were left were put to the sword, and some few were spared and held as
prisoners.

So fell the castle of Chagres, and nothing now lay between the
buccaneers and the city of Panama but the intervening and trackless
forests.

And now the name of the town whose doom was sealed was no secret.

Up the river of Chagres went Capt. Henry Morgan and twelve hundred men,
packed closely in their canoes; they never stopped, saving now and then
to rest their stiffened legs, until they had come to a place known as
Cruz de San Juan Gallego, where they were compelled to leave their boats
on account of the shallowness of the water.

Leaving a guard of one hundred and sixty men to protect their boats as
a place of refuge in case they should be worsted before Panama, they
turned and plunged into the wilderness before them.

There a more powerful foe awaited them than a host of Spaniards
with match, powder, and lead--starvation. They met but little or no
opposition in their progress; but wherever they turned they found every
fiber of meat, every grain of maize, every ounce of bread or meal, swept
away or destroyed utterly before them. Even when the buccaneers had
successfully overcome an ambuscade or an attack, and had sent the
Spaniards flying, the fugitives took the time to strip their dead
comrades of every grain of food in their leathern sacks, leaving nothing
but the empty bags.

Says the narrator of these events, himself one of the expedition, "They