Читать книгу A Voyage Round the World онлайн

19 страница из 36

On the 5th of June, 1719, we met a Portuguese merchantman near Cape Frio. Our captain order’d the Emperor’s colours to be hoisted, which, without any reflection, look the most thief-like of any worn by honest men: those of his Imperial Majesty are a black spread eagle in a yellow field, and those of the pyrates a yellow field and black human skeleton; which at a small distance are not easily distinguished, especially in light gales of wind. So he brings her to, by firing a musket thwart her forefoot; sends aboard her the best busker (as he himself call’d Hatley) with a boat’s crew; each man arm’d with a cutlass and a case of pistols.

The Portuguese not only imagines his ship made prize, but thinks also how he shall undergo that piece of discipline used by the merry blades in the West-Indies, call’d blooding and sweating; which is done by making the captain, on the ill report of his men, or his declining to discover where his money is hid, to run the gantlet naked thro’ the pyrate’s crew; each of them furnish’d with a sail-needle, pricking him in the buttocks, back and shoulders; thus bleeding they put him into a sugar cask swarming with cock-roaches, cover him with a blanket, and there leave him to glut the vermin with his blood.