III
THE QUEEN’S LITTLE PIRATE

Another couple of centuries with a few added years have slipped away, and the next scene of the slowly-unfolding drama opens on the sea instead of the land. The Idea which Edward of the Long Legs had so clearly conceived and so very nearly realised, the idea that the frontiers of the United Kingdom of which he had dreamt should be its sea-coasts has all the time been growing and deepening, for, like all ideas which faithfully reflect some fact in the universe, it could not die, and was bound some day to become a fact itself.

Politically, England and Scotland were still independent kingdoms, but many old differences had been forgotten and forgiven, and they had come a great deal closer, as it was fitting that they should do on the eve of their final union. Moreover, they were one in their dread and hatred of that cruel and implacable Colossus which, with one foot on the East and the other on the West, bestrode the world, drawing vast treasures from hidden El Dorados with which it built countless ships, and hired and armed innumerable men for the enslavement of mankind. For now we have reached those “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when that lusty young giant of Liberty, recently born into the world, was girding on his armour, and making him ready to grapple with the powers of oppression and darkness which were just then most fitly incarnated in the shape of Spain.

It is almost impossible for us of the present day to understand clearly what the Spain of those days was. She was the first naval and military Power in the world, her ships and armies were everywhere, her wealth was honestly believed to be illimitable, and moreover she was the recognised champion of the Catholic Church, whose spiritual thunders mingled with the roar of her guns, and which supplemented the terror of her arms by all the diabolical enginry of torture and the awful powers of the Holy Office.

The world, in short, was on the eve of great and marvellous doings—on the one hand so terrible in their deadly earnestness and tremendous consequences, and on the other so fantastically splendid in their almost superhuman daring and undreamt-of rewards, that it looked as though the Fates were preparing some gigantic miracle wherewith to astound mankind. And so, in sober truth, they were, and the miracle about to be wrought was the making of what we now call the British Empire.

In the beginning of the latter half of the sixteenth century there was a yellow-haired, blue-eyed, round-faced and sturdily-built youngster sailing to and fro as ship’s boy in a tiny cockle-shell of a craft plying with the humbler kinds of merchandise between the Thames and the coasts of France and Flanders. Whether or not he had heard any of those wondrous stories which the western gales were wafting across the Atlantic from the golden Spanish Main we do not know, but probably he had, and, like many another sailor-lad of his day, he had dreamt wild dreams of blue seas and bright skies, of white-walled cities crammed with gold, and of stately galleons staggering across that mysterious sea stuffed to the deck with the treasures they were bringing to pour into the coffers of the King of Spain.

And yet, wild as these dreams may have been, they would have been commonplace in comparison with the bewildering exploits with which this same blue-eyed sailor-lad was one day to realise and excel them. For this was he whose name the mariners of Spain were soon to hear shrieked out by the voice of the tempest, booming in the roar of guns, and echoing through the crash of battle. This, in a word, was Francis Drake—El Draque, the Dragon, child and servant of the Devil himself, Scourge of the Church and Plunderer of the Faithful.

As I say, he may or may not have heard the story of the Golden West, but it is quite certain that he did hear much of the black and terrible tales which the refugees and exiles from France and the Netherlands had to tell, for not a few of them crossed over in the little barque in which he served, and he could not fail to hear what they had to say of the murders and massacres, the torturing and outrage with which Spain was disgracing her knightly fame and her ancient faith. They are horrible enough for us to read even here in the security which that gallant struggle won for us, and now when we can only hear the shrieks of the tortured and the groans of the dying echoing faintly across the gulf of three centuries; but what must they have been to Francis Drake when he heard them told by those whose eyes had only just before looked upon the hideous reality—perhaps indeed by some of those racked and mutilated unfortunates who had managed to escape with their lives to seek the sheltering hospitality of Gloriana the Queen? Was it any wonder that deep down in his boyish heart there were planted those seeds of hate and horror which later on were to bear such terrible fruit?

The lad Francis seems to have performed his duties as ship’s boy as well as he did everything else, whether it was leading the Queen’s ships to harry the coast of Spain or raging and storming through one of his piratical raids among the Fortunate Isles of the West, for when his master died he made him his heir, and so Francis became a trader on his own account. For a few years he was just a peaceful shipmaster, making an honest and hard-won living; but all this time events were arranging themselves in more and more martial array, and the bursting of the storm was not very far off.

