The captain did not pay for these, being out of money as well as food, not an uncommon thing among buccaneers, but they gave the English notes of exchange payable in Jamaica; but as these notes were never honored, the people of the English ship had never been paid for their provisions.
This affair properly arranged in Morgan's mind, he sent a very polite note to the captain of the French ship and some of his officers, inviting them to dine with him on his own vessel.

The French accepted the invitation, but when Morgan received them on board his ship he did not conduct them down to dinner; instead of that, he began to upbraid them for the manner in which they had treated an English crew, and then he ordered them to be taken down below and imprisoned in the hold.
Having accomplished this, and feeling greatly elated by this piece of sly vengeance, he went into his fine cabin, and he and his officers sat down to the grand feast he had prepared.
There were fine times on board this great English ship; the pirates were about to set forth on an important expedition, and they celebrated the occasion by eating and drinking, firing guns, and all manner of riotous hilarity.

In the midst of the wild festivities--and nobody knew how it happened--a spark of fire got into the powder magazine, and the ship blew up, sending the lifeless bodies of three hundred English sailors, and the French prisoners, high into the air.

The only persons on board who escaped were Morgan and his officers who were in the cabin close to the stern of the vessel, at some distance from the magazine.
This terrible accident threw the pirate fleet into great confusion for a time; but Morgan soon recovered himself, and, casting about to see what was the best thing to be done, it came into his head that he would act the part of the wolf in the fable of the wolf and the lamb.

As there was no way of finding out how the magazine happened to explode, he took the ground that the French prisoners whom he had shut up in the hold, had thrown a lighted match into the magazine, wishing thus to revenge themselves even though they should, at the same time, lose their own lives.