Sir Francis Drake E-Book

Julian Corbett

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 297

Beschreibung

Sir Francis Drake is a classic biography of the legendary explorer.

Das E-Book Sir Francis Drake wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
pirate; explorer; england

Leseprobe

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

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Julian Corbett

LACONIA PUBLISHERS

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Copyright © 2016 by Julian Corbett

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

CHAPTER I: THE REFORMATION MAN

CHAPTER II: THE SPANISH MAIN

CHAPTER III: THE MULE-TRAINS

CHAPTER IV: GLORIANA AND HER KNIGHTS

CHAPTER V: AN OCEAN TRAGEDY

CHAPTER VI: WAKING THE SOUTH SEA

CHAPTER VII: THE GREAT MISTAKE

CHAPTER VIII: THE DRAGON LOOSED

CHAPTER IX: SINGEING THE KING OF SPAIN’S BEARD

CHAPTER X: IN QUEST OF THE SPANISH ARMADA

CHAPTER XI: THE BATTLE OF GRAVELINES

CHAPTER XII: DRAKE’S ARMADA

CHAPTER XIII: THE LAST TREASURE-HUNT

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

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BY

JULIAN CORBETT

CHAPTER I

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THE REFORMATION MAN

OF ALL THE HEROES WHOSE exploits have set our history aglow with romance there is not one who so soon passed into legend as Francis Drake. He was not dead before his life became a fairy tale, and he himself as indistinct as Sir Guy of Warwick or Croquemitaine. His exploits loomed in mythical extravagance through the mists in which, for high reasons of State, they long remained enveloped, and to the people he seemed some boisterous hero of a folk-tale outwitting and belabouring a clumsy ogre.

And that our Drake might David parallel,

A mass of Man, a gyant he did quell.

So punned a west -country Protestant; and even now the most chastened explorer of pay-sheets and reports cannot save his imagination from the taint of the same irrational exultation that possessed the Admiral’s contemporaries. The soberest chroniclers reeled with unscholarly gait as they told the tale, and the most dignified historians made pedantic apology for the capers they felt forced to cut. From his to his grave the story is one long draught of strong waters, and the very first sip intoxicates. Peer into the mists that fitly shroud his birth and all is dark, till on a sudden the veil is riven with an outburst of Catholic fury. Then, while the flash of the explosion illuminates the scene, a small party of desperate Protestants are seen flying for their lives, and in their midst a blue-eyed, curly-haired child, scarce out of babyhood, who is Francis Drake.

So Reformation set her seal in his forehead at the outset. It was in the year 1549, when Edward the Sixth was king, and on Whitsunday the new service-book was to be read for the first time throughout the realm. To the fervent simplicity of the west-country folk, to whom the mass was the beginning and the end of religion, it was as though Christ were being banished from the earth, and ere the week was out all Devon and Cornwall were in a blaze of religious riot. In the heart of the conflagration lay Tavistock, where still green memories of the kindly monks added fuel to the flames. Little mercy was there in the shadow of the old abbey walls for active partisans of the new order. About the great centres of trade there was now growing up on the ruins of the Middle Ages a party democratic in politics and religion, the nucleus of the revolutions to come, and of such was little Francis’s father, Edmund Drake. He had once been a sailor they say, and that is not unlikely. For his kinsman, old William Hawkins, like his father before him, was a great merchant and shipowner of Plymouth, and, first of all Englishmen, had sailed to the Brazils in King Henry’s time. Now, however, Edmund Drake had taken his place among the lesser western gentry, and was settled down in substantial comfort at Crowndale, hard by the town of Tavistock. There he had won himself powerful friends, as a strong “Reformation man” with a turn for preaching, which in those days, when politics and religion were not yet divorced, took the place of political speaking. The great Earl of Bedford, himself the most powerful of the Protestant leaders, bestowed upon him his patronage. The Earl’s eldest son, Francis Russell, held the preacher’s first-born at the font, and endowed him with his own name, as he afterwards endowed Francis Bacon. Thus honourably the flail of the Papacy was baptized into the Protestant faith; but now the preacher’s great friends were only a source of danger. There could be for him no thought but flight. The most powerful of his political patrons could not shield him where he was; for the Earl himself, with all the forces he could muster at his back, dared not approach within fifty miles of his own seat at Tavistock. But in the good Protestant town of Plymouth Edmund Drake had friends to shelter him, for William Hawkins and his sons owned a great part of the town. Out in the harbour lay St. Nicholas island, which in the years to come was to be honoured with the blue-eyed baby’s name, and there, as a throng of fugitives gathers for sanctuary, darkness falls upon the preacher’s flight.

