Their sloop had encountered and had been sunk three days ago by the Santo Nino, and Cahusac had narrowly escaped hanging merely that for some time he might be a mock among the Brethren of the Coast.

For many a month thereafter he was to hear in Tortuga the jeering taunt: 

“Where do you spend the gold that you brought back from Maracaybo?”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MILAGROSA

The affair at Maracaybo is to be considered as Captain Blood’s buccaneering masterpiece.  Although there is scarcely one of the many actions that he fought — recorded in such particular detail by Jeremy Pitt — which does not afford some instance of his genius for naval tactics, yet in none is this more shiningly displayed than in those two engagements by which he won out of the trap which Don Miguel de Espinosa had sprung upon him.

The fame which he had enjoyed before this, great as it already was, is dwarfed into insignificance by the fame that followed.  It was a fame such as no buccaneer — not even Morgan — has ever boasted, before or since.

In Tortuga, during the months he spent there refitting the three ships he had captured from the fleet that had gone out to destroy him, he found himself almost an object of worship in the eyes of the wild Brethren of the Coast, all of whom now clamoured for the honour of serving under him.  It placed him in the rare position of being able to pick and choose the crews for his augmented fleet, and he chose fastidiously.  When next he sailed away it was with a fleet of five fine ships in which went something over a thousand men.  Thus you behold him not merely famous, but really formidable.  The three captured Spanish vessels he had renamed with a certain scholarly humour the Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, a grimly jocular manner of conveying to the world that he made them the arbiters of the fate of any Spaniards he should henceforth encounter upon the seas.

In Europe the news of this fleet, following upon the news of the Spanish Admiral’s defeat at Maracaybo, produced something of a sensation.  Spain and England were variously and unpleasantly exercised, and if you care to turn up the diplomatic correspondence exchanged on the subject, you will find that it is considerable and not always amiable.

And meanwhile in the Caribbean, the Spanish Admiral Don Miguel de Espinosa might be said — to use a term not yet invented in his day — to have run amok.  The disgrace into which he had fallen as a result of the disasters suffered at the hands of Captain Blood had driven the Admiral all but mad.  It is impossible, if we impose our minds impartially, to withhold a certain sympathy from Don Miguel.  Hate was now this unfortunate man’s daily bread, and the hope of vengeance an obsession to his mind.  As a madman he went raging up and down the Caribbean seeking his enemy, and in the meantime, as an hors d’oeuvre to his vindictive appetite, he fell upon any ship of England or of France that loomed above his horizon.