Blood smiled with a flash of white teeth, and bowed.  “I shall be glad of your orders now, General, for pursuing our advantage.  You realize that speed in striking is the first essential.”

Rivarol was left gaping a moment.  Absorbed in his ridiculous anger, he had considered nothing.  But he made a quick recovery.  “To my cabin, if you please,” he commanded peremptorily, and was turning to lead the way, when Blood arrested him.

“With submission, my General, we shall be better here.  You behold there the scene of our coming action.  It is spread before you like a map.”  He waved his hand towards the lagoon, the country flanking it and the considerable city standing back from the beach.  “If it is not a presumption in me to offer a suggestion....”  He paused.  M. de Rivarol looked at him sharply, suspecting irony.  But the swarthy face was bland, the keen eyes steady.

“Let us hear your suggestion,” he consented.

Blood pointed out the fort at the mouth of the inner harbour, which was just barely visible above the waving palms on the intervening tongue of land.  He announced that its armament was less formidable than that of the outer fort, which they had reduced; but on the other hand, the passage was very much narrower than the Boca Chica, and before they could attempt to make it in any case, they must dispose of those defences.  He proposed that the French ships should enter the outer harbour, and proceed at once to bombardment.  Meanwhile, he would land three hundred buccaneers and some artillery on the eastern side of the lagoon, beyond the fragrant garden islands dense with richly bearing fruit-trees, and proceed simultaneously to storm the fort in the rear.  Thus beset on both sides at once, and demoralized by the fate of the much stronger outer fort, he did not think the Spaniards would offer a very long resistance.  Then it would be for M. de Rivarol to garrison the fort, whilst Captain Blood would sweep on with his men, and seize the Church of Nuestra Senora de la Poupa, plainly visible on its hill immediately eastward of the town.  Not only did that eminence afford them a valuable and obvious strategic advantage, but it commanded the only road that led from Cartagena to the interior, and once it were held there would be no further question of the Spaniards attempting to remove the wealth of the city.

That to M. de Rivarol was — as Captain Blood had judged that it would be — the crowning argument.  Supercilious until that moment, and disposed for his own pride’s sake to treat the buccaneer’s suggestions with cavalier criticism, M. de Rivarol’s manner suddenly changed.  He became alert and brisk, went so far as tolerantly to commend Captain Blood’s plan, and issued orders that action might be taken upon it at once.

It is not necessary to follow that action step by step.  Blunders on the part of the French marred its smooth execution, and the indifferent handling of their ships led to the sinking of two of them in the course of the afternoon by the fort’s gunfire.  But by evening, owing largely to the irresistible fury with which the buccaneers stormed the place from the landward side, the fort had surrendered, and before dusk Blood and his men with some ordnance hauled thither by mules dominated the city from the heights of Nuestra Senora de la Poupa.