I often wondered how much of this the captain had foreseen.

As Alfonso said, he was "good trader." The latter part of the voyage was, in these altered circumstances, a holiday to what had gone before.

The captain was never actually drunk again, and the _Water-Lily_ got to look clean, thanks largely to the way Pedro slaved at scraping, sweeping, swabbing, rubbing, and polishing, to please his new master.

She was really in something like respectable harbour trim when we approached the coast of British Guiana.
Georgetown, so Alfonso told me, looks very odd from the sea.

The first thing that strikes you being the tops of the trees, which seem to be growing out of the water; but as you get nearer you discover that this effect is produced by the low level of the land, which is protected from the sea by a sea-wall and embankment, I have no doubt Alfonso was right, but when the time came I forgot all about it, for it was not in ordinary circumstances that I first saw Georgetown.
It was one of those balmy, moonlit tropical nights of which I have spoken; but when we were within about an hour's sail of the mouth of the Demerara river, the sky ahead of us began to redden, as if the evening had forgotten itself and was going back to sunset.