CUTTING OFF THE RETREAT. 446

At length they came in view of the place where the more
miserable remains of the savages’ army lay, where there appeared
about an hundred still. Their posture was generally sitting upon
the ground, with their knees up towards their mouth, and the
head put between the two hands, leaning down upon the knees.

When our men came within two musket shot of them, the
Spanish governor ordered two muskets to be fired without ball, to
alumthem, ‘This he did that by their countenance he might know
what to expect, namely, whether they were still in heart to fight,
or were so heartily beaten as to be dispirited and discouraged, and
so he might manage accordingly.

This stratagem took; for, as soon as the savages heard the first
eun and saw the flash of the second, they started up from their
fect in the greatest consternation imaginable; and as our men
advanced swiftly towards them, they all ran screaming and
yawling away, with a kind of a howling noise, which our men did
not understand and had never heard before, and thus they ran up
the hills into the country.

At first our men had much rather the weather had been calm,
and they had all gone away to sea; but they did not then consider
that this might probably have been the occasion of their coming
again in such multitudes as not to be resisted, or, at least, to come
so many and so often as would quite desolate the island and starve
them. Will Atkins, therefore, who, notwithstanding his wound,
kept always with them, proved the best counsellor in this case.
lis advice was, to take the advantage that offered, and clap in
between them and their boats, and so deprive them of the capacity
of ever returning any more to plague the island.

They consulted long about this; and some were against it, for
fear of making the wretches fly to the woods and live there des-
perate, and so they should have them to hunt like wild beasts, be
afraid to stir out about their business, and have their plantations
continually rifled, all their tame goats destroyed, and, in short, be
reduced to a life of continual distress.

Will Atkins told them they had better have to do with a hundred
men than with a hundred nations; that as they must destroy their
boats, so they must destroy the men, or be all of them destroyed