others of lesser fame, such as Winter, Knollys
and Barker, helped to swell the roll of these Elizabethan sea-rovers. To
many a gallant sailor the Caribbean Sea was a happy hunting-ground where
he might indulge at his pleasure any propensities to lawless adventure.
If in 1588 he had helped to scatter the Invincible Armada, he now
pillaged treasure ships on the coasts of the Spanish Main; if he had
been with Drake to flout his Catholic Majesty at Cadiz, he now closed
with the Spaniards within their distant cities beyond the seas. Thus he
lined his own pockets with Spanish doubloons, and incidentally curbed
Philip's power of invading England. Nor must we think these mariners the
same as the lawless buccaneers of a later period. The men of this
generation were of a sterner and more fanatical mould, men who for their
wildest acts often claimed the sanction of religious convictions.
Whether they carried off the heathen from Africa, or plundered the
fleets of Romish Spain, they were but entering upon "the heritage of the
saints." Judged by the standards of our own century they were pirates
and freebooters, but in the eyes of their fellow-countrymen their
attacks upon the Spaniards seemed fair and honourable.

The last of the great privateering voyages for which Drake had set the
example was the armament which Lord George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland,
sent against Porto Rico in 1598. The ill-starred expeditions of Raleigh
to Guiana in 1595 and again in 1617 belong rather to the history of
exploration and colonization. Clifford, "courtier, gambler and
buccaneer," having run through a great part of his very considerable
fortune, had seized the opportunity offered him by the plunder of the
Spanish colonies to re-coup himself; and during a period of twelve
years, from 1586 to 1598, almost every year fitted out, and often
himself commanded, an expedition against the Spaniards. In his last and
most ambitious effort, in 1598, he equipped twenty vessels entirely at
his own cost, sailed from Plymouth in March, and on 6th June laid siege
to the city of San Juan, which he proposed to clear of Spaniards and
establish as an English stronghold. Although the place was captured, the
expedition proved a fiasco. A violent sickness broke out among the
troops, and as Clifford had already sailed away with some of the ships
to Flores to lie in wait for the treasure fleet, Sir Thomas Berkeley,
who was left in command in Porto Rico, abandoned the isla