But it is only to startle us again out of all sobriety when next the veil is lifted, so like a fairy tale the truth appears. In Chatham reach, off the new dockyard, was the anchorage where the navy ships were laid up when out of commission, and there too lay veteran war-hulks slowly rotting to death. So well had Edmund Drake’s friends stood by him that one of these had been assigned to him as a dwelling-place, and with it an official appointment as Reader of prayers to the Royal Navy. To such a nursery had Catholic devotion driven the most redoubtable of its enemies. What wonder that it bred a crusading sea-king! The clatter of the shipwrights’ hammers in the dockyard, the sea-songs of the mariners as they polished the idle guns, the fierce and intemperate denunciations of his father’s friends vowing vengeance on the “idolaters who had defiled the House of God,” such were the first sounds his dawning intelligence learnt to grasp. His eyes could rest nowhere but on masts, and guns, and the towering hulks of the warships which lay anchored about his floating home. His very playthings were instruments of destruction; the prayer he lisped at his mother’s knee was little better than a curse.

So passed the first years of his boyhood, and year after year was born another sturdy little Protestant till Edmund Drake had round him twelve young champions of his hot opinions. “As it pleased God,” the old chronicler rejoiced to say, “to give most of them a being on the water, so the greatest part of them died at sea.” Boys whose lullaby had been the rush of the tide and the hum of the wind in the standing rigging were marked by destiny for a sailor’s life, and the influence which their father commanded seemed to open the navy to their ambition. But as Francis approached the age of apprenticeship all his interest was lost at a stroke. In the summer of 1553 the sickly young king breathed his last, and a Catholic princess reigned in his stead. Drake’s party found itself fallen from the Delectable Mountains of Patronage into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and soon Protestant England was chafing ominously at the news that Mary was to marry with the Prince of Spain. The new faith, the very independence of England seemed at stake, and it was under young Drake’s eyes that the storm of opposition burst. He must have seen Wyatt ride into Rochester and establish his headquarters in the castle. He must have heard him call on all true Englishmen to rally to his standard to save the country from the Pope and Spain. He must have seen the fleet in the Medway supplying the patriot rebel with artillery, and shouted with the rest to see the Duke of Norfolk recoil before Wyatt’s banner from Rochester bridge. Then came the pause while London was beleaguered, and then the block and gibbet were busy with those who had failed. Friends, namesakes, perhaps even kinsmen of the Drakes, suffered with poor Wyatt, and Francis was at least old enough to know it was because they had lifted their hands against Spain and Rome. For the issue was so clear, and feeling so intense, that children forgot their games to play at politics. They snowballed the suite of the Spanish Ambassador, they fought mock combats between Wyatt and the Prince of Spain, and once were barely prevented from hanging the lad who represented Philip.