The actual fighting did not begin in the guise of recognised warfare for a very considerable time. Spain and England were at peace, each trying to humbug the other, but between Protestant and Catholic it was otherwise. Armed cruisers manned by angry Protestants made their appearance in the Narrow Seas, and whenever they got a chance fell upon Catholic ships and avenged the sufferings of their fellow-heretics in a fashion at once prompt and pitiless, and this at length so exasperated Philip that he closed his ports to English trade, and Drake’s occupation was gone. Better, in truth, had it been for Philip if he had left him undisturbed in his business!

He sold his little vessel, went to Plymouth, and entered the service of two kinsmen of his, one of whom was soon to prove somewhat of an empire-maker in his own line and whose name, with certain others soon to be mentioned, was destined to go down to everlasting fame indissolubly linked with that of Francis Drake. This was Captain John Hawkins, and when the young trader reached Plymouth he had just come back with a shipload of gold and other precious things from his first venture in slave-trading, and now at least Drake, who was still a lad in his teens, must have heard something of the wonders of El Dorado. Yet, curiously enough, when Captain Hawkins went back he did not go with him. He sailed instead, as a sort of supercargo, in another of Hawkins’ ships to Biscay, and there a momentous revelation awaited him, as though to guide him on the path of his destiny.

At San Sebastian about a score of English sailors, once strong and stalwart men of Devon, crept out of the dungeons of the Inquisition and took passage with him home. King Philip had taken off his embargo now, and these men were the remnant of the crew of a Plymouth ship which he had seized in port when the embargo was laid on. The others had rotted to death during the six months that he had bestowed his hospitality upon them. We can imagine what talks they had on the way home, and no doubt El Draque bore the stories of these forlorn mariners well in mind on that most memorable day when he “singed the King of Spain’s beard” at Cadiz.

John Hawkins came back from his second voyage richer than ever, and now all the mariners of the South Coast were beginning to dream golden dreams which were soon to become yet more golden deeds, and King Philip, to whom all such ventures were the flattest piracy, began to fear for his monopoly and instructed his ambassador in London to drop the hint that foreign trade with the Indies was forbidden, upon which, foolishly enough, or perhaps not knowing their own true strength, Queen Bess’s councillors backed down and forbade John Hawkins to start again.

He, obediently enough, stayed at home, but a certain George Lovell got together an expedition and slipped out to sea, westward bound. With him went Francis Drake, at length to see for the first time the blue waters and green shores of El Dorado. This time, however, it proved anything but golden for him or his companions, for they came back with shattered ships and still worse broken fortunes. They had drawn a blank in the great lottery which half Europe was wanting to gamble in.

Nothing daunted, he shipped again, this time with George Fenner, bound for Guiana. Again, financially speaking, the voyage ended in disaster, but there was one incident in it destined to bear good fruit. A big Portuguese galleasse, backed up by six gunboats, tried to enforce the prohibition against foreign trade. Fenner had one ship and a pinnace, and with these he fought the “Portugals” and thoroughly convinced them by the logic of shot and steel that he was not the sort of man to be prohibited from doing anything he wanted to do.

This forgotten action is really one of great importance. It was Francis Drake’s first taste of fighting, which in itself means a good deal, but it was also the beginning of that lordly and magnificent contempt which the English mariners of that day were soon to feel for all enemies, no matter how strong they might seem. It was this spirit which a few years later was to take Sir Richard Grenville

“With his hundred men on deck and his ninety sick below,”

into the midst of the fifty-three Spanish ships which he fought for an afternoon and a night before he surrendered so sorely against his will and fell dead of his wounds on the deck of the Spanish flagship. It was this, too, which, when that long seven days’ fight against the Armada was raging and roaring up the Channel, brought the flag of the Spanish Rear-Admiral down with a run just because the Little Pirate stamped his foot on the deck of that same Revenge and said that he was Francis Drake and had no time to parley.

