A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People — page 116: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A QUEER RACE. 113 of the obscure natural phenomena which have come under my notice. And now to resume sny story. When the prisoners (among whom were many women, the object of the invaders being to take entire possession of the island) had been disposed of, the Carib chiefs waited on Commander Fane, and, after expressing un- bounded gratitude for the creat service he had rendered him, begged of him to stay with them for good, and offered him the sovereignty of the country. As for his people, they might have as much land and as many slaves as they liked, and choose for themselves wives from among the most beautiful girls of the island. It was not like a British officer to accept such an offer as this, for doing so involved both a dereliction of duty and a breach of discipline. ‘To remain on the island, ex- cept under compulsion, was tantamount to desertion; and desertion by a combatant officer in war time is an offense punishable with death. Yet Denzil Fane not only did accept the offer of the Carib chiefs, but constrained his brother officers to follow his example. I assume the con- straint, albeit no mention of it appears in the records, be- cause it can hardly be supposed that the officers—the two lieutenants, the master’s mates, the surgeon, the chap- lain, and the half dozen midshipmen—-would willingly agree to expatriate themselves and renounce all hope of ever seeing Hngland again. But the recalcitrants were a small minority, and, being too few to build a ship and _ get away by themselves, they had no alternative but to throw in their lot with the others and make the best of it. And some of the officers, like the survivors of the crew, may have preferred freedom and the Fair Island to life on the ocean wave, for the British man-of-war of that time was not exactly a paradise. As for Denzil Fane’s motives I can offer no adequate explanation. One, and perhaps the most powerful, may have been that since his arrival on the island he had married a wife. ‘The Spanish captain of the Santa Anna, who fell on his own quarter-deck, had with him his wife and daughter, the latter a handsome girl of nine- teen. ‘The wife (Senora Velasquez y Blanco) survived her husband only a few weeks; but Mercedes was among the remnant whio reached the island, and a month after- Gomichoo cS (€ @)