When it comes, the sun turns to water and the transparent waters cloud over, torrid and angry, as if the winds of Huracán were stirring them up from the bottom, as if down there the winds were roiling them, as if Huracán were transforming their element, as if the winds were able to make them rise: and they, infused with a wrath like that of young women who know not their own strength, pant after anything they see and devour it, gulp it down, transformed from their normally limpid, translucent clarity into a gluttonous digestive system, into acids that dissolve anything they consume, into brawny muscles, into oily, slippery, mucus-like, corrosive apparitions. Take care, freebooters! Something more fierce than you are has been set loose! It is coming to seek you out; Huracán has no fear, the waters of the sea have a sudden need for flesh, and Huracán knows not who the pirates are: but even so he is coming after you, you who think you have no other master than God nor any other law than force nor any other will but violence! He is coming after you!
We were left without the galley, without the Archbishop, without the Archbishop’s crucifix (the wind took it off as well), without the galley slaves, since in all the turbulence and with every chain welded to the boat they went down with it; and almost without ourselves, because most died. Those of us who went ashore to sleep were safe; we had lashed the canoe to the largest trees, and as soon as the weather calmed down we set out to join the others at Matamaná on the southern coast of Cuba where a great many turtle fishers live and where L’Olonnais would probably be, rounding up canoes. And so he was. It gave us great joy to find ourselves together again with the other Brothers, thinking that here would be the end of our poverty and tribulation.
We set sail for Cape Gracias a Dios, located on the mainland in the same latitude as the Isla de Pinos, but once at sea we were overtaken by a sultry calm: no longer beloved by the Caribbean. Had we been touched by Huracán? Water and wind were now both contrary, and our food supplies running low. By canoe we found an estuary and went in search of food and water, stealing it from the Indians: a store of corn, livestock, and chickens, yet not enough for the enterprise we had planned, thus continuing to cruise along the coast of the Gulf of Honduras seeking more provisions; yet in raid after raid on the impoverished Indians we never got enough together for all of us for long and we would finish off what we had previously collected before we got the next batch. Then we came to Puerto Caballos, a Spanish market center with warehouses where they store all the merchandise that comes down from up-country until the arrival of their ships.
We captured a Spanish ship and, not to arouse suspicion, used it to approach the mainland, taking over the two warehouses and all the buildings in the town, and also taking many of the inhabitants prisoner. L’Olonnais inflicted the most awful tortures on them, so viciously that when I asked permission to heal the body of a poor woman tortured severely, a woman whom he had decided to leave alive, not from compassion but out of cruelty, simply so she would continue to suffer the agony his vindictiveness had brought her, in response I was asked whether I considered myself a surgeon or a veterinarian, since she being Spanish, my intention to treat her was just like a veterinarian would do, because treating her was like treating animals. Yet I could not withhold my compassion, and to avoid a clash with L’Olonnais I gave her some poison during the night so her soul might greet the dawn without that body so sorely abused by his extravagant persecution.
When all the prisoners were dead we went toward San Pedro Sula. Only three leagues had we gone when we found ourselves in an ambush that, although it caused us many mortal casualties and wounded, was yet unable to resist the fury of our response. L’Olonnais had the injured Spaniards who remained on the path finished off after he asked them for what he wanted.
Three more ambuscades we beat off, since there was no other road where we could avoid them, until at the very entrance of the town the Spaniards found themselves forced to raise the white flag as a signal of truce. The conditions for surrender would allow the inhabitants two hours to pick up everything they were able to and flee.
We entered the place and spent two hours standing around while the whole town of San Pedro Sula was hiding itself and the citizens carting off everything they thought they could carry.
When the time was up, L’Olonnais had them followed and whatever they were carrying taken from them, and then he turned San Pedro on its head. But there was no way to find everything they had hidden, so after staying there for some time, celebrating after our fashion, we reduced the place to ashes.
In the midst of our whooping it up, which was much wilder than when we returned to Tortuga from Maracaibo, I discovered a woman lying at the foot of a wall and moaning feebly, her request for water the only sign of her need for help. I turned her face and body toward me, pulling her by her long hair because I did not want to place my hands anywhere that might hurt her. What I had in my hands had once been a head and a body but now was a mass of flesh mutilated along its full length: cut and burned, whipped and beaten. I wanted to give her something to drink but found no lips on which to rest the vessel, and so with my knife blade I let some drops fall on her bloodied tongue. How was she able to utter it, water, water? And who had done this to her? Had someone of ours put her to torture to get her to confess something, I asked her. And she told me, No. But I have something to tell you. Soon a ship loaded with treasure will pass along the coast. All this she said, I know not how; nor what lips, tongue, or mouth she used, for of those she had none. After which she died.
The same news was received from other bodies found by me or others here and there in San Pedro, bodies that had once been children, men, women, though whoever had taken them to this hideous extreme seemed to enjoy making them all alike, without distinction of rank, sex, or age.
For three months we waited for the arrival of the ship, living together with the wild Indians of Puerto Caballos, hunting turtles with a certain bark craft called macoa, and driven to despair. When we finally captured the ship, we did not find what we were waiting for, as it had already been unloaded of whatever it carried of value, the great treasure advertised consisting only of fifty iron bars, a little paper, some containers of wine, and things of that sort, hardly important at all. Those bodies, tortured by some of our men, had lied to us.
After that attack, we gathered for a vote. L’Olonnais proposed that we make our way to Guatemala; the most disappointed of us, new to such exercises, had believed that pieces of eight could be plucked from the trees like pears, and now they left the company. Others, headed by Moses Van Wijn, returned to Tortuga, to continue under the orders of Pierre le Picard.
A few of us decided to follow L’Olonnais without knowing that we were voting to watch his ship run aground in the Gulf of Honduras, too big to slip through the ocean tides or up the river; and shortly afterward, in the islands called Las Perlas, it foundered on a sandbank, where we took it apart to rebuild it in the form of a longboat with which we thought our luck would change.
While we were tearing it down and reassembling it, concluding that here was labor enough for some time, we cultivated some fields, planting beans, Spanish wheat, bananas. And thus, during the five or six months we were in Las Perlas we ceased bearing any resemblance to pirates, so much so that we even kneaded bread and baked it in portable ovens.