midnight
The presence of these articles proved conclusively that the unfortunate ship had gone down , and the cry that we had heard was doubtless the last despairing cry of her hapless , helpless passengers and crew . Thus to the crime of piracy Renouf had added the far worse one of wholesale murder , for Dumaresq asserted that , according to his estimate , the number of passengers and crew together on board the _ Santa Theresa _ could not have fallen much , if anything , short of a hundred . We immediately hove the schooner to , and Dumaresq , with my four English shipmates , at once shoved off in a boat to search among the wreckage for possible survivors , but not one was found ; which is not to be wondered at , for it afterwards transpired that Renouf had driven the Spanish seamen below and battened them down , while he had lashed the officers and passengers hand and foot and locked them into the cabins the last thing before scuttling the ship ! We remained hove-to until past midnight , and then , having failed to find even so much as a floating body , sorrowfully filled away , and shaped a course for the West Indies , it being my intention to hand the whole crew over to the authorities upon a charge of piracy . A few days later , as we were running down the trade-wind , shortly after mid-day , we sighted ahead a whole fleet of large ships steering pretty nearly the same course as ourselves . They were under royals , with studding-sails set on both sides , and despite the fact that they were so much bigger than ourselves , we overhauled them so rapidly that by sunset we had brought them hull-up , and had neared them so closely that we were not only able to identify them as line-of-battle ships , but , with the aid of Renouf 's splendid telescope , were able to read several of the names emblazoned upon their sterns . We made out such names as _ Argonauta _ , _ Espana _ , _ Pluton _ , _ Terrible _ , _ Bucentaure _ , _ San Rafael _ , and others , by means of which Dumaresq was able to identify some of them as ships that had been blockaded in the port of Toulon by Lord Nelson .