These were the boy’s first recollections, and upon them came a rude change of fortune to heap up the hate that was gathering in his masterful temper for Rome and Spain. The preacher’s occupation was gone, his prospects shattered, and he had to seize any opportunity to launch his sons into the world. Francis was apprenticed to the skipper of a small craft that traded to France and Holland. It was a poor end to his brighter expectations. The hardships of a ship-boy on board a Channel coaster in those days are to us inconceivable. In danger, privation, and exposure, the lad was moulded into the man, and even as his frame was being rudely forged into the thick-set solidity that distinguished his manhood, so was his spirit being tempered in the subtlest medium that destiny could have chosen. As he passed to and fro upon the narrow seas in the months of his hottest youth, he was plunged into the most violent religious passion which the Reformation ever evoked. For ere he was well on the threshold of manhood, Philip was goading his Low Country subjects into a frenzy with his insane persecutions. On quay, and market, and shipboard the horror of the Inquisition was the only talk, and the Flemings were flying for sanctuary to England. Elizabeth, who had now begun her reign, received them with open arms, and the preacher too held up his head as the tide turned once more. His Devonshire friends and patrons were those who had stood most stoutly by the young princess in the darkest hours of her danger. They were now all-powerful, and Edmund Drake was gladdened with the living of Upchurch on the Medway. Fortune smiled on Francis no less. His master died, and out of love for the lad who had served him so well left him the vessel on which he had been apprenticed. The young skipper could thus begin to trade on his own account; and it can hardly have been but that he brought over bands of Flemish refugees, and caught from them something of their defiant and implacable attitude towards their persecutor.

Year by year the grumbling of the coming storm grew louder, and the narrow seas began to swarm with Protestant rovers revenging themselves with wanton cruelty upon Catholic ships. England was their base and market, and at last, in January, 1564, Spain, in a fit of just exasperation, closed her ports and seized every English vessel on which she could lay her hands. Drake’s trade was stopped, but it mattered little. He sold his vessel and entered the service of his two kinsmen, old William Hawkins’s adventurous sons. A wiser step he could not have taken. The brothers, already large shipowners at Plymouth and London, were more than maintaining the family name for skill and enterprise. Captain John, the younger brother, had just returned triumphant from that first slaving voyage of his which so darkly ushered in the grandest era of English maritime adventure. The shareholders were revelling in an unheard-of profit, and court, commerce, and admiralty were bowing before the brothers as society now caresses the last enthroned financial king. In October, 1564, John Hawkins sailed again to repeat his happy venture, but Drake did not accompany him. As soon as diplomacy had removed the embargo he had sailed as purser of a ship, belonging probably to William Hawkins, to the Biscayan province of Spain, and once more it seems as though the finger of Destiny had beckoned him there to show the work he was born to do. St. Sebastian was the chief port of Biscaya, and there at this moment were creeping from the pestilential dungeons of the Inquisition the remnants of a Plymouth crew, who had been seized when the embargo was first proclaimed. In six months half of them had rotted to death, and it may even have been that his ship brought home the broken wretches that survived.

So successful was John Hawkins’s second voyage, and so alarming the activity it bred in the English ports, that Spain began to tremble for her monopoly of the western trade. She had absolutely forbidden her American subjects to traffic with foreigners, and particularly in negro slaves, and so indignantly did the Ambassador protest against Hawkins’s conduct, that the Council, still ignorant of their strength, felt themselves obliged to bind him over the following year not to go to the Indies. But if he did not go, an expedition went. It was under the command of a Captain Lovell, one of the forgotten pioneers of North America, and with it sailed Francis Drake. It was his first sight of the fabled Indies, and one he never forgot. For in attempting to set the prohibition at defiance in the port of La Hacha, on the Spanish Main, they found themselves the victims of some treacherous stratagem which sent them home with the loss of all their venture.

It was a blow Drake never forgot nor forgave, but in the following year the attempt was not repeated, and he sought to recoup his shattered fortunes by serving in a voyage to Guinea. It was probably that under Captain George Fenner; and, if so, he must have witnessed that brilliant engagement, in which for two days with his own single ship and a pinnace Fenner fought and finally drove off a great Portuguese galleasse and six gunboats. It was the first action of a long and glorious series, and the news of it came most timely to add its inch to the lengthening stride of the epic. For the Netherlands were sullenly turning upon their Spanish governor, the English Catholics were staring dumb-foundered at the blackened relics of Darnley’s murder, and Elizabeth felt she could for the present snap her fingers at the Spanish Ambassador and indulge in a little more buccaneering.

