By then the piraguas had made a half-dozen journeys with their loads of men, and they had landed also--as Don Miguel had clearly observed through his telescope--at least a dozen guns.
His countenance no longer smiled; it was a little wrathful and a little troubled now as he turned again to his officers.
"Who was the fool who told me that they number but three hundred men in all?
They have put at least twice that number ashore already." Amazed as he was, his amazement would have been deeper had he been told the truth: that there was not a single buccaneer or a single gun ashore on Palomas.

The deception had been complete.

Don Miguel could not guess that the men he had beheld in those piraguas were always the same; that on the journeys to the shore they sat and stood upright in full view; and that on the journeys back to the ships, they lay invisible at the bottom of the boats, which were thus made to appear empty.
The growing fears of the Spanish soldiery at the prospect of a night attack from the landward side by the entire buccaneer force--and a force twice as strong as they had suspected the pestilent Blood to command--began to be communicated to the Admiral.
In the last hours of fading daylight, the Spaniards did precisely what Captain Blood so confidently counted that they would do--precisely what they must do to meet the attack, preparations for which had been so thoroughly simulated.

They set themselves to labour like the damned at those ponderous guns emplaced to command the narrow passage out to sea.
Groaning and sweating, urged on by the curses and even the whips of their officers, they toiled in a frenzy of panic-stricken haste to shift the greater number and the more powerful of their guns across to the landward side, there to emplace them anew, so that they might be ready to receive the attack which at any moment now might burst upon them from the woods not half a mile away.
Thus, when night fell, although in mortal anxiety of the onslaught of those wild devils whose reckless courage was a byword on the seas of the Main, at least the Spaniards were tolerably prepared for it.

Waiting, they stood to their guns.
And whilst they waited thus, under cover of the darkness and as the tide began to ebb, Captain Blood's fleet weighed anchor quietly; and, as once before, with no more canvas spread than that which their sprits could carry, so as to give them steering way--and even these having been painted black--the four vessels, without a light showing, groped their way by soundings to the channel which led to that narrow passage out to sea.
The Elizabeth and the Infanta, leading side by side, were almost abreast of the fort before their shadowy bulks and the soft gurgle of water at their prows were detected by the Spaniards, whose attention until that moment had been all on the other side.