of Heaven,' that is, of course, more prizes of a richer kind.
But sickness broke out. The men died off like flies. Storms completed
the discomfiture. And the expedition got home with a great deal less
than half its strength in men and not enough in value to pay for its
expenses. It was held to have failed; and Drake lost favor.

* * * * *

With the sun of Drake's glory in eclipse at court and with Spain and
England resting from warfare on the grander scale, there were no more
big battles the following year. But the year after that, 1591, is
rendered famous in the annals of the sea by Sir Richard Grenville's
fight in Drake's old flagship, the _Revenge_. This is the immortal
battle of 'the one and the fifty-three' from which Raleigh's prose and
Tennyson's verse have made a glory of the pen fit to match the glory of
the sword.

Grenville had sat, with Drake and Sir Philip Sidney, on the
Parliamentary committee which recommended the royal charter granted to
Sir Walter Raleigh for the founding of the first English colony in what
is now the United States. Grenville's grandfather, Marshal of Calais to
Henry VIII, had the faculty of rhyme, and, in a set of verses very
popular in their own day, showed what the Grenville family ambitions
were.

Who seeks the way to win renown,
Or flies with wings to high desire,
Who seeks to wear the laurel crown,
Or hath the mind that would aspire--
Let him his native soil eschew,
Let him go range and seek a new.

Grenville himself was a wild and roving blade, no great commander, but
an adventurer of the most daring kind by land or sea. He rather enjoyed
the consternation he caused by aping the airs of a pirate king. He had a
rough way with him at all times; and Ralph Lane was much set against his
being the commander of the 'Virginia Voyage' of which Lane himself was
the governor on land. But in action he always was, beyond a doubt, the
very _beau ideal_ of a 'first-class fighting man.' A striking instance
of his methods was afforded on his return from Virginia, when he found
an armed Spanish treasure ship ahead of him at sea. He had no boat to
board her with. But he knocked some sort of one together out of the
ship's chests and sprang up the Spaniard's side with his boarding party
just as this makeshift boat was sinking under them.

The last fight of the _Revenge_ is almost incredible from the odds
engaged--fifty-three vessels to one. Bu