panish boarding parties. But the King's Island, to which
Hawkins had moored his vessels, now swarmed with Spaniards firing
cannon only a few yards off. To hearten his men he drank their health
and called out, "Stand by your ordnance lustily!" As he put the goblet
down a round shot sent it flying. "Look," he said, "how God has
delivered me from that shot; and so will He deliver you from these
traitors." Then he ordered his own battered ship to be abandoned for
the _Minion_, telling Drake to come alongside in the _Judith_. In
these two little vessels all that remained of the English sailed safely
out, in spite of the many Spanish guns roaring away at point-blank
range and of two fire-ships which almost struck home.

Drake and Hawkins lost each other in the darkness and gale outside.
Drake's tiny _Judith_, of only fifty tons, went straight to England,
with every inch of space crowded by her own crew and those she had
rescued from the other vessels. Hawkins was so overcrowded in the
_Minion_ (which then meant "darling") that he asked all who would try
their luck ashore to go forward, while all who would stand by the
_Minion_ stayed aft. A hundred went forward, were landed south of the
Rio Grande, and died to a man, except three. One of these walked all
round the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic sea-board, till he reached
the mouth of the St. John in New Brunswick, when a Frenchman took him
home. The other two were caught by the Spaniards and worked as slaves,
one in Mexico, the other as a galley-slave in Europe. Both escaped in
the end, one after fourteen, the other after twenty-two, years. The
Spaniards found their own hostages all safe and sound aboard the
flagship that Hawkins had abandoned at the King's Island. This
surprised them very much; for they had kept all the English hostages
Hawkins had sent them in exchange for theirs when they had made the
agreement never to attack him, and they knew that by the laws of war he
had the right to kill all the Spaniards who were in his power when the
other Spaniards broke their word.

The treason of Ulua took place in 1568, just twenty years before the
Great Armada. During those fateful twenty years the storm of English
hatred against the Spanish tyrants grew and grew until it burst in fury
on their heads.

Nothing daunted, Drake and his dare-devils went, three years running,
to the Spanish Main. The third year, 1572, brought him into fame. He
had only two ti