," said the captain, "I have seen her, and she has sent me to you. But I see you are all knocked into a heap, and I will make the story as short as I can. This vessel of mine is bound from Liverpool to La Guayra, and on the way down we called at Lisbon. On the morning of the day I was to sail from there, there came into port the Glanford, a big English merchantman, from Buenos Ayres to London.
But from the extreme equality of temperature which characterizes the climates of Porto Cabello, La Guayra, New Barcelona, and Cumana, it may be feared that the typhus will there become permanent, whenever, from a great influx of strangers, it has acquired a high degree of exacerbation.
North Americans, seized with the typhus, were received in the Spanish hospitals; and it was affirmed that they had imported the contagion, and that the disease had appeared on board a brig from Philadelphia, even before the vessel had entered the roads of La Guayra.
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