with them for the surrender of the vessel, whereby Pierre Francois and
his men came off scot-free.

Bartholomew Portuguese was a worthy of even more note. In a boat manned
with thirty fellow adventurers he fell upon a great ship off Cape
Corrientes, manned with threescore and ten men, all told.

Her he assaulted again and again, beaten off with the very pressure of
numbers only to renew the assault, until the Spaniards who survived,
some fifty in all, surrendered to twenty living pirates, who poured upon
their decks like a score of blood-stained, powder-grimed devils.

They lost their vessel by recapture, and Bartholomew Portuguese
barely escaped with his life through a series of almost unbelievable
adventures. But no sooner had he fairly escaped from the clutches of the
Spaniards than, gathering together another band of adventurers, he fell
upon the very same vessel in the gloom of the night, recaptured her when
she rode at anchor in the harbor of Campeche under the guns of the fort,
slipped the cable, and was away without the loss of a single man. He
lost her in a hurricane soon afterward, just off the Isle of Pines; but
the deed was none the less daring for all that.

Another notable no less famous than these two worthies was Roch
Braziliano, the truculent Dutchman who came up from the coast of Brazil
to the Spanish Main with a name ready-made for him. Upon the very first
adventure which he undertook he captured a plate ship of fabulous value,
and brought her safely into Jamaica; and when at last captured by the
Spaniards, he fairly frightened them into letting him go by truculent
threats of vengeance from his followers.