Meanwhile the rumblings of the war-storm in Europe had been growing louder. The Netherlanders were at last turning on their torturers, Darnley had been murdered and Mary Queen of Scots put in prison, so Gloriana, feeling herself somewhat at leisure, took a hand in the next buccaneering expedition. It may be noted here, by the way, that there was no more ardent buccaneer and slave-trader in her dominions than Good Queen Bess herself. She lent ships though she withheld her commission, and her pirates did the rest. If disaster overtook them or if the Spanish Minister raged against their doings she promptly disowned them and felt sorry for her ships. But if they came back happily filled to the hatches with plundered treasure, she took her dividends and lent more ships.

It was thus with the expedition which sailed out of Plymouth on October 2, 1567, under the command of Admiral John Hawkins, whose second officer was Francis Drake. The diplomacy of the times called it the trading venture of Sir William Garrard and Co., but for all that there were two ships of the Royal Navy in it, the Jesus and the Minion, and the merchandise it carried consisted mainly of cannon and small arms, powder and shot, and cold steel.

The voyage began with a slave-raiding expedition down the Portuguese coast of Africa, whence with five hundred slaves they crossed to the Spanish Main. Here, after varying fortunes, they filled their ships with treasure, and Hawkins turned his prows northward for home. But while crossing the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico a furious hurricane burst upon them and drove his gold-and-pearl-laden vessels so far into it, that he came to the bold decision to put into the Spanish port of Vera Cruz to refit.

In the harbour he found twelve great galleons loaded with gold and silver, waiting for the convoy to escort them to Spain. They were utterly at the mercy of the English ships, but John Hawkins, pirate and slave-dealer, was still an English gentleman, so he made a solemn convention to leave the treasure-ships alone on condition of being allowed to refit in the harbour. Hawkins was already known in Spain as the “Enemy of God,” and Don Martin Enriquez, the new Governor of Mexico, had come out with special orders to abolish him by any means that might be found the readiest.

Don Martin seems to have thought that in this case treachery would suit best, so he signed the convention and gave his word of honour as a gentleman of Spain that the English ships should be allowed to come and go unmolested. So for three days the work of dismantling went on in peace, and on the fourth, half-disabled as they were, they were attacked. It was a fierce and bloody fight, and it ended in the sinking of four galleons, the wrecking of the Spanish flag-ship, and the killing of five or six hundred Spaniards.

But on the English side only the Jesus, the Minion, and the Judith got away and, shot-shattered and half-provisioned, began to stagger homeward across the wide Atlantic. On the way the Judith was lost, and took to the bottom with her all the proceeds of many months of trading and fighting and privation.

So the expedition came back poorer than it went, and Spain laughed aloud, but, as will be seen, somewhat too soon. Drake got home first, and no sooner did he land at Plymouth than he took horse for London. It so happened that a little while before Spanish ships carrying a huge amount of money to pay Alva’s army in the Netherlands, had been driven into the Thames by the Protestant rovers lately mentioned, and Gloriana, who never liked to let a good thing go, had held on to it on one pretext or another until Drake came hot-footed and angry-hearted to tell of the treachery of Vera Cruz.

Gloriana wanted nothing better. Her buccaneering venture had been a failure and here was a way of paying herself for the two ships she had risked, so she turned upon the Spanish Ambassador and told him point blank that until the injury done to her “honest merchants” was redressed she would hold the treasure in pledge. Naturally after that not a groat of it ever got to Alva or his soldiers.

That year, which was 1569, Drake went to Rochelle with Sir Thomas Wynter. The next summer he married Mary Newman, and a month or two later he was again steering to the westward in two little vessels, the Dragon and the Swan. The next year he went again, with the Swan alone, and this time he came back with a certain idea in his head which was magnificent to the point of absurdity. The adventures of the last two or three years had deepened his contempt for Spanish prowess, and now he laughingly proposed to go back, not to kill the goose that laid the King of Spain’s golden eggs, but to rifle the nest in which they were deposited. This was Nombre de Dios, the strongest city in the New World, and the richest to boot.

The means employed were, as was usual in this age of wonders, ridiculously inadequate to the end to which they were devoted. Of late years certain bold mariners have sought to win an ephemeral notoriety by crossing the Atlantic in open boats. Francis Drake set out on a serious and momentous expedition to the Spanish Main in the Pasha of 70 tons followed by the Swan of 25—that is to say in a couple of fishing-boats. These two cockle-shells were manned by seventy-three men all told, only one of whom had reached the age of thirty. It must have looked more like a parcel of lads going afloat on a holiday spree than an expedition with which all the world was soon to ring.

