The six months of plantation life in Barbados had made an almost tragic mark upon the young seaman.  His erstwhile bright alertness was all departed.  His face was growing vacuous, his eyes were dull and lack-lustre, and he moved in a cringing, furtive manner, like an over-beaten dog.  He had survived the ill-nourishment, the excessive work on the sugar plantation under a pitiless sun, the lashes of the overseer’s whip when his labours flagged, and the deadly, unrelieved animal life to which he was condemned.  But the price he was paying for survival was the usual price.  He was in danger of becoming no better than an animal, of sinking to the level of the negroes who sometimes toiled beside him.  The man, however, was still there, not yet dormant, but merely torpid from a surfeit of despair; and the man in him promptly shook off that torpidity and awoke at the first words Blood spoke to him that night — awoke and wept.

“Escape?” he panted.  “O God!” He took his head in his hands, and fell to sobbing like a child.

“Sh!  Steady now!  Steady!” Blood admonished him in a whisper, alarmed by the lad’s blubbering.  He crossed to Pitt’s side, and set a restraining hand upon his shoulder.  “For God’s sake, command yourself.  If we’re overheard we shall both be flogged for this.”

Among the privileges enjoyed by Blood was that of a hut to himself, and they were alone in this.  But, after all, it was built of wattles thinly plastered with mud, and its door was composed of bamboos, through which sound passed very easily.  Though the stockade was locked for the night, and all within it asleep by now — it was after midnight — yet a prowling overseer was not impossible, and a sound of voices must lead to discovery.  Pitt realized this, and controlled his outburst of emotion.

Sitting close thereafter they talked in whispers for an hour or more, and all the while those dulled wits of Pitt’s were sharpening themselves anew upon this precious whetstone of hope.  They would need to recruit others into their enterprise, a half-dozen at least, a half-score if possible, but no more than that.  They must pick the best out of that score of survivors of the Monmouth men that Colonel Bishop had acquired.  Men who understood the sea were desirable.  But of these there were only two in that unfortunate gang, and their knowledge was none too full.  They were Hagthorpe, a gentleman who had served in the Royal Navy, and Nicholas Dyke, who had been a petty officer in the late king’s time, and there was another who had been a gunner, a man named Ogle.

It was agreed before they parted that Pitt should begin with these three and then proceed to recruit some six or eight others.  He was to move with the utmost caution, sounding his men very carefully before making anything in the nature of a disclosure, and even then avoid rendering that disclosure so full that its betrayal might frustrate the plans which as yet had to be worked out in detail.  Labouring with them in the plantations, Pitt would not want for opportunities of broaching the matter to his fellow-slaves.