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Captain Blood was pleased with the world--which is but another way of saying that he was pleased with himself.
He stood on the mole at Cayona and surveyed the shipping in the rockbound harbour. With pride he considered the five great ships that now made up his fleet, every spar and timber of which had once been the property of Spain. There was his own flagship, the _Arabella_, of forty guns, that once had been the _Cinco Llagas_ out of Cadiz, with her red bulwarks and gilded ports aflame in the evening sunlight, with the scarcely less powerful blue and white _Elizabeth_ beside her. Beyond them rode the three smaller twenty-gun vessels captured in the great affair at Maracaybo from which Blood was lately returned. These ships, originally named the _Infanta_, the _San Felipe_, and the _Santo Niño_, Blood had renamed after the three Parcae, the _Clotho_, the _Lachesis_, and the _Atropos_, by which it was his intention playfully to convey that they were the arbiters of the fate of any Spaniard henceforth encountered by them upon the seas.