There is no space here to tell of all that befel these absurd adventurers on their devious and tedious way to Nombre de Dios, though no romancer ever imagined such a story as their adventures make. So it must suffice to say that on July 29th he started out across the Isthmus of Darien at the head of seventy-three men to attack a strong city as big as Plymouth, and with these he actually fought his way into the town, established himself in the centre of it and held it for some hours.

If his men had been the seasoned buccaneers of his later raids he would probably have taken it altogether, but they unhappily found in the Governor’s house a stack of silver bars twelve feet high, ten feet broad, and seventy feet long. This was a little too much for the nerves of the Devon boys, but Drake would not let them touch it, since the town was not yet theirs. Then a fearful rain-storm came on just about dawn and put out their matches and ruined their bow-strings, and then a terrible misfortune happened. Drake had been severely wounded in the leg, but he had concealed his hurt until the supreme moment came, and then, as he was leading his handful of heroes to the last attack, he went down with his boot full of blood. Something very like a panic now took his men, not for their own sakes but for his. In vain he stormed at them, and cried angrily:

“I have brought you to the door of the Treasure-house of the World! Will ye be fools enough to go away empty?”

“Your life is more precious to us and England than all the gold of the Indies!” they replied, and so by kindly force they carried him down to the boats and rowed away, having accomplished perhaps the most splendid failure in history.

The fame of this exploit instantly echoed through the whole Spanish Main and thence across the Atlantic to Europe. A few days later he avenged his failure at Nombre de Dios by cutting a big ship out from under the guns of Cartagena. Then he vanished, leaving no other trace behind him than the poor little abandoned Swan. For the next few months nothing was seen of him, though his hand was felt far and wide along the coast. Spanish store-ships disappeared, dispatch boats were intercepted, and coast-towns were raided with bewildering rapidity and effectiveness.

But all this time the deadly tropical fever was playing havoc with his little handful of men. His brother John died of it, and man after man was struck down till at last, out of the seventy-three who had sailed with him from Plymouth, he could only muster eighteen fighting men when he at length started to plunder the mule-train from Panama.

On the fourth day of the journey a very memorable thing happened, for that noon he reached the top of the dividing ridge of the Isthmus, and lo! there before him, only a few miles away, lay the smooth, shining expanse of the Pacific Ocean, that long-hidden, jealously-guarded sea on which his were the first English eyes that had ever gazed. He did just what such a man would have done in such circumstances. He fell on his knees and, raising his hands to heaven, cried aloud:

“Almighty God, of Thy goodness, give me life and leave once to sail an English ship on yonder sea!”

Years afterwards the prayer was granted, and not only did he sail on the Golden Sea, but crossed it while he was making the first voyage that an Englishman ever made round the world.

Were I writing a book instead of an essay I could tell of the plundering of the mule-trains, of the taking of Vera Cruz—where, to the astonishment of the Spaniards, he would not allow a single woman or an unarmed man to be hurt—and Nombre de Dios, which did not resist him so well the second time. It must, however, be enough to say that this time everything ended happily for the remnant that survived, and that on Sunday morning, August 9, 1573, while the good folks of Plymouth were in church, they heard a roar of artillery from the batteries followed by an answering salute from the sea and, straightway quitting their devotions, they ran out to learn the good news that Gloriana’s Little Pirate had come back safe at last and well loaded up with plunder.

His next venture was nothing less than that famous voyage of his round the world, with the fairy-story of which we have here nothing to do save to say that the fame of it, no less than the enormous treasure, the plunder of a hundred ships and a score of towns, with which the poor sea-worn, worm-eaten, wind-weary Golden Hind, staggered one Michaelmas morning into Plymouth Sound, at last convinced Queen Bess that in her dear Little Pirate—whom, by the way, she had never yet openly recognised—she had a champion who was worth a good many thousands of King Philip’s soldiers and sailors.

