black skins were turned white in several places where the powder had torn it from their flesh and bones.

Having compassionated their misery, I afterwards went on board the Admiral's ship, and here what I saw did much astonish me, and would scarcely be believed by others than ourselves who saw it. There were found on this ship only twenty-five men alive, where before the fight there were four-score and six. And out of these twenty-five men, only eight were able to bear arms, all the rest being desperately wounded, and by their wounds totally unable to make any resistance. Their blood ran down the decks in whole streams, and scarcely one place in the ship was free from blood.

Having once possessed ourselves of two vessels of the little fleet, Captain Sawkins asked the prisoners how many men there were on the largest ship that we could see lying in the harbor of Perico, and also how many were upon the smaller ships. Peralta, the heroic captain of the second vessel, tried to dissuade Sawkins from attacking the Spanish vessels at anchor, saying in the biggest one alone there were three hundred and fifty men, and that all the other vessels would be found too well provided for defense against the small number of the buccaneers. One of the Spaniards, however, who lay dying on the deck, told Captain Sawkins that there was not a single man on board any one of the great ships in the harbor, for they had all been drawn away to fight on the ships of the Little Fleet. Believing the dying man's story, we sailed into the harbor and went on board the ships, finding, as we had been told, not one person there. They had set on fire the biggest ship and made a hole in her hull, but we put out the flames and stopped the leak. All our wounded were then placed on this ship, which for a time became our hospital.Having counted up our own loss and damages, we found eighteen of our men killed and twenty-two wounded. The three captains against whom we fought were esteemed by the Spaniards as the bravest in the South Seas, nor was this reputation undeserved by them, as may easily be seen from the story of this bloody battle. We began the fight about a half hour after sunrise, and by noon had finished the battle. While Captain Peralta was our prisoner, he would often break out and say: "Surely you Englishmen are the valiantest in the whole world, and always design to fight in the open; while all other nations have invented all kinds of ways to barricade themselves and fight as close as possible"; and yet notwithstanding, we killed more of the enemy than they have of us.

The journal of Basil Ringrose is a very interesting document, and we 

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