divided among themselves, leaving Smith, who was still on board the Frenchman, only his waistcoat and breeches.  The next day, the weather being foul, they ran so near the Frenchman as to endanger their yards, and Chambers called to Captain Smith to come aboard or he would leave him.  Smith ordered him to send a boat; Chambers replied that his boat was split, which was a lie, and told him to come off in the Frenchman’s boat.  Smith said he could not command that, and so they parted.  The English bark returned to Plymouth, and Smith was left on board the French man-of-war.

Smith himself says that Chambers had persuaded the French admiral that if Smith was let to go on his boat he would revenge himself on the French fisheries on the Banks.

For over two months, according to his narration, Smith was kept on board the Frenchman, cruising about for prizes, “to manage their fight against the Spaniards, and be in a prison when they took any English.”  One of their prizes was a sugar caraval from Brazil; another was a West Indian worth two hundred thousand crowns, which had on board fourteen coffers of wedges of silver, eight thousand royals of eight, and six coffers of the King of Spain’s treasure, besides the pillage and rich coffers of many rich passengers.  The French captain, breaking his promise to put Smith ashore at Fayal, at length sent him towards France on the sugar caravel.  When near the coast, in a night of terrible storm, Smith seized a boat and escaped.  It was a tempest that wrecked all the vessels on the coast, and for twelve hours Smith was drifting about in his open boat, in momentary expectation of sinking, until he was cast upon the oozy isle of “Charowne,” where the fowlers picked him up half dead with water, cold, and hunger, and he got to Rochelle, where he made complaint to the Judge of Admiralty.  Here he learned that the rich prize had been wrecked in the storm and the captain and half the crew drowned.  But from the wreck of this great prize thirty-six thousand crowns’ worth of jewels came ashore.  For his share in this Smith put in his claim with the English ambassador at Bordeaux.  The Captain was hospitably treated by the Frenchmen.  He met there his old friend Master Crampton, and he says:  “I was more beholden to the Frenchmen that escaped drowning in the man-of-war, Madam Chanoyes of Rotchell, and the lawyers of Burdeaux, than all the rest of my countrymen I met in France.”  While he was waiting there to get justice, he saw the “arrival of the King’s great marriage brought from Spain.”  This is all his reference to the arrival of Anne of Austria, eldest daughter of Philip III., who had been betrothed to Louis XIII. in 1612, one of the double Spanish marriages which made such a commotion in France.