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Delgarno and his twenty-gun frigate so terrified the Salē rovers, that they never ventured forth while he was about, and mothers used to quiet naughty children by saying that Delgarno was coming for them, just as Napoleon and "Malbrouk" were used as bugbears in England and France.
Our vessel was then ransacked; and the other privateer, who had suffered much the day before in an engagement with an English twenty-gun ship of war, coming up, the prize was sent by her into port, where she herself was to refit.
Athwart the harbour was moored a Dutch thirty-six gun frigate and a twenty-gun corvette. The commodore had been ordered to diplomatise, and so he did in the most effectual way, for we all sailed in with a flag of truce flying, but with the guns run out and the men at their quarters.
From one of the prizes it had been learned that the English thirty-two-gun frigate Carrysford, the twenty-gun sloop Perseus, the sixteen-gun sloop Hinchinbrook, with several privateers, had been cruising off the coast together, and the commander of the Randolph was most anxious to get the help of some of the South Carolina State cruisers to go in search of the British ships.
For instance, the State of Massachusetts bought a twenty-gun ship, the Protector, as a contribution to the naval strength, and one of her crew, Ebenezer Fox, wrote of the effort to enlist sufficient men: "The recruiting business went on slowly, however, but at length upwards of three hundred men were carried, dragged, and driven abroad; of all ages, kinds, and descriptions; in all the various stages of intoxication from that of sober tipsiness to beastly drunkenness; with the uproar and clamor that may be more easily imagined than described.
The enemy had already destroyed a fine frigate, a twenty-gun sloop, twenty thousand stand of arms, and immense magazines of powder. Even if justifiable as a military retaliation, this act was unworthy of a great and generous nation. The town of Alexandria was saved from destruction only by the surrender of twenty-one vessels, sixteen hundred barrels of flour, and a thousand hogsheads of tobacco.
In a pamphlet, written by Sir John Dalrymple, and dispersed in America in the year 1775, he asserted that two twenty-gun ships, nay, says he, tenders of those ships, stationed between Albermarle sound and Chesapeake bay, would shut up the trade of America for 600 miles. How little did Sir John Dalrymple know of the abilities of America!
All hands of us were sent on board the Cyane, an English prize twenty-gun ship, where we remained about six weeks. A draft was then made, and more than a hundred of us were sent round to Norfolk, in a sloop, to join the Delaware, 80, then fitting out for the Mediterranean.
Thus was Don Miguel de Espinosa left to chew the bitter cud of a lost opportunity, and to consider in what terms he would acquaint the Supreme Council of the Catholic King that Peter Blood had got away from Maracaybo, taking with him two twenty-gun frigates that were lately the property of Spain, to say nothing of two hundred and fifty thousand pieces of eight and other plunder.
The recollection of a very extraordinary accident which occurred during this cruise remains with me. We were in the Archipelago, off the Island of Andros. I had just come off the first night watch, at midnight, and had got into bed, when I heard somebody say our consort, a twenty-gun brig, the Ducouedic, Commander Bruat, was making signals of distress, I got back on deck without delay.
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