The other had been sunk, but not before the English ship had transferred to her own hold a good deal of the treasure aboard the Spaniard.

It was, in fact, one of those piratical affrays which were a perpetual source of trouble between the courts of St.James's and the Escurial, complaints emanating now from one and now from the other side.
Steed, however, after the fashion of most Colonial governors, was willing enough to dull his wits to the extent of accepting the English seaman's story, disregarding any evidence that might belie it.

He shared the hatred so richly deserved by arrogant, overbearing Spain that was common to men of every other nation from the Bahamas to the Main.
Therefore he gave the Pride of Devon the shelter she sought in his harbour and every facility to careen and carry out repairs.
But before it came to this, they fetched from her hold over a score of English seamen as battered and broken as the ship herself, and together with these some half-dozen Spaniards in like case, the only survivors of a boarding party from the Spanish galleon that had invaded the English ship and found itself unable to retreat.

These wounded men were conveyed to a long shed on the wharf, and the medical skill of Bridgetown was summoned to their aid.

Peter Blood was ordered to bear a hand in this work, and partly because he spoke Castilian--and he spoke it as fluently as his own native tongue--partly because of his inferior condition as a slave, he was given the Spaniards for his patients.
Now Blood had no cause to love Spaniards.