Peter Blood judged her — as we are all too prone to judge — upon insufficient knowledge.

He was very soon to have cause to correct that judgment.  One day towards the end of May, when the heat was beginning to grow oppressive, there crawled into Carlisle Bay a wounded, battered English ship, the Pride of Devon, her freeboard scarred and broken, her coach a gaping wreck, her mizzen so shot away that only a jagged stump remained to tell the place where it had stood.  She had been in action off Martinique with two Spanish treasure ships, and although her captain swore that the Spaniards had beset him without provocation, it is difficult to avoid a suspicion that the encounter had been brought about quite otherwise.  One of the Spaniards had fled from the combat, and if the Pride of Devon had not given chase it was probably because she was by then in no case to do so.  The other had been sunk, but not before the English ship had transferred to her own hold a good deal of the treasure aboard the Spaniard.  It was, in fact, one of those piratical affrays which were a perpetual source of trouble between the courts of St. James’s and the Escurial, complaints emanating now from one and now from the other side.

Steed, however, after the fashion of most Colonial governors, was willing enough to dull his wits to the extent of accepting the English seaman’s story, disregarding any evidence that might belie it.  He shared the hatred so richly deserved by arrogant, overbearing Spain that was common to men of every other nation from the Bahamas to the Main.  Therefore he gave the Pride of Devon the shelter she sought in his harbour and every facility to careen and carry out repairs.

But before it came to this, they fetched from her hold over a score of English seamen as battered and broken as the ship herself, and together with these some half-dozen Spaniards in like case, the only survivors of a boarding party from the Spanish galleon that had invaded the English ship and found itself unable to retreat.  These wounded men were conveyed to a long shed on the wharf, and the medical skill of Bridgetown was summoned to their aid.  Peter Blood was ordered to bear a hand in this work, and partly because he spoke Castilian — and he spoke it as fluently as his own native tongue — partly because of his inferior condition as a slave, he was given the Spaniards for his patients.

Now Blood had no cause to love Spaniards.  His two years in a Spanish prison and his subsequent campaigning in the Spanish Netherlands had shown him a side of the Spanish character which he had found anything but admirable.  Nevertheless he performed his doctor’s duties zealously and painstakingly, if emotionlessly, and even with a certain superficial friendliness towards each of his patients.  These were so surprised at having their wounds healed instead of being summarily hanged that they manifested a docility very unusual in their kind.  They were shunned, however, by all those charitably disposed inhabitants of Bridgetown who flocked to the improvised hospital with gifts of fruit and flowers and delicacies for the injured English seamen.  Indeed, had the wishes of some of these inhabitants been regarded, the Spaniards would have been left to die like vermin, and of this Peter Blood had an example almost at the very outset.