The captain of the Virago asked what vessels those were lying at anchor. Cambiaso answered that they belonged to him; remarking that the brig had prisoners on board of her--some of the convicts whom he had not the conveniences for keeping in close confinement on shore; and that as the vessel was only used as a prison, there would be nothing interesting to them in going on board of her.
The captain and officers afterwards visited the Florida, from which all my crew had been removed except the steward, a negro man, and on board which were living five or six of Cambiaso’s followers. How the English officers could be so blind as not to read on the stern of the barque the name, “Florida, of New Orleans,” and on the brig, “Eliza Cornish, of Liverpool,” or not to have their suspicions excited, if they did read those names, is incomprehensible to me. It would seem that their own common sense would have told them that such a colony could not hold vessels; or if it did, that the vessels would be Chilian--not American, or English. I was told that Cambiaso made the captain a present of eighty or ninety tons of coal, of which the Virago was in need; but I could not but think there must be some mistake about this. The coal was perhaps bought by the Virago. Surely, Her British Majesty’s vessels do not accept such presents as that from the governor of a small penal colony, on the shores of Patagonia. So large a quantity of coal would be a very valuable gift in such a place as that, where all the fuel, except the brush-wood from the scrubby forests around, must be brought from abroad.
Cambiaso told the captain, whose name I afterwards learnt was Stewart, that several of his prisoners had escaped, and were now lurking about the woods at Port Famine; and if, on the steamer’s anchoring there to take in some of this coal, which lay on the shore, any of these prisoners should wish to be taken on board the Virago, he wished captain Stewart to order his men to drive them away, and to hold no communication with them. Some of the soldiers who escaped with the governor, had, it appears, never been re-taken, and Cambiaso feared their report to the English vessel.
It seems to me another instance of stupidity in captain Stewart, that he should have swallowed unsuspiciously this story of Cambiaso’s. Would it not have been much more probable that Cambiaso would have asked their assistance in recapturing his prisoners, and requested the Virago to retain them until he could send for them? I could not but feel that all these things, or indeed, half of them, would have been enough to have opened the eyes of even a moderately “cute” Yankee. But perhaps some allowance for my impatience at the blindness of the English officers is to be made, when we consider how much this chance of escape was to me, and how bitterly I lamented its loss.