But now the first of Drake’s open rewards was to be his. The Golden Hind was hauled on to the slips at Deptford, and Gloriana and her court dined on board. When the dinner was over she bade her Little Pirate kneel before her, touched him on the shoulder with his own sword and bade him rise Sir Francis Drake. The Spaniards, by the way, had another title for him, no less honourable in his eyes, and this was “the Master-Thief of the New World.”

For some considerable time nothing happened beyond the failure of one or two trifling expeditions—which failure was Gloriana’s fault, and not Drake’s—and the setting of a price of £40,000 by favour of the King of Spain on the Little Pirate’s head—an investment of which Drake was soon to pay the dividend in the craft-crowded harbour of Cadiz.

Meanwhile, matters between England and Spain were going from bad to worse. For a few months unscrupulous intrigue, backed up by wholesale lying, hampered Drake most sorely in the preparation of that great work which was nothing less than the establishment of the sea-power of England. Everything that the fickleness of his mistress, the weathercock support of so-called friends at court, and the still more dangerous machinations of English statesmen in the pay of Spain could do, was done. The fleet, to his unutterable rage and disgust, was even placed on a peace-footing, despite the fact that the noise of the Armada’s preparations was still sounding across the Narrow Seas.

But at last, by some means or other, a certain Spanish spy had got himself suspected and stretched on the rack. Now the rack, as an aid to cross-examination, is not an ideal instrument, but it certainly served its purpose this time, for the spy in his torment gave away all the details of a vast scheme which embraced an alliance between France, Spain, and Scotland, together with a general Catholic uprising in England, which was to take place simultaneously with the Triple Invasion.

Never had England, and with her the cause of liberty, stood in such great and deadly peril. Gloriana at last flung diplomatic dalliance to the winds, stopped her lying and chicanery, kicked the Spanish Ambassador out of the country, and let her Little Pirate loose. Yet even now there was another lull before the storm, and this lull Philip took advantage of to invite a fleet of English corn-ships to his ports, where he seized them to feed that ever-growing sea-monster which he was going to pit against El Draque.

This settled the matter. Drake, only half ready for sea, put out with every ship that could move for fear more orders would come to stop him and, with an insolent assurance which augured well for the great things that he was about to do, actually ran his ships into Vigo Bay and forced the Spanish Governor to allow him to finish his preparations in Spanish waters. Then he turned his eager prows westward, stopping on the way at the Cape Verde Islands to lay waste Vera Cruz and make Santiago a heap of ashes.

Five years before young William Hawkins had been taken prisoner here and burnt alive with several of his crew, and this was El Draque’s way of wiping out the old score.

Then he sped on again, spent Christmas at Santa Dominica, refitted his ships and refreshed his men, and then fell like a thunderbolt on the famous city of Santo Domingo, the oldest in the Indies, founded by Columbus himself and ruled over by his brother. It was this that the Little Pirate had been preparing for during those other mysterious voyages of his. The blow was as crushing as it was unexpected, and the prestige of Spain in the West never recovered from it. The town was utterly stripped and dismantled by the victors. Fifty thousand pounds in cash, two hundred and forty guns of all calibres, and an immense amount of other spoil was brought away, and the whole fleet, after living at free quarters for a month, sailed southward, completely refitted and re-victualled, as usual, at the Spaniards’ expense.

When the news got to Europe, it was said that Philip had had “such a cooling as he had never had since he was King of Spain.” It is both interesting and instructive to learn that not the least part of the booty took the shape of a hundred English sailors who were found toiling as slaves in the Spanish galleys.

Reinforced by these, Gloriana’s Little Pirate crossed the Caribbean Sea and fell on Cartagena, the capital of the Spanish Main, and now the richest city in the Indies. Paralysed by the insolence of the attack, it soon fell under its fury and real strength. The booty was enormous, but the moral effect was still greater. The new-born sea-power of England had vindicated itself with triumphant suddenness, and Drake, having picked up the unfortunate remnants of Raleigh’s colony in Virginia—the time for colonising not having come yet—entered Plymouth Sound again in the Elizabeth Bonaventura at the head of his loot-laden fleet, and reported his arrival, piously regretting that on the way home he had missed the Spanish plate-fleet by twelve hours “for reasons best known to God.”

