Читать книгу The Life of Sir Henry Morgan. With an account of the English settlement of the island of Jamaica онлайн

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After enduring an extremity of hardship, hunger, and privation, Yssasi's worst forebodings were fulfilled. On the 26th of February, 1660, Lieut.-Colonel Tyson with a party of only eighty men, guided over the mountains by some of these negroes, surprised his camp at Rio Hoja, near Moneague, killed his chief lieutenant and fifty others, took a few prisoners, and dispersed the rest of his men beyond recall. The English leader reported that Yssasi "ran so nimbly as to save himself from being taken."

Negotiations were begun for a treaty of surrender, but failed. A boat bringing supplies from Cuba was captured in the bay of Ocho Rios, making further resistance all but hopeless. Two large canoes were fashioned out of cottonwood logs, sails were improvised from hunters' sheets, Yssasi embarked with his remaining adherents at the little harbour, which has ever since been known as Runaway Bay, and safely crossed the hundred miles of tranquil water that separated him from Cuba. Spanish dominion over any part of Jamaica had come to an end. Some hundreds of impoverished fugitives found an asylum at Bayano, Santiago, and Trinidad, where they obtained lands and continued for the next ten years to cherish hopes of regaining their lost possessions, and form fruitless plans for that object. They seem even to have been officially informed that the exiled King of England had promised to restore Jamaica to Spain if he regained his throne.