only deceptive. Walsingham and
Leicester were for war; Burleigh for peace; between the two the subtle
Queen played fast and loose with her powerful enemy.

Drake avowed to Doughty his belief that to strike effectively at the
gigantic power of Spain, England must raid the colonies--not the West
Indies alone, but the rich western provinces of Peru and Chili. No one
had been south of Patagonia since its discovery, sixty years before.
Geographers still held that beyond the Straits of Magellan a huge
Antarctic continent existed. From that unknown region of darkness and
tempest came the great heaving ground-swell, the tidal wave and the
hurricane. Even Spanish pilots never used the perilous southern route.
Treasure went overland across the Isthmus. Every year an elephantine
treasure-ship sailed from Panama westward through the South Sea; and
there was a rich trade between the American mines and the Orient and the
Spanish peninsula, by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Doughty's
imagination was fired by the gorgeous possibilities of the idea, and
when he became the secretary of Christopher Hatton, the Queen's handsome
Captain of the Guard, he laid the plan before him with all the eloquence
of his persuasive tongue. Hatton finally obtained from Elizabeth a
promise to contribute a thousand crowns to the cost of an expedition to
penetrate the South Seas. This, however, was only on condition that the
affair should be kept secret, above all from Burleigh, who was certain
to use every effort to stop it. She had already, in a private audience
with Drake, been informed of the main features and even the details of
the scheme, and had assured him that when the time was ripe he should be
chosen to avenge the long series of injuries which Philip had inflicted
upon England's honor and her own.

When in mid-November, 1577, Drake ran out of Plymouth with his tiny
fleet, he had with him all told one hundred and fifty seamen and
fourteen boys, enlisted for a voyage to Alexandria, although it was
pretty well known that this was a blind. His flagship, the _Pelican_,
afterward re-christened the _Golden Hynde_ for Hatton's coat-of-arms,
was a hundred-ton ship carrying eighteen guns. The _Marygold_, a barque
of thirty tons and fifteen guns, and the _Swan_, a provision ship of
fifty tons, were commanded by two of the gentlemen volunteers, Mr. John
Thomas and Mr. John Chester. Captain John Wynter commanded the
_Elizabeth_, a new eighty-ton ship, and a