“A great gap hath been opened which is very little to the King of Spain’s liking,” was the Little Pirate’s own comment on the brilliant achievement which had ushered a new power into the world. He might also have put it another way, and said that with his well-directed shot he had plugged the source whence flowed the golden stream of Spanish wealth, for indeed it was nothing less than this. The Spanish Colossus suddenly found itself with empty pockets, Spanish credit was ruined at a single blow, the Bank of Seville closed its doors, and when King Philip tried to raise a loan of half a million ducats, he was flatly refused.

How hard hit he was may be seen from the fact that instead of hurling the whole strength of his laboriously-prepared Armada on the English coasts, he asked for explanations. Gloriana, with an almost splendid mendacity, disowned her Little Pirate once more and swore she had nothing whatever to do with him. But this Drake expected, and went on with his own plans, having no doubt honestly paid up the Queen’s full share of the plunder.

A few months more of diplomatic dodgery followed, and then came the final opening of Gloriana’s eyes. A letter stolen from the Pope’s own cabinet proved to her beyond all possibility of doubt that the Great Armada was intended for the invasion of England and nothing else. Then she called her Little Pirate to her again and took counsel with him, with the result that the next time he hoisted his flag he did so on board the great Merchant Royal at the head of twenty-three sail including five battleships, two first-class cruisers, seven second-class, and about a dozen gunboats. Nor did he go this time as the Queen’s licensed pirate but as her Admiral of the Fleet, duly commissioned in her name to burn, sink, and destroy, and to use all means whatever to prevent the various divisions of the Armada coming together.

Even now, at the last minute of the eleventh hour, treachery almost did its work, for there was an Opposition and Peace-at-any-price Party in those days, as there has been in later ones. Drake seems to have known what was coming, for, when the Queen’s messenger dashed into Plymouth bearing the fatal orders, he had gone.

Happily there was no telegraph in those days. If there had been it would probably have proved the ruin of England and the triumph of Spain. As it was the next news that came was from Drake himself, telling, laconically as usual, how he had “singed the King of Spain’s beard in Cadiz.” When the facts came out, the said singeing was seen to amount to the destruction by burning and sinking of 12,000 tons of shipping, including some of the finest ships of war that floated. The whole English fleet had, as had now become the custom on such occasions, been revictualled at Spanish expense, and four large ships full of provisions were captured intact.

From Cadiz the triumphant Admiral raged up and down the terror-stricken coast, storming strongholds, and burning and scuttling the store-ships of the Great Armada. He went to Lisbon, where Santa Cruz, said to be the greatest sea-captain in Europe, lay, and, after vainly challenging him to come out and fight, politely offered to convoy him and his fleet to England “if by chance his course should lie that way.” The fact was that the Colossus was paralysed. Drake had struck out straight at its heart, and so doing had proved two principles of no small moment to the making of the British Empire: first, the true frontiers of a maritime nation are its enemies’ coasts; second, the only effective method of defence for such a nation is attack.

It was on his way home from this expedition, storm-shattered and disgusted at missing the Plate-Fleet, which had once more slipped through his fingers, that Gloriana’s Little Pirate took the richest prize of his life. This was the San Felipe. She was the King of Spain’s own treasure-ship, and she came, not from the West, but from the East. Though he knew it not, Drake had that day done a very great thing for England and the making of her Empire, for not only did the San Felipe carry treasure and rich stuffs to the value of something like a million and a quarter of our money, but she had on board dispatches, letters, and account-books which let the English merchants into all the secrets of Spain’s East Indian trade, and led to the almost instant formation of the Honourable East India Company, itself an Empire-Maker of no small account.

The epic of the Elizabethan era was now beginning to hurry towards its climax. But Gloriana was still surrounded by traitors, and even now temporising was the order of the day. She was cast down by remorse for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and she even reprimanded her Little Pirate for doing her too good service, and told Philip that he was in disgrace for exceeding instructions.

It was in vain that Drake and the other friends of England prayed and entreated and stormed and swore. In vain they pointed across the Narrow Seas to Parma in the Netherlands at the head of 30,000 of the finest troops in Europe, and to the ports of Spain and Portugal, once more swarming with shipping and echoing with the noise of warlike preparations. For a time the liars and traitors had things their own way again. Drake and Howard implored her to let them get their ships fitted and go and fight the Armada in its own ports. No, she would do nothing. And she did nothing till at last arrived that fatal evening on which—

“There came a gallant merchant-ship full sail to Plymouth Bay.”

