[Sidenote: _The blind superstition of the Spaniards towards an image of the Virgin cast overboard._]
[Sidenote: _A mutiny design'd but prevented._]
[Sidenote: _The civil behaviour of our men to Spanish ladies we had taken prisoners._]
Though Rogers rarely lets a chance pass of having a shot at the Pope, he was far from having bigoted or puritanical ideas about the Catholic religion, for in speaking of his treatment of some of his prisoners of the better class, he says, "We allow'd liberty of conscience on board our floating commonwealth, and there being a priest in each ship, they had the great cabin for their Mass, whilst we us'd the Church of England service over them on the quarter deck; so that the papists here were the Low Church men." Other reasons, not connected with his prisoners' liberty of conscience, may have had something to do with this arrangement. It happened, however, curiously enough, that about this time Rogers and his crew, quite unintentionally, assisted in the making of what afterwards became, no doubt, a very valuable relique to the Romanists here. For while discharging the cargo of the Spanish gallion-built ship, he says, "A large wooden effigy of the Virgin Mary was either dropt or thrown overboard, which drove ashoar near the north point of the island, from whence some Indians there a fishing, brought her in their canoe to the shoar over against our ship, where we gave our prisoners liberty to walk that day. Who, as soon as they saw her, cross'd and bless'd themselves, and fancied this must be the Virgin come by water from Lima to help them, and set the image up on shoar and wiped it dry with cotton, and when they come aboard told us, that tho' they had wiped her again and again, she continued to sweat very much; while all those around were devoutly amazed, praying and telling their beads. They shew'd this cotton to the ransomers and the interpreter wet by the excessive sweat of the Holy Virgin, which they kept as a choice relick." "Before this," says Rogers, "when I heard the like stories, I took 'em to have been invented meerly to ridicule the Romanists; but when I found such silly stories believed by eight grave men of a handsome appearance and good reputation amongst the Spaniards, I was convinced of the ignorance and credulity of the Papists." Just after the valuation and sale of the plunder of Guiaquil and the prizes was settled, a mutiny was discovered among the crew of the "Duke," sixty of whom signed a paper, expressing discontent at the large share of plunder assigned to "the gentlemen that were officers, tho not sailors amongst us." But a little firmness, combined with a judicious use of the bilboes on Rogers' part, with an abatement on three of these gentlemen's shares, soon brought his men to reason; "while though," says Rogers, "sailors usually exceed all measures when left to themselves on these occasions, I must own ours have been more obedient than any ship's crew engaged in a like undertaking I ever heard of;" adding, "but if any sea officer thinks himself endowed with patience and industry, let him command a privateer and discharge his office well in a distant voyage, and I'll engage he shall not want opportunities to improve, if not to exhaust all his stock." It must be remembered that Captain Rogers wrote this little growl, and found his stock of patience running short, on the equator, in a small ship, half full of sick men, and soon after what he calls "those general misunderstandings, and several unhappy differences among us, arrising out of, and before our attack on Guiaquil." That Rogers had at this time even more difficult questions and people to deal with, is shown by an entry in his log, that, "amongst the prisoners taken on board the last prize from Panama, was a gentlewoman and her family, her eldest daughter, a pretty young woman of about 18 newly married, and her husband with her, to whom we assigned the great cabin of the prize, none being suffer'd to intrude amongst them.