After a time the buccaneers got back to their fleet and remained on the coast about three months, waiting for some expected Spanish ships, which they hoped to capture.  They eventually met with one, and after a great deal of ordinary fighting and stratagem they boarded and took her, but found her not a very valuable prize.

Now L’Olonnois proposed to his men that they should sail for Guatemala, but he met with an unexpected obstacle; the buccaneers who had enlisted under him had expected to make great fortunes in this expedition, but their high hopes had not been realized.  They had had very little booty and very little food, they were hungry and disappointed and wanted to go home, and the great majority of them declined to follow L’Olonnois any farther.  But there were some who declared that they would rather die than go home to Tortuga as poor as when they left it, and so remained with L’Olonnois on the biggest ship of the fleet, which he commanded.  The smaller vessels now departed for Tortuga, and after some trouble L’Olonnois succeeded in getting his vessel out of the harbor where it had been anchored, and sailed for the islands of de las Pertas.  Here he had the misfortune to run his big vessel hopelessly aground.

When they found it absolutely impossible to get their great vessel off the sand banks, the pirates set to work to break her up and build a boat out of her planks.  This was a serious undertaking, but it was all they could do.  They could not swim away, and their ship was of no use to them as she was.  But when they began to work they had no idea it would take so long to build a boat.  It was several months before the unwieldy craft was finished, and they occupied part of the time in gardening, planting French beans, which came to maturity in six weeks, and gave them some fresh vegetables.  They also had some stores and portable stoves on board their dismantled ship, and made bread from some wheat which was among their provisions, thus managing to live very well.

L’Olonnois was never intended by nature to be a boat-builder, or anything else that was useful and honest, and when the boat was finished it was discovered that it had been planned so badly that it would not hold them all, so all they could do was to draw lots to see who should embark in her, for one-half of them would have to stay until the others came back to release them.  Of course L’Olonnois went away in the boat, and reached the mouth of the Nicaragua River.  There his party was attacked by some Spaniards and Indians, who killed more than half of them and prevented the others from landing.  L’Olonnois and the rest of his men got safely away, and they might now have sailed back to the island where they had left their comrades, for there was room enough for them all in the boat.  But they did nothing of the sort, but went to the coast of Cartagena.