The great fish heaved itself up and threw up all the twelve ships and their crews.
Now the eight ships with their demon crews sailed away over the lake toward Maracaibo.
I ordered the five best men of the crews into a canoe lightly loaded; and in a moment it was under way.
Crews deserted their ships, clerks deserted the company, trappers turned miners and took to the gold-bars.
Several of the craft were limping perceptibly, and seemed but barely under the control of their depleted crews.
All made way for these swift racing boats, for one of the unwritten rules of the river is that boat crews must not be interfered with while practising.
Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable.
In that snug anchorage he found his fleet awaiting him--the four ships which had been separated in that gale off the Lesser Antilles, and some seven hundred men composing their crews.
But if actual accomplishments count, these pilots with their ragged peon crews, half-bloods of Aztec woman and Spanish adventurer, deserve higher rank in the roll of Pacific coast exploration than history has yet accorded them.
Thus skimming along as fast as lightning, the crews, cool and determined, followed each other in awful silence; and when we arrived at the end, we stood gazing at each other in silent congratulation on our narrow escape from total destruction.