She was now about five miles distant, and as she came driving along, now stem-on, with her square canvas full, and anon sweeping round until she presented one or the other of her broadsides to us, with only her fore-and-aft canvas drawing, we were enabled to get a very good view of her.  She was a big craft, of from nine hundred to a thousand tons, perhaps, and at a distance might very well have been mistaken for a man-o'-war.  But she was evidently not that, for she showed only four guns of a side upon her upper-deck, and they were but small, apparently not more than 6-pounders.  She was very heavily rigged, with a wide spread to her lower yards, but the heads of her square sails narrowed away to such an extent that her royal-yards looked to be scarcely more than ten feet long.  Her hull was painted bright yellowish-brown, with a broad white ribbon round it, and her bottom was painted white, with a black stripe between it and the brown, but below the water-line the white paint was foul with barnacles and sea grass, as we could see when she rolled.  She carried, by way of figurehead, the image of a female saint, very elaborately painted and gilded, with a good deal of gilded scroll-work round about it, and her stern and quarters were also elaborately carved and gilded.  Her topsides tumbled home enormously, her width on deck being little more than half that at her water-line. Surmounting her stern there was a great poop lantern, almost big enough for a man to stand in.  A rough painting of the Crucifixion adorned her fore-topsail.  She showed no colours; but she was Spanish, beyond a doubt, and most probably, as I had at first surmised, a West Indiaman.