Golden weeks and priceless opportunities had been wasted by the fatal lethargy of the Court. Drake and Howard, instead of falling, as they longed to do, on the wind-bound Armada in Vigo Bay, and doing with it as Drake had done at Cadiz, were kept on the defensive, straining like bloodhounds at the leash, knowing that every moment that the good wind lasted was heavily fraught with fate for England and perhaps the world.

At length the wind went round, and Drake, marvelling in angry wonder “how God could have sent a south-west wind just then,” found himself baffled and beaten back, while Medina-Sidonia with his released Armada sailed triumphantly for the Channel. There was only one thing now to do if England was to be saved. Valour and heroism, self-devotion and skill, must repair the damage that treason, lying, and weakness of head or heart had done. By this time the Armada should have been a crushed and tangled mass of burning wreckage, and so it would have been if Drake had had his way, and now here it was stronger than ever, its ships covering the hitherto Inviolate Sea; and there was Parma, with his transports still undestroyed, only waiting to join hands with Sidonia to once for all strangle the Heretic in their pitiless grip.

In the mighty and memorable fight that followed, our Little Pirate commanded on his own ship, the immortal Revenge. With almost incredible labour and skill the English fleet was somehow worked and warped out to the westward until, when that famous Sunday morning dawned, the sun looked, as has been truly said, upon a sight glorious for England. There was the great Armada, crescent-shaped, rolling up the Channel, and there, right in the wind’s eye and on its rear, were two English squadrons, and a third was gallantly advancing out of Plymouth.

This one, with true Elizabethan insolence, steered right across the front of the huge fleet, firing into such of the Dons as came within range. Then it went about, and joined the other English ships to windward.

Every one has read of the long, running, seven-day fight that followed; every one knows how the little, light-heeled English ships ran in and out among the great unwieldy galleons, tempting them out of their formation, and, having isolated one, fell on her like a pack of dogs on a wolf; and how, in spite of all that the English Admiral and his captains could do, the ever-changing wind and the ever-succeeding calms so helped the Spaniards, that in the end they reached the Straits of Dover but little worse off than they started.

If Drake could have had his way, these tactics would have been pushed farther, and every mile of the way would have been disputed; but Lord Howard, though a brave man, lacked the all-daring assurance of the conqueror of Santo Domingo and Cartagena. He would not fight until he had joined with Seymour and Wynter in the Straits. So it came about that on the seventh day—that is to say, Saturday afternoon—the Great Armada, the poorer only by some dozen craft that had been captured or battered into wreck and ruin, was sailing gloriously past Calais with the French and English land well in sight, and Dunkirk, the trysting-place with Parma, only eighteen miles away.

England has never passed through such anxious hours as she did that afternoon and night. It seemed as though, after all, her new-found sea-strength had failed her, and that, despite all the brilliant exploits of Gloriana’s Little Pirate in the West, he was powerless to protect her nearer home. What would have happened in the ordinary course of events no one now knows, for the Spaniards, stricken by some inexplicable madness, suddenly altered the whole course of events by what can only be called a freak of idiocy.

Medina-Sidonia, after having accomplished the most brilliant feat of seamanship that his age had seen, gave orders for the Armada to anchor! A few hours more and its work would have been done, with what results to England one scarcely cares to picture. So unexpected was this piece of priceless good fortune by the English captains that they had to drop their own anchors within range of the Spanish guns to save entangling themselves with the big Spanish ships.

All Sunday the two fleets lay within sight of each other; anxious councils of war were held on both sides, and so night fell without a shot being fired or anything done. By midnight the tide was swirling strong and swift from the English to the Spanish ships, and Drake was busy preparing his crowning piece of devilry for the edification of the Dons.

At about one o’clock on that calm, moonless morning, patches of flickering, leaping flame began to show among the twinkling English lights, and these grew swiftly higher and broader, and a few minutes later the terrified Dons saw eight fire-ships crowned mast-high with leaping flames, come reeling and roaring into their midst.