It was her favourite investment. For her the risk was small and the hopes of profit too rosy to be resisted. It seems strange conduct for a great Queen, but she had to encourage adventurous commerce, on which, in those days of a half-established navy, England’s maritime position depended. The royal ships were merely a nucleus round which armed merchantmen gathered in time of war. It was as natural for the Queen to employ her ships in commerce while the realm was at peace, as it was for shipowners to accept a charter-party from the admiralty at the outbreak of a war. The mercantile marine then formed what we should now call the naval reserve. The situation was perfectly understood and recognised by both Government and shipowners. Private cruisers were a necessity to every considerable owner. He kept them, as large firms now insure their own ships; and at a time when the diplomatic system was not yet established, a merchant who considered himself injured abroad had more faith in reprisals with his cruisers than in complaints to his Government.

In such a state of things it is hardly to be wondered at that the line was not always very sharply defined between naval and commercial expeditions. In the present case there is little doubt that both the Hawkinses and Elizabeth had scores to settle in connection with the La Hacha affair, and the rough usage of the last expedition to Guinea. The Queen’s name, of course, did not appear. It never did. It was nominally a venture by Sir William Garrard and Co., in which the Hawkinses were the largest subscribers. The Queen’s contribution was two ships of war. This was her usual practice. They cost her nothing. They had merely to be valued—not often, it would seem, much below their worth—and Her Majesty then stood as a shareholder to the extent of the valuation. Not a penny of cash was she wont to provide. The Company had even to fit out the ships for sea. She had but little to lose and everything to gain, and the temptation to filibuster under such terms is not difficult to appreciate.

Such was the expedition which on October 2nd, 1567, sailed out of Plymouth harbour with John Hawkins as admiral, and Francis Drake as pilot or second officer of his ship. It consisted of the Jesus and the Minion of Her Majesty’s navy, and four other vessels which the Company had chartered of the Hawkinses. In no way did it differ from a naval squadron. It had its admiral, its vice-admiral, and its captain of the land forces. It had every kind of munition of the latest type; it even carried field-artillery, and its crews had been completed by the pressgang. The first rendezvous was fixed at the Canaries, and thence early in November the squadron sailed for the west coast of Africa. They were now well within the Portuguese sphere of action, and no time was lost in exacting reprisals for Fenner’s ill-usage. Trade in these regions was carried on in vessels called caravels. They were rigged and fitted like galleys, with a lofty square poop, and being of light draught, they were admirably adapted for entering the rivers and inlets where the trade was done. One of these was picked up before the squadron reached Cape Blanc, and on the way to Cape Verde another was sighted. It had been captured by a Frenchman, but this made no difference to Hawkins. The Minion gave chase, and took it without compunction. It proved to be a smart new craft of one hundred and fifty tons, and as two pinnaces had been lost in the foul weather that had prevailed, it was permanently attached to the squadron, and Francis Drake placed in command.

For three months the squadron continued on the coast hunting for negroes and Portuguese caravels, and Drake, in the Grace of God, was not behindhand in landing and burning and cutting out. It was work he could enjoy without compunction, though he was as religious as Hawkins himself and quite as humane. The institution of the slave-trade was the first genuine attempt at the abolition of slavery. Las Casas himself, the apostle of the Indies, the father of philanthropy, had been its ardent advocate. Forced labour in the American mines and plantations was rapidly exterminating the natives. By importing black labour from the pestilential heathendom of Africa to the Christian paradise in the west, the saintly missionary thought not only to confer a temporal and spiritual blessing upon the negroes themselves, but also to save the Indians without ruining the colonists. So fairly did the idea promise, that it seemed an inspiration from Heaven. Its evils, of course, soon pronounced themselves, and Philip had forbidden the trade except under special license from himself. Of this the English understood nothing; and the old Puritan captains went on hunting slaves, just as they prayed and fought, with all their heart and with all their strength, and never knew a reason why they should not.

