In that snug anchorage he found his fleet awaiting him — the four ships which had been separated in that gale off the Lesser Antilles, and some seven hundred men composing their crews.  Because they had been beginning to grow anxious on his behalf, they gave him the greater welcome.  Guns were fired in his honour and the ships made themselves gay with bunting.  The town, aroused by all this noise in the harbour, emptied itself upon the jetty, and a vast crowd of men and women of all creeds and nationalities collected there to be present at the coming ashore of the great buccaneer.

Ashore he went, probably for no other reason than to obey the general expectation.  His mood was taciturn; his face grim and sneering.  Let Wolverstone arrive, as presently he would, and all this hero-worship would turn to execration.

His captains, Hagthorpe, Christian, and Yberville, were on the jetty to receive him, and with them were some hundreds of his buccaneers.  He cut short their greetings, and when they plagued him with questions of where he had tarried, he bade them await the coming of Wolverstone, who would satisfy their curiosity to a surfeit.  On that he shook them off, and shouldered his way through that heterogeneous throng that was composed of bustling traders of several nations — English, French, and Dutch — of planters and of seamen of various degrees, of buccaneers who were fruit-selling half-castes, negro slaves, some doll-tearsheets and dunghill-queans from the Old World, and all the other types of the human family that converted the quays of Cayona into a disreputable image of Babel.

Winning clear at last, and after difficulties, Captain Blood took his way alone to the fine house of M. d’Ogeron, there to pay his respects to his friends, the Governor and the Governor’s family.

At first the buccaneers jumped to the conclusion that Wolverstone was following with some rare prize of war, but gradually from the reduced crew of the Arabella a very different tale leaked out to stem their satisfaction and convert it into perplexity.  Partly out of loyalty to their captain, partly because they perceived that if he was guilty of defection they were guilty with him, and partly because being simple, sturdy men of their hands, they were themselves in the main a little confused as to what really had happened, the crew of the Arabella practised reticence with their brethren in Tortuga during those two days before Wolverstone’s arrival.  But they were not reticent enough to prevent the circulation of certain uneasy rumours and extravagant stories of discreditable adventures — discreditable, that is, from the buccaneering point of view — of which Captain Blood had been guilty.

But that Wolverstone came when he did, it is possible that there would have been an explosion.  When, however, the Old Wolf cast anchor in the bay two days later, it was to him all turned for the explanation they were about to demand of Blood.