and having on board the
newly appointed Mexican viceroy. Hawkins, though his guns commanded
the entrance, took hostages and made some sort of agreement by
which the Spanish ships were allowed to come in and moor alongside.
But the situation was too tense to carry off without an explosion.
Three days later the English were suddenly attacked on sea and
shore. They at once leaped into their ships and cut their cables,
but though they hammered the Spanish severely in the fight that
followed, only two English vessels, the _Minion_ and the _Judith_,
escaped, the _Minion_ so overcrowded that Hawkins had to drop 100 of
his crew on the Mexican coast. Drake made straight for Plymouth,
nursing a bitter grievance at the alleged breach of faith, and
vowing vengeance on the whole Spanish race. "The case," as Drake's
biographer, Thomas Fuller, says, "was clear in sea-divinity, and
few are such infidels as not to believe doctrines which make for
their own profit."[1]

[Footnote 1: THE HOLY STATE, Bk. II, Ch. XXII.]

In the next three years, following the example of many a French
Huguenot privateersman before him, and forsaking trade for semi-private
reprisal (in that epoch a few degrees short of piracy), he made
three voyages to the Spanish Indies. On the third, in 1572, he
raided Nombre de Dios with fire and sword. Then, leaguing himself
with the mixed-breed natives or cameroons, he waylaid a guarded
mule-train bearing treasure across the Isthmus, securing 15 tons of
silver which he buried, and as much gold as his men could stagger
away under. It was on this foray that he first saw the Pacific
from a height of the Cordilleras, and resolved to steer an English
squadron into this hitherto unmolested Spanish sea.

The tale of Drake's voyage into the Pacific and circumnavigation
of the globe is a piratical epic, the episodes of which, however,
find some justification in the state of virtual though undeclared
hostilities between England and Spain, in the Queen's secret sanction,
and in Spain's own policy of ruthless spoliation in America. Starting
at the close of 1577 with five small vessels, the squadron was
reduced by shipwreck and desertion until only the flagship remained
when Drake at last, on September 6 of the next year, achieved his
midwinter passage of the Straits of Magellan and bore down, "like
a visitation of God" as a Spaniard said, upon the weakly defended
ports of the west coast. After ballasting his ship with silver fr