By the end of January some five hundred negroes had been collected, and the squadron sailed for the Spanish Main. The French captain seems to have been persuaded to join hands with Hawkins, for Drake was transferred to the Judith, a barque of fifty tons and one of the original squadron. In seven weeks they were lying off the island of Margarita. It was the depot from which were supplied the struggling settlements on the Spanish Main, as the north coast of South America was then called, and here in spite of the Spaniards’ protests the fleet quietly revictualled. It had now been five months at sea, and in those days ships’ bottoms grew so quickly foul that it was already necessary to clean them. With the same effrontery which marked their dealings at Margarita, the well-stored squadron put into a lonely little port somewhere between Caracas and Coro in the Golfe Triste, and there for two months they stayed, leisurely careening, scraping, and refitting their weather-beaten ships.

Then trade began in earnest, and as lawfully as might be. It is a story that has been told more than once in the glorious and disreputable annals of British enterprise, and not so long ago about opium on the coast of China. The Spaniards of course refused to buy negroes, as the Chinese refused to buy opium; but Hawkins knew it was only because of a stringent Government order that they must pretend to obey. He had only as a rule to urge the comity of nations and the old commercial treaties between England and Spain for the Spaniards to buy his dearly coveted wares. If these arguments failed he had another, which at La Hacha was sure to be wanted. Thither the Judith and another ship were sent, and at once were fired on. For five days they blockaded the port, and then Hawkins came round with the rest of the squadron. The field-guns and two hundred musketeers were landed, the defences stormed, and the town cleared of Spaniards. At night they began to steal back to trade in secret, Governor and all, and Hawkins did not leave till he had thus sold two hundred negroes.

So the game continued, till the ships were so loaded with gold and pearls that Hawkins would not risk another action, and sailed away northward to take up the Gulf Stream for the homeward voyage. No sooner, however, had he passed the Yucatan channel than two hurricanes shattered his fleet and drove it deep into the Gulf of Mexico. To proceed was impossible without refitting, and he boldly put into Vera Cruz. San Juan de Ulua, as it was then called, was the port of the city of Mexico itself, and twelve large ships laden with gold and silver lay in the harbour waiting for the rest of the Plate fleet and its convoy. They were hourly expected, and next day they arrived off the port to find it in the possession of Hawkins. The whole year’s produce of the Indies was thus at his mercy. The galleons within the port were defenceless, and the fleet outside must be utterly destroyed by the first gale unless he permitted it to enter. Never had such a draught been held to an Englishman’s lips. But John Hawkins was honest and discreet enough to resist the temptation, and a formal convention was made by which the Spaniards were to be allowed to come in and the English to refit.

Hawkins scrupulously observed the terms of the agreement, but Don Martin Enriquez, the new Viceroy of Mexico, who was with the fleet, had come out with special orders about that “enemy of God,” John Hawkins, and he saw too well a road to high favour with Philip. For three days the English were suffered to dismantle their ships, and then, in spite of oaths and hostages and the sacred word of the Viceroy as a gentleman and a soldier, they were treacherously attacked. Though the surprise was complete, a desperate resistance was made. Four Spanish ships were sunk, the flagship reduced to a wreck, over five hundred of their men slain, and at last it was only by fire-ships that Hawkins could be dislodged. The Jesus, the Minion, and the little Judith were all that got clear, and Drake himself, it is said, only escaped by swarming on board along a hawser. The rest of the ships were lost, and so shattered was the Jesus that she had to be abandoned with all the immense proceeds of the voyage. Crowded with the crews of the lost ships, riddled with shot, and only half-victualled, the Minion and the Judith began to stagger homewards, while the Spaniards enjoyed their ill-gotten success. In all those wars it was by far the richest victory which the Spaniards gained over the English, and of all the most dearly purchased; for not only did it win for Philip and his perjured Viceroy the mortal enmity of John Hawkins and Francis Drake, but it showed them the path to their revenge.

