These bullocks were handed over to those of the company who ordinarily were boucan-hunters, and therefore skilled in the curing of meats, and for best part of a week thereafter they were busy at the waterside with the quartering and salting of carcases.

While this was doing on the one hand and the ships were being refitted for sea on the other, Captain Blood was pondering the riddle on the solution of which his own fate depended.  Indian spies whom he employed brought him word that the Spaniards, working at low tide, had salved the thirty guns of the Salvador, and thus had added yet another battery to their already overwhelming strength.  In the end, and hoping for inspiration on the spot, Captain Blood made a reconnaissance in person.  At the risk of his life, accompanied by two friendly Indians, he crossed to the island in a canoe under cover of dark.  They concealed themselves and the canoe in the short thick scrub with which that side of the island was densely covered, and lay there until daybreak.  Then Blood went forward alone, and with infinite precaution, to make his survey.  He went to verify a suspicion that he had formed, and approached the fort as nearly as he dared and a deal nearer than was safe.

On all fours he crawled to the summit of an eminence a mile or so away, whence he found himself commanding a view of the interior dispositions of the stronghold.  By the aid of a telescope with which he had equipped himself he was able to verify that, as he had suspected and hoped, the fort’s artillery was all mounted on the seaward side.

Satisfied, he returned to Maracaybo, and laid before the six who composed his council — Pitt, Hagthorpe, Yberville, Wolverstone, Dyke, and Ogle — a proposal to storm the fort from the landward side.  Crossing to the island under cover of night, they would take the Spaniards by surprise and attempt to overpower them before they could shift their guns to meet the onslaught.

With the exception of Wolverstone, who was by temperament the kind of man who favours desperate chances, those officers received the proposal coldly.  Hagthorpe incontinently opposed it.

“It’s a harebrained scheme, Peter,” he said gravely, shaking his handsome head.  “Consider now that we cannot depend upon approaching unperceived to a distance whence we might storm the fort before the cannon could be moved.  But even if we could, we can take no cannon ourselves; we must depend entirely upon our small arms, and how shall we, a bare three hundred” (for this was the number to which Cahusac’s defection had reduced them), “cross the open to attack more than twice that number under cover?”

The others — Dyke, Ogle, Yberville, and even Pitt, whom loyalty to Blood may have made reluctant — loudly approved him.  When they had done, “I have considered all,” said Captain Blood.  “I have weighed the risks and studied how to lessen them.  In these desperate straits....”