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Rh captured so strong a city. Morgan gave the messenger a pistol and a few small bullets, as a sample or "slender pattern," with the word that he would himself come to Panama and take them back within a twelvemonth.

Next year the advance forces of the bucaneers, four hundred strong, under Captain Bradley, landed near the mouth of the Chagres and attacked Fort San Lorenzo. Here double walls of palisades, filled in with earth, ran round the top of a steep hill. Outside was a ditch, inside were heavy cannon and a picked garrison of Spanish regulars. They beat off the first assaults with great loss to the bucaneers, one of whom was shot through the body by an Indian bowman in the fort. Pulling out the arrow, the plucky pirate wrapped a bit of cotton round it, rammed it into his musket and fired it back. Set on fire by the powder, the burning arrow fell on a palm-thatched roof, and before the Spaniards could put it out, the powder-magazine had exploded and the castle was all ablaze. As the palisades burned, the earthworks crumbled into the ditch, and the bucaneer marksmen easily picked off the soldiers from the darkness of the jungle. When Fort San Lorenzo was stormed next morning, not a single officer and only thirty soldiers, twenty of whom were badly wounded, were left alive out of a garrison of three hundred and fourteen men. No place was ever defended more gallantly.

Morgan came in with his fleet and after placing garrisons both here and at Porto Bello, he started up the Chagres River with a picked force of fourteen hundred men. Very foolishly, they took only enough provisions to last two days. The Spaniards retreated before them,