CHAPTER II

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THE SPANISH MAIN

IN ENGLAND THE NEWS OF the disaster produced a profound sensation. It may fairly be said to mark the opening of a new book in the great epic of the Reformation. For the first time the long commercial intimacy between England and Spain received a rude shock, and from that shock it pined and died. Hitherto the party in the Council that believed England’s true policy to be a policy of alliance with Spain had more than held their own; but on January 23rd, 1569, a weather-beaten man was riding post from Plymouth along the London road with the tidings which were destined at last to turn the scale.

That man was Francis Drake. He had been the first to arrive from the perilous voyage. Since the fatal night he had seen nothing of his kinsman. He had put into Plymouth in great extremity, and in spite of his long privations, had been despatched by William Hawkins post-haste to the Council on the spot. It was in a critical moment that he came. Alarmed by the restlessness of the Northern Catholics and the suspicious preparations which Philip’s Viceroy, the Duke of Alva, was making in the Netherlands, Elizabeth was “taking care” of a large treasure which had been chased into her ports by the Protestant rovers in the Channel. It was money borrowed to pay Alva’s army, and the Spanish Ambassador was loudly protesting. Determined not to let it go, the Queen was yet at her wits’ end for an excuse for keeping her hold, and Drake reached the Council doors in the nick of time. At the moment when the Ambassador was pressing his claim with a cogency that was not to be resisted, he suddenly found himself recoiling before a new argument. For the Queen was parrying his home-thrust with demands for an explanation of the outrage offered to her trusty merchant; and, till satisfaction was given, she was flatly refusing to loose her hold on the treasure.

A few days later Hawkins arrived in a worse case than Drake. At first he accused his kinsman of having deserted him, but in the official inquiry, which was immediately held, the accusation was not repeated. He had probably been satisfied with the explanation Drake would naturally have given him, that, as he was already overloaded and short of provisions, he thought it his duty to get home as quickly as possible.

Drake was not present at the inquiry. While he was waiting for the result of the Queen’s demands for redress on behalf of her fellow-adventurers, he took service in the navy. The Queen’s retention of the treasure had been followed by embargoes on both sides. Trade with Spain was stopped, war with France was imminent, and Sir William Wynter was sent out with a strong fleet under orders to relieve the French rebels in Rochelle and convoy the English merchant fleets to the Baltic, where the swelling trade of the country had pushed a new outlet. It was under him that Drake probably served, and in his school learnt all that the royal service could teach.

In the summer he got leave, and on July 4th was married to Mary Newman, a Devonshire girl, who lived at St. Budeaux close by the town of Plymouth. But he can have had but little leisure to enjoy his new happiness. For England was passing through one of the greatest crises of all her history, and every one knew it. Men believed that the ensuing year would decide the fate of the Reformation, and a presentiment of coming evil hung over the nation. In the winter the insurrection of the Northern Catholics prematurely exploded, and though it was easily smothered, the success of the Government did little to relieve the situation. The dawn of the year 1570 was darkened with the threatening shadow of a crusade for the release of Mary Stuart. England resounded with warlike preparations; the forces of the south and west were mobilised; every available ship was being brought forward for service; and John Hawkins was equipping a force which was supposed to be under orders to intercept the Plate fleet at the Azores. We see all England at this moment agitated by the rough gusts that herald the storm; we see her overshadowed with war-clouds; the horizon blackens with coming danger, and like a gleam of hope the white sails of two small vessels scudding westward out of Plymouth harbour detach themselves brightly against the surrounding gloom.

The secrecy which shrouded this daring expedition is still impenetrable. It was only known that Francis Drake had sailed with two small vessels, the Dragon and the Swan, to reconnoitre the Spanish Indies till he found at the very well-spring of her life a point where some terrible wound could be inflicted on England’s enemy. In England it was always believed to be a private venture for revenge, which began and ended with Drake himself. Like Hawkins, he was burning to rescue from the clutch of the Inquisition the comrades of the last voyage who had fallen into the hands of the Spaniards. Diplomacy had failed to obtain redress for their losses, and both were bent on reprisals. Still, when we consider the demand there was at this moment for naval officers, with what care the intelligence department was being organised, and finally how the expedition was prepared under the eyes of Drake’s old patron, William Hawkins, who was now Governor of Plymouth, it is impossible to believe that the Government was not in some way concerned. Without the incentive of a special mission Drake would hardly have sailed while his old commander was hourly expecting to be loosed on the Plate fleet; and the truth most probably is that Hawkins had suggested the possibility of reprisals in the Indies, that his idea had been favourably received as being less likely to lead to an open rupture than action in Europe, and that he had employed Drake to secure the necessary information.

