ver,
one more stroke to make. The great East-India Spanish treasure ship was
coming home; and Drake made up his mind to have her.

Off the Azores he met her coming towards him and dipping her colors
again and again to ask him who he was. 'But we would put out no flag
till we were within shot of her, when we hanged out flags, streamers,
and pendants. Which done, we hailed her with cannon-shot; and having
shot her through divers times, she shot at us. Then we began to ply her
hotly, our fly boat [lightly armed supply vessel of comparatively small
size] and one of our pinnaces lying athwart her hawse [across her bows]
at whom she shot and threw fire-works [incendiary missiles] but did them
no hurt, in that her ordnance lay so high over them. Then she, seeing us
ready to lay her aboard [range up alongside], all of our ships plying
her so hotly, and resolutely determined to make short work of her, they
yielded to us.' The Spaniards fought bravely, as they generally did. But
they were only naval amateurs compared with the trained professional
sea-dogs.

The voyage was now 'made' in the old sense of that term; for this prize
was 'the greatest ship in all Portugal, richly laden, to our Happy Joy.'
The relative values, then and now, are impossible to fix, because not
only was one dollar the equivalent in most ways of ten dollars now but,
in view of the smaller material scale on which men's lives were lived,
these ten dollars might themselves be multiplied by ten, or more,
without producing the same effect as the multiplied sum would now
produce on international affairs. Suffice it to say that the ship was
worth nearly five million dollars of actual cash, and ten, twenty,
thirty, or many more millions if present sums of money are to be
considered relatively to the national incomes of those poorer days.

But better than spices, jewels, and gold were the secret documents which
revealed the dazzling profits of the new East-India trade by sea. From
that time on for the next twelve years the London merchants and their
friends at court worked steadily for official sanction in this most
promising direction. At last, on the 31st of December, 1600, the
documents captured by Drake produced their result, and the East-India
Company, by far the greatest corporation of its kind the world has ever
seen, was granted a royal charter for exclusive trade. Drake may
therefore be said not only to have set the course for the United States
but to ha