By evening the far-off mountains had slid below the horizon. With the Duchess following astern, the two raiders headed north on the "Spanish lake"—the sea off the western shore of South America that Spain claimed for its own.
The Spanish gunners "did not ply their great guns half as fast as we did."
FIVE
Pacific Adventures and the Manila Galleon
Rogers kept the Duke and Duchess about twenty miles out, just beyond the horizon from the South American mainland. On March 16, 1709, the two privateers came upon their first prize.
The ship was a small trading vessel. The threat of the Duke's open gun ports was enough to lower its sails.
The master, Antonio Heliagos, was brought on board the Duke. He was heading for a village along the coast to take on a cargo of flour, he told Rogers. Amazingly, Heliagos, half Indian and half Spanish, had unexpected news about Stradling and the crew of the Cinque Ports.
Four years earlier, Heliagos was cruising along the coast, farther north from where they were now. On the rocky shore he saw the wreck of a ship.
People from a nearby village told him the ship's name: the Cinque Ports. Strong winds had pushed it toward shore. The ship ran onto an underwater shelf, broke apart, and sank. Almost all the crew drowned, but the captain and six seamen made shore in a boat.
Soldiers were waiting. Arms tied behind their backs, the shipwrecked seamen were marched to the local jail. Then they were taken overland to Lima, Peru. After spending four years in prison, they were again moved—Heliagos didn't know where. He thought possibly Spain.
Selkirk was stunned. What if he had not gone ashore on Juan Fernández? He might have drowned or still be wasting away in a Spanish prison. By choosing the island, he had escaped a dreadful fate.
***
In the next two weeks three small traders gave up their cargos—soap, leather, cocoa, coconuts, timber, and tobacco. One of these traders Rogers renamed the Increase. He placed sick men from the Duke and Duchess aboard and made Selkirk master.
On April 2 the squadron's first large prize came into view. The 450-ton Ascensión was nearly half again the size of the Duke. A tactic Rogers may have used was to approach the merchantman upwind. The Ascensión, sails fluttering when wind was blocked from its sails, then slowed in the water. The Duke and Duchess closed in.
Now began a scare tactic intended to bully and terrify the Spanish crew. The blare of battle trumpets aboard the privateers and the hammering of drums foretold the coming attack. Gun ports opened and the ugly snouts of cannons poked through. Bare-chested seamen raised cutlasses and boarding axes. Others swung three-pronged grappling hooks, ready to hurl them at the merchantman's rail and haul the ships together.
The display of might was enough for the Ascensión's captain. He ordered the ship's flag lowered: Surrender.
"Tho' one of the largest merchant ships in these seas," Rogers recorded in his journal, "she deem'd herself so safe in the King of Spain's private ocean that no gun had ever been put aboard her to fire. Indeed, for arms I saw not so much as a pistol in her."
The Ascensión proved a valuable prize—320 bales of linens, woolens, and silks; boxes of knives, scissors, and hatchets; silver-handled swords; valuable snuffboxes, silver shoe buckles, fine porcelain dinner plates; 30 tons of gold and silver religious medals, crosses, and crucifixes. Rich booty that would bring high prices in London.
Days later the squadron captured another big merchant ship, en route from Panama to Lima, Peru. Passengers on the Havre de Grâce were rich merchants. A search of their clothes and trunks uncovered bags of pearls and valuable jewels.
The Havre de Grâce carried twenty cannons. Six were mounted behind closed gun ports. The others were stowed in the hold. The befuddled commander had not expected English privateers in Spanish waters. Rogers ordered the cannons removed from the hold and mounted in empty gun ports. He renamed the ship the Marquiss, as he spelled it, and sent the passengers ashore.
Rogers's squadron was now made up of the Duke, Duchess, and Marquiss; Selkirk's small fifty-ton hospital ship, the Increase; and a second fifty-tonner captured off Peru, the Joseph.
The three privateers now boasted a total of seventy-six guns, enough to bully any foe.
***
Rogers sailed the fleet to the Gulf of Guayaquil on the coast of Ecuador.
Guayaquil was a wealthy town located on the Guayas River thirty-three miles upstream from the gulf. Merchant ships anchored in the gulf to unload their cargos onto barges. The barges were then rowed upriver to the town.
At midnight on April 17 Selkirk joined two hundred other crewmen on boats and headed up the alligator-infested river, "pester'd and stung grievously by muskitoes." The raid increased the expedition's loot by 23,500 gold pieces, 230 bags of flour, 150 bales of cloth, 1 ton of sugar, casks of fresh food, and barrels of gunpowder.