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Updated: May 9, 2025
These conflicting draughts finally resolved themselves into a series of fitful gusts from the northward, which happily lasted long enough to enable her crew to get the Nonsuch's bows round, pointing to the southward, and then, with a screaming roar, the gale rushed down upon the ship, out from due north, and amid the yelling and piping of the wind, and the angry hiss of maddened waters suddenly scourged into white, luminous foam, with the spindrift flying over her in blinding, drenching showers, the ship gathered way and fled southward like a frightened thing.
George, therefore, issued his orders, and while one party of his now pretty well exhausted crew manned the capstan and proceeded to get the Nonsuch's anchor, a second were set to work to pass a towing hawser aboard the prize and make it fast; after which the ships got under way, the Santa Maria being in tow of the Nonsuch, and safely accomplished the passage of the reef just as the sun's upper rim was disappearing beneath the western horizon in a flaming glory of gold and crimson.
This threat, backed up as it was by the display of the English ship's ordnance, had the desired effect, and there were no further attempts at flight just then on the part of the plate ships. George's next act was to send Captain Martinez, of the wrecked Dona Catalina, ashore in one of the Nonsuch's boats, under a flag of truce.
Under ordinary conditions so large a crew would have found themselves cramped for room in a ship of the Nonsuch's tonnage. But the Nonsuch was not designed for cargo carrying.
So they raised three joyous cheers and fell to loading their pieces again, while their comrades, who had not yet fired, looked to see where the Spanish shot had gone. But, with the exception of two holes in the Nonsuch's mainsail, and a severed brace dangling from the fore-topsail yardarm, no damage was discoverable, whereat they cheered again.
But Dyer had seen to this; for while the boat had been absent on her errand of mercy the pilot had ordered a block to be lashed to the starboard mainyard-arm, a whip rove through it, a boatswain's chair made fast to the end of the whip, and a hauling line bent on to the boatswain's chair; and when the boat ranged up under the Nonsuch's lee, there was the whole apparatus dangling in the air, ready to effect the transfer.
Don Juan Alvarez, the alcalde of San Juan de Ulua, was the first to ascend the side and pass through the Nonsuch's gangway, when, again removing his hat and bowing profoundly to the little group of Englishmen, he stood aside until his twelve companions had joined him, when he proceeded to ceremoniously introduce them, one after the other, until he had named them all.
I've thought it all out, and I've made up my mind that the way sails be cut up to now, they be very much too baggy, so that a ship can't go to windward. But I be havin' all the Nonsuch's sails cut to set so flat as ever they can be made, and well, I do expect 'twill make a lot of difference.
We will get to windward of the wreck, and then, everything having been previously made ready, we will lower a boat and if we can get away without being stove run down to the wreck in the `smooth' of the Nonsuch's lee; get under the lee of the wreck; and her people must jump overboard, two or three at a time, and trust to us to pick them up.
The shot flew wide, striking the water nearly a hundred fathoms away on the Nonsuch's lee bow. "Now," cried George, turning to a man who had for some time been standing by the ensign staff, "you may hoist away and let the Dons see with whom they are about to fight."
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