In the morning, the Betsey crew bathed in a nearby cove and made a gruesome discovery. Partially buried at the high water mark were several human skeletons, bleached and decayed, and without their skulls. The fishermen assured them that the skeletons belonged to seamen who had died in a wreck on the reef, but Collins imagined a terrible alternative. Whatever brutality that might occur in this isolated place was entirely hidden from the eyes of the world.

“We might all be murdered,” Collins told his crewmates, “without the possibility of it being known.” He urged Captain Hilton to leave in the longboat, damaged as it was. The captain, convinced that the master fisherman was a friend, refused.

On the following morning, December 24, the master fisherman announced that they would leave for Matanzas. As the crew helped load the fishermen’s schooner, another vessel approached from across the bay. As it drew closer, Collins noticed a man on deck pointing what appeared to be a spyglass. An explosive musket blast revealed that the spyglass was actually a gun. More muskets and blunderbusses appeared, their round shots peppering the schooner, and whistling past Collins’ ears as he dived for cover on the deck. Then the fishermen began to wave their hats, and the shooting stopped.

The vessel came alongside. It was an open boat of about thirty-five feet, painted black, with a streak of white around the hull. It was manned by ten Spaniards, all heavily armed, and all with very long beards, apparently cultivated over many months at sea. One of the men had a particularly savage appearance. He was tall and broad, missing three fingers on his left hand, with a slash across his face that had knocked out his front teeth, removed his upper lip, and left a scar that extended the corners of his mouth into a terrifying grimace. Collins was in no doubt that the men were pirates.

The pirate captain was a very stout figure with a long mustache. He was armed with a machete, knives, and a pair of pistols. He greeted the master fisherman like an old acquaintance, and handed him two doubloons, regarded by Collins as “the price of our blood.” Then he examined the Betsey crew’s papers, which Captain Hilton had retained during the shipwreck. When the tale of the wreck was related to him, the pirate captain reacted with only a shrug of his shoulders, and without the slightest indication of sympathy. Then he produced a ball of bark cord and ordered that the crew be restrained.

The pirates seized Captain Hilton and bound his arms behind his back so tightly that he cried out in excruciating pain. Collins leaped to his feet to assist his sick-weakened captain but was knocked to the ground by a blow from the muzzle of a cocked blunderbuss. The pirates proceeded to tie up Collins and the rest of the crew, laughing and singing as they did so, while drawing their fingers across their throats and telling them in broken English that Americans were “very good beef” for their knives.

Once they were all securely bound, the seven members of the Betsey crew were thrown into the canoes and dragged into the secluded cove. Captain Hilton, Joshua Merry, Benjamin Bridge, and Detrey Jeome were in one canoe. Daniel Collins, Seth Russell, and Charles Manuel were in the other. “The stillness of death was now around us,” recalled Collins. “We had scarcely passed the last parting look at each other when the work of death commenced.”

Captain Hilton was first to die, seized by the hair, and viciously decapitated with multiple hacking blows. “I could distinctly hear them chopping the bone of the neck,” recalled Collins. “They then wrung his neck, separated the head from the body by a slight draw of the sword, and let it drop into the water. There was a dying shriek — a convulsive struggle — and all I could discern was the arms dangling over the side of the canoe, and the ragged stump pouring out the blood like a torrent.”

Joshua Merry was next, eviscerated with a cutlass, “his bowels gushing out of the wound”, then stabbed in the breast, and sliced across the throat from ear to ear. Benjamin Bridge and Detrey Jeome were stabbed several times in their chests, then had their heads split open with cutlass blows, their terrible screams piercing the air. Seth Russell was hit with such force that his head was severed completely in two, showering Collins in blood and brains, “and even without the decency of removing his cap.” Then the pirate who was to be Collins’ executioner raised his cutlass.

Suddenly there was a commotion, as the last crewmember, Charles Manuel, jumped overboard. The distracted pirate swung at Collins but struck him only a glancing blow that knocked him over the side of the canoe. Without a pause, Collins leaped forward through the shallow water, which was “colored with blood as far as the shore.” Two pirates splashed after him, swinging cutlasses and hurling knives. Collins raced into the mangrove swamp, the loosened cord ties falling from his arms, and looked back to see Manuel running in the opposite direction with the pirates almost upon him.

The swamp was saturated with waist-high water and mud, and thick with tall mangroves, which were covered with razor-sharp oyster shells. The pirates were only ten feet behind Collins, yelling savagely as they hacked at the mangroves with their cutlasses. He was barefoot, and the oyster shells sliced at his feet and legs. His head was badly injured from the cutlass blow, and he was covered in blood. But he continued to push through the swamp, gradually putting distance between himself and his pursuers. “I had determined not to yield to them until I fell under the blow of their cutlass,” he wrote.

The pursuit continued for hours, with the frenzied sounds of splashing and hacking following him through the swamp. But the thick mangroves slowed the boot-wearing pirates, and the barefoot Collins was able to make quicker progress. “Had it been on cleared land, I should soon have been overtaken by them,” he wrote. At one point he sunk to his knees and crawled with only his head above the brackish swamp water in an effort to avoid detection. By sunset, he could no longer hear the pirates “hallooing” to each other as they pursued him, so he clambered into a tall mangrove bush and took a fitful rest.