“But there should be no questions if you go carefully to work.  You concert matters With Nuttall.  You enlist him as one of your companions and a shipwright should be a very useful member of your crew.  You engage him to discover a likely sloop whose owner is disposed to sell.  Then let your preparations all be made before the purchase is effected, so that your escape may follow instantly upon it before the inevitable questions come to be asked.  You take me?”

So well did Blood take him that within an hour he contrived to see Nuttall, and found the fellow as disposed to the business as Dr. Whacker had predicted.  When he left the shipwright, it was agreed that Nuttall should seek the boat required, for which Blood would at once produce the money.

The quest took longer than was expected by Blood, who waited impatiently with the doctor’s gold concealed about his person.  But at the end of some three weeks, Nuttall — whom he was now meeting daily — informed him that he had found a serviceable wherry, and that its owner was disposed to sell it for twenty-two pounds.  That evening, on the beach, remote from all eyes, Peter Blood handed that sum to his new associate, and Nuttall went off with instructions to complete the purchase late on the following day.  He was to bring the boat to the wharf, where under cover of night Blood and his fellow-convicts would join him and make off.

Everything was ready.  In the shed, from which all the wounded men had now been removed and which had since remained untenanted, Nuttall had concealed the necessary stores:  a hundredweight of bread, a quantity of cheese, a cask of water and some few bottles of Canary, a compass, quadrant, chart, half-hour glass, log and line, a tarpaulin, some carpenter’s tools, and a lantern and candles.  And in the stockade, all was likewise in readiness.  Hagthorpe, Dyke, and Ogle had agreed to join the venture, and eight others had been carefully recruited.  In Pitt’s hut, which he shared with five other rebels-convict, all of whom were to join in this bid for liberty, a ladder had been constructed in secret during those nights of waiting.  With this they were to surmount the stockade and gain the open.  The risk of detection, so that they made little noise, was negligible.  Beyond locking them all into that stockade at night, there was no great precaution taken.  Where, after all, could any so foolish as to attempt escape hope to conceal himself in that island?  The chief risk lay in discovery by those of their companions who were to be left behind.  It was because of these that they must go cautiously and in silence.

The day that was to have been their last in Barbados was a day of hope and anxiety to the twelve associates in that enterprise, no less than to Nuttall in the town below.

Towards sunset, having seen Nuttall depart to purchase and fetch the sloop to the prearranged moorings at the wharf, Peter Blood came sauntering towards the stockade, just as the slaves were being driven in from the fields.  He stood aside at the entrance to let them pass, and beyond the message of hope flashed by his eyes, he held no communication with them.