In the following year the expedition was repeated with the Swan only. Whatever Drake did and whatever he saw, the effect of these two adventurous voyages was to earn him a reputation for humanity with the Spaniards and beget in him a magnificent contempt for their power. He returned with his head full of a scheme so wild in its daring that in the bare contemplation of its extravagance we seem transported into the world of the Seven Champions. Spain bestrid the world like a Colossus, half Europe was crawling between its legs, and Drake was volunteering with a jest on his lips to steal the hen that laid the giant’s golden eggs. The two years of danger through which the State had just passed had bred a spirit ripe to applaud such an enterprise. Elizabeth’s excommunication, and the discovery of the great Ridolphi plot, had filled her with an ugly desire for retaliation both against Rome and Spain, and the relations between London and Madrid were strained once more to breaking-point. Although at last she wisely smiled upon Alva’s suggestion that they should kiss and be friends yet a little while, an adder’s poison was under her lips. In deference to the Proconsul’s wishes she refused any longer to harbour the savage De la Marck and his Beggars of the Sea under the guns of her Cinque-Ports; but the Governor of Plymouth received no orders to stay two wicked little craft which under his very eyes were being fitted out with every device which the latest science could suggest.

For Francis Drake had found friends to back his wild scheme, and on Whitsunday eve, May 24th, 1572, he sailed out of Plymouth Sound on board the Pasha, of seventy tons, and in his wake was the little Swan, of twenty-five, in command of his brother John. Another brother, Joseph, was with him too, and John Oxenham of tragic memory, and others whose names were destined to be not entirely lost in the coming blaze of brilliant reputations. The Spaniards always said the Queen was among those who subscribed the cost, but be that as it may, no ship in her navy was better furnished than these. In all respects they might have been Her Majesty’s own men-of-war, and yet the whole project wears the air of a schoolboy’s escapade. The crews all told, men and boys, numbered but seventy-three souls; there was but one of them had reached the age of thirty, and their modest end was nothing less than to seize the port of Nombre de Dios, and empty into their holds the Treasure-House of the World.

On his previous voyage in the lonely depths of the Gulf of Darien, Drake had discovered a little landlocked bay. Here he had buried his surplus stores, and here on July 12th he hove-to his tiny squadron. Secure in the solitude of these untrodden shores, he intended at his leisure to set up three dainty pinnaces which he had brought from Plymouth in pieces, and with which the attack was to be made. No sooner, however, had his boat passed the narrow entrance of his hiding-place, than he saw smoke rising out of the dense tropical forest in which it was embosomed. His fastness had been profaned, and after returning to the ships for more strength and arms, he went ashore and boldly plunged into the tangled vegetation to solve the mystery. Not a soul was to be seen, but a leaden tablet met his view, informing him that some prisoners whom last year, in defiance of all precedent, he had released instead of drowning, had betrayed his hiding-place, and that the Spaniards had removed his stores. One of his former crew had conducted a rover called Garrett to the spot, but, in alarm to find the place had been discovered by the Spaniards, he had hurried away, and the only traces left of him were the kindly warning on the leaden tablet and the smouldering fire.

But Drake was not so easily daunted. He had fixed on the spot for setting up his pinnaces, and he did not mean to leave it till they were afloat. The ships were brought in, a pentagonal entrenchment marked out on the shore, and all hands were soon hard at work clearing the ground about it and hauling the felled trees together to make an abattis for its defence.