Each of them had come, in other words, from a part of Africa notorious for breeding lazy and rebellious slaves, and each had acquired some additional defect en route: infected eyes, gray hair, excessive gauntness, mysterous swellings, or contagious-looking skin diseases. Therefore none of the planters had wanted to buy them, or even take them for free. Obviously the captain of the slave-ship had no intention of taking such refuse slaves back to Africa and so they were simply abandoned on the dock of Kingston, where it was hoped and expected they’d die. And indeed there was no better place for it, as Kingston was perhaps the filthiest city on the planet. Most of the refuse slaves obligingly died. But each of the ones in this little band had separately made his way inland, and entered into a sort of Vagabond life, joining together in bands with escaped slaves and native Jamaicans and roving about the island stealing chickens and trying to stay one step ahead of the posses sent out after them by plantation-owners.
This particular group had drifted to an unsettled stretch of coast towards the western tip of Jamaica, where fishing was rumored to be good. About a year later they had encountered a brig full of English adventurers sailing out of the west, i.e., from the general direction of New Spain. These Englishmen—who, to judge from their description, were likely nothing more than incompetent or luckless boca-neers—had lately been reckless enough to find a route through a barrier reef that had hitherto barred access to a certain part of the Mosquito Coast, seven hundred miles due west of Jamaica. Now they were making a foray to Kingston to collect gunpowder, musket-balls, swine, and other necessaries, so that they could go back and establish a settlement.
Here the narrator—an African by the name of Amboe, with a bald head and grizzled beard—jumped over what must have been a somewhat involved negotiation, and said simply that he and a dozen of his band had decided to leave Jamaica and throw in their lot with these boca-neers, and had helped establish a rudimentary village at a place called Haulover Creek near the mouth of the river Belice. But it was a pestilential place, and the Englishmen got drunker and nastier every day, and so those who’d survived the initial rounds of diseases and hurricanes had pulled up stakes and moved inland, passing through a land of jungle-covered Pyramids (lengthy, implausible yarns deleted here), and straying across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (or so Jack—who’d been studying maps—inferred), to the Pacific Coast, and then wandering up this way.
Acapulco, Amboe explained, was far too hot, cramped, and famished to support many Spaniards and so for most of the year its hovels were occupied by the wretched soldiers of the garrison, a few missionaries who did not care whether they lived or died, and people like these: Indians, refuse-slaves, and the like. Only when the Manila Galleon or the Lima treasure-fleet was expected did white men swarm down out of the mountains and kick out the squatters and turn Acapulco into a semblance of a real city. This had just happened a week ago, which explained why so many rabble were camped on the beach at Port Marques; but word had already gotten around that the ship was not the Manila Galleon, and disappointed merchants were already streaming out of town in droves, leaving behind empty buildings that the beach-people would soon move back into.
Naturally all of Minerva‘s crew wanted to come ashore, but van Hoek only let them do so one watch at a time, and he insisted that men stand by the longboat with muskets. He was worried, in other words, that the Spaniards would try to seize the ship on some pretext, and that she would have to fight her way out onto the main and make for Galápagos or some other pirate-haven. Jack for his part was inclined to believe that the Spaniards would see things their way. If Minerva came under attack she would either flee or be sunk, and in either event the quicksilver in her holds would never arrive at the mine-heads of New Spain. And if she were not received hospitably and dealt with fairly, she could sail down the coast to Lima and the quicksilver would end up at Potosí, the greatest mine in the world.