workshop,
and refitted her with a month's labour from stem to stern.

By the sixteenth of April, 1579, the Pelican was once more in order, and
started on her northern course in search of the expected passage. She
held on up the coast for eight hundred miles into latitude forty-three
degrees North, but no signs appeared of an opening. Though it was summer
the air grew colder, and the crew having been long in the tropics
suffered from the change. Not caring to run risks in exploring with so
precious a cargo, and finding by observation that the passage, if it
existed, must be of enormous length, Drake resolved to go no further,
and expecting, as proved to be the case, that the Spaniards would be on
the look-out for him at Magellan's Strait, he determined on the
alternative route by the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese had long
traded with China. In the ship going to the Philippines he had found a
Portuguese chart of the Indian Archipelago, and with the help of this
and his own skill he trusted to find his way.

At the little island of Ternate, south of the Celebes, the ship was
again docked and scraped. The crew were allowed another month's rest,
when they feasted their eyes on the marvels of tropical life, then first
revealed to them in their luxuriance--vampires "as large as hens,"
crayfish a foot round, and fireflies lighting the midnight forest.
Starting once more, they had now to feel their way among the rocks and
shoals of the most dangerous waters in the world. They crept round
Celebes among coral reefs and low islands scarcely visible above the
water-line. The Malacca Straits formed the only route marked in the
Portuguese chart, and between Drake and his apparent passage lay the
Java Sea and the channel between Borneo and Sumatra. But it was not
impossible that there might be some other opening, and the Pelican
crawled in search of it along the Java coast. Here, if nowhere else, her
small size and manageableness were in her favour. In spite of all the
care that was taken, she was almost lost. One evening as the black
tropical night was closing, a grating sound was heard under her keel:
another moment she was hard and fast upon an invisible reef. The breeze
was light and the water calm, or the world would have heard no more of
Francis Drake and the Pelican. She lay immovable till morning; "we were
out of all hope to escape danger," but with the daylight the position
was seen not to be utterly desperate. "Our gener