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are yet unpossessed by any Christians, and seeme to offer themselves unto us, and stretching nearer unto her Majesty's dominions than to any other part of Europe." The forgotten explorations of Cabot were now remembered. Here was a

vast country to which Spain and France had laid claim, but which neither had colonized. The fishermen of four or five nations were constantly resorting thither, but it belonged, by right of prior discovery, to England alone. Why should not England occupy it? "It seems probable," wrote the historian. of Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583, "by event of precedent attempts made by the Spanyards and French sundry times (i. e., by their uniform failure) "that the countries lying north of Florida God hath reserued the same to be reduced unto Christian civility by the English nation. For not long after that Christopher Columbus had discouered the islands and continents of the West Indies for Spayne, John and Sebastian Cabot made discovery also of the West from Florida northwards to the behoofe of England." Frobisher had already attempted the North-west passage; Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the first English colonizer, took possession of Newfoundland in the name of the Queen, and tried in vain to settle a colony there; and he died at sea at last, as described in Longfellow's ballad:

"Beside the helm he sat,

The Book was in his hand,
'Do not fear; Heaven is as near,'
He said, 'by water as by land.'"

He had obtained a commission from the Queen "to inhabit and possess at his choice all remote and heathen lands not in the actual possession of any Christian prince." He himself obtained for his body but the unquiet possession of a grave in the deep sea; but his attempt was one event more in the great series of English enterprises. After him his half-brother Raleigh sent Amidas and Barