The Spanish
frigates were already abreast in a life-and-death grapple, soldiers
boarding the English decks, sabring the crews, hurling hand grenades
down the hatches to blow up the powder magazines. Hawkins roared "to
cut the cables." It was a hand-to-hand slaughter on decks slippery
with blood. No light but the musketry fire and glare of burning masts!
The little English company were fighting like a wild beast trapped,
when with a {138} thunderclap that tore bottom out of hull--Hawkins's
ship flew into mid-air, a flaring, fiery wreck--then sank in the
heaving trough of the sea, carrying down five hundred Spaniards to a
watery grave. Cutlass in hand, head over heels went Hawkins into the
sea. The hell of smoke, of flaming mast poles, of blazing musketry, of
churning waters--hid him. Then a rope's end flung out by some friend
gave handhold. He was up the sides of a ship, that had cut hawsers and
off before the fire-rafts came! Sails were hoisted to the seaward
breeze. In the carnage of fire and blood, the Spaniards did not see
the two smallest English vessels scudding before the wind as if
fiend-chased. Every light on the decks was put out. Then the dark of
the tropic night hid them. Without food, without arms, with scarcely a
remnant of their crews--the two ships drifted to sea.

Not a man of the sailors ashore escaped. All were butchered, or taken
prisoners for a fate worse than butchery--to be torn apart in the
market-place of Vera Cruz, baited in the streets to the yells of
on-lookers, hung by the arms to out-of-doors scaffolding to die by
inches, or be torn by vultures. The two ships at sea were in terrible
plight. North, west, south was the Spanish foe. Food there was none.
The crews ate the dogs, monkeys, parrots on board. Then they set traps
for the rats of the hold. The starving seamen begged to be marooned.
They would risk Spanish cruelty to escape starvation. Hawkins landed
{139} three-quarters of the remnant crews either in Yucatan or Florida.
Then he crept lamely back to England, where he moored in January, 1569.

Of the six splendid ships that had spread their sails from Plymouth,
only the _Minion_ and _Judith_ came back; and those two had been under
command of a thick-set, stocky, red-haired English boy about
twenty-four years of age--Francis Drake of Devon, one of twelve sons of
a poor clergyman, who eked out a living by reading prayers for the
Queen's Navy Sundays, playing sailor wee