VII. At WillemstadOn the following day, after lunch, the Buccaneer cast anchor off the port of Willemstad in the island of Curaçao. There is a dangerous current off the mouth of the harbor, and as Horace Laghet intended to remain only long enough to pick up Martin Coade, his secretary, they didn’t want to take the big yacht inside.
After six days at sea the sight of land was grateful to the eye, though it was but a brown and treeless island. However, the beach was of the whitest, the sky of the bluest, and the town picturesque enough with its steep-roofed Dutch houses bordering the quays. In designing those roofs, the prudent Dutch were not taking any chances of a heavy snowfall.
It put Horace in a temper to learn that the liner Orizaba, which was bringing Martin Coade from Europe, had n