Then there was cutting of cables and slipping of moorings, and labouring with frantic haste to get the ships under sail. Galleon crashed into galleasse, and galleasse into cruiser in the wild haste and fatal confusion.

Marvellous to say, not a single Spanish ship took fire, but behind the fire-craft there was something more terrible and deadly still—El Draque and his guns. At the supreme moment Lord Howard weakly and foolishly turned aside to capture or sink a disabled galleasse. If the rest of the fleet had followed him there might have been no Battle of Gravelines, and the Trafalgar of the Sixteenth Century might never have been fought. But, as has been well said, it was the hour for which Francis Drake had been born. He set the Revenge on the wind, and, followed by the rest of the squadron, bore down in grim and ominous silence on the huddled, entangled Dons. Within pistol range of the great San Martin the Revenge burst into sudden thunder and flame, and drove on enwreathed in smoke. In her wake ship after ship came on in perfect order, each raining her iron storm into the rent and splintering sides of the Dons as they passed.

Then from Dover way came the roar of guns telling that Wynter and Seymour had got to work, and so for three hours they went at it, the Little Pirate ever first, and revelling in the work that he loved to do for his dear England. He had forgotten all his mistress’s slights and fickleness, all the harm that Court traitors had done him, all his suffering and privation on the windless seas and burning lands of the West. It was the hour of England’s fate and his own, and there he was in the thick of it, and he was happy.

After three hours Howard and his laggards came up, and the fight roared on flank and front and rear. Although the school-books say but little about it, there had never been such a sea-fight in the world before, nor one on whose end such great issues hung. The Spaniards, caught between El Draque and the sands of Dunkirk—which to them was something worse than being between the devil and the deep sea—fought with all their ancient valour, but ship after ship, as the battle roared on through the day, went down riddled with shot or took fire and blew up, till at length out of the forty battleships and cruisers which Sidonia had somehow got together to protect his rear, only sixteen were left, and they were little better than shot-shattered, fire-blackened hulks.

The powder on both sides was nearly done, but so too was the work of Drake and his ships. Fathom by fathom the north-west wind was driving the Dons on to the mud-banks of the Netherland shore, and the Little Pirate in his well-named Revenge was hanging on their weather quarter watching—and I doubt not praying—for the moment of their final ruin.

And yet he was not to see it, for when there was but five fathoms of water between the Spanish keels and the Dutch mud the north-wester dropped to a calm, a fresh south-wester sprang up in its place, and for the fourth time in seven days the Armada was saved from utter destruction by those fickle winds to which a pious sentiment has ascribed its ruin.

Down went the Spanish helms, and round came the dripping, labouring, Spanish prows, and ere long all that was left of King Philip’s fleet was staggering away to the northward to begin that awful voyage round the north of Scotland and past the wild Irish coast from which so few were to return. Meanwhile the Little Pirate hung on to the heels of the flying Armada for two days and nights, until at length a tempest came rolling up over the Dogger Bank, and he ran in for safety under the Scottish shore, cheerfully leaving the Dons to the winds of heaven, and the rocks that were waiting to finish what his own guns had begun.

With the victory of Gravelines, Drake’s work as an Empire-maker comes to an end. The expedition to Portugal, for all its booty, was a failure and did nothing to enhance his fame. If his advice had been taken Spain might have been crushed and humbled for ever, but such was the hopeless weakness and vacillation at Court that, even after the Armada had shown her the true designs of Philip, Gloriana got into negotiations with him again. Over and over again her Little Pirate besought her to give him the means of striking the blow that should crush Spain and make England undisputed mistress of the seas, but it was not to be, and so at length, sick and sore at heart, he sailed away again to his beloved West, never to return.

There is nothing in this last expedition of his that is noteworthy save its continued misfortunes. It seemed as though when the little Revenge went down, as she did in the midst of the fifty-three Spanish ships which she had fought “for a day and a night,” she had taken her old commander’s good luck down with her. At last on the deadly island of Escudo de Veragua the two guardian demons of El Dorado, fever and dysentry, struck him down with many another of his men. He lived to get away, but not for long, and six days afterwards, when his fleet came to anchor off Puerto Bello, the heroic Little Pirate breathed his last and his gallant soul went to its account, passing away from earth on the very spot that had been the scene of his first sea-fight and his first victory.