Page:A Mainsail Haul - Masefield - 1913.djvu/128

116 service of Davis here, and joined his fortunes with Swan's. He had been Davis's navigator for some time and he filled some similar post under Swan, who had perhaps attracted him as a weak but cultivated man will attract the cultivated strong man who has no one else to talk with. Captain Swan lingered for some days more at the anchorage, and then cruised slowly to the north, along the surf-beaten Western Coast. Captain Townley, the leader of the eighty brisk Men, remained as his vice-admiral.

The history of their cruise is a history of bold incompetence. They landed, and fought, and fell ill, and sailed, and again landed; but they got very little save a knowledge of geography. When they came as far to the north as Acapulco, it occurred to them that they were in season to take the annual galleon from Manila, a prize worth some half a million of our money, and the constant dream of every pirate in the Pacific. Cavendish had taken one such galleon a century before; and Rogers was to take another some thirty years later. When the Cygnet arrived near Acapulco the citizens were expecting her arrival. Had the buccaneers but filled