really in pursuit of prizes and plunder.

Drake took five vessels with him on this his first expedition, but they
were all very small. The largest was only a vessel of one hundred tons,
while the ships which are now built are often of _three thousand_. With
this little fleet Drake set sail boldly, and crossed the Atlantic, being
fifty-five days out of sight of land. He arrived at last on the coast of
South America, and then turned his course southward, toward the Straits
of Magellan. Two of his vessels, he found, were so small as to be of
very little service; so he shipped the men on board the others, and
turned the two adrift. When he got well into the southern seas, he
charged his chief mate, whose name was Doughty, with some offense
against the discipline of his little fleet, and had him condemned to
death. He was executed at the Straits of Magellan--beheaded. Before he
died, the unhappy convict had the sacrament administered to him, Drake
himself partaking of it with him. It was said, and believed at the time,
that the charge against Doughty was only a pretense, and that the real
cause of his death was that Leicester had agreed with Drake to kill him
when far away, on account of his having assisted, with others, in
spreading the reports that Leicester had murdered the Earl of Essex, the
former husband of his wife.

The little squadron passed through the Straits of Magellan, and then
encountered a dreadful storm, which separated the ships, and drove them
several hundred miles to the westward, over the then boundless and
trackless waters of the Pacific Ocean. Drake himself afterward recovered
the shore with his own ship alone, and moved northward. He found Spanish
ships and Spanish merchants every where, who, not dreaming of the
presence of an English enemy in those distant seas, were entirely
secure; and they fell, one after another, a very easy prey. The very
extraordinary story is told of his finding, in one place, a Spaniard
asleep upon the shore, waiting, perhaps, for a boat, with thirty bars of
silver by his side, of great weight and value, which Drake and his men
seized and carried off, without so much as waking the owner. In one
harbor which he entered he found three ships, from which the seamen had
all gone ashore, leaving the vessels completely unguarded, so entirely
unconscious were they of any danger near. Drake broke into the cabins
of these ships, and found fifty or sixty wedges of pure silver there, o