In the South Atlantic, the portion of the Main Equatorial Current split off by Cape St. Roque and directed south leaves the coast at Cape Frio, and at the latitude of the River Plate assumes a due easterly direction, crossing the ocean as the Southern Connecting Current.  At the Cape of Good Hope it meets the cold, northeasterly Cape Horn Current, and with it passes up the coast of Africa to join the Equatorial Current at the starting-point in the Gulf of Guinea, the whole constituting a circulatory system of ocean rivers, of speed value varying from eighteen to ninety miles a day.

On a bright morning in November, 1894, a curious-looking craft floated into the branch current which, skirting Cuba, flows westward through the Bahama Channel.  A man standing on the highest of two points enclosing a small bay near Cape Maisi, after a critical examination through a telescope, disappeared from the rocks, and in a few moments a light boat, of the model used by whalers, emerged from the mouth of the bay, containing this man and another.  In the boat also was a coil of rope.

The one who had inspected the craft from the rocks was a tall young fellow, dressed in flannel shirt and trousers, the latter held in place by a cartridge-belt, such as is used by the American cowboy.  To this was hung a heavy revolver.  On his head was a broad-brimmed cork helmet, much soiled, and resembling in shape the Mexican sombrero.  Beneath this head-gear was a mass of brown hair, which showed a non-acquaintance with barbers for, perhaps, months, and under this hair a sun-tanned face, lighted by serious gray eyes.  The most noticeable feature of this face was the extreme arching of the eyebrows—­a never-failing index of the highest form of courage.  It was a face that would please.  The face of the other was equally pleasing in its way.  It was red, round, and jolly, with twinkling eyes, the whole borrowing a certain dignity from closely cut white hair and mustaches.  The man was about fifty, dressed and armed like the other.

“What do you want of pistols, Boston?” he said to the younger man.  “One might think this an old-fashioned, piratical cutting out.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Doc.  It’s best to have them.  That hulk may be full of Spaniards, and the whole thing nothing but a trick to draw us out.  But she looks like a derelict.  I don’t see how she got into this channel, unless she drifted up past Cape Maisi from the southward, having come in with the Guiana Current.  It’s all rocks and shoals to the eastward.”

The boat, under the impulse of their oars, soon passed the fringing reef and came in sight of the strange craft, which lay about a mile east and half a mile off shore.  “You see,” resumed the younger man, called Boston, “there’s a back-water inside Point Mulas, and if she gets into it she may come ashore right here.”

“Where we can loot her.  Nice business for a respectable practitioner like me to be engaged in!  Doctor Bryce, of Havana, consorting with Fenians from Canada, exiled German socialists, Cuban horse-thieves who would be hung in a week if they went to Texas, and a long-legged sailor man who calls himself a retired naval officer, but who looks like a pirate; and all shouting for Cuba Libre! Cuba Libre!  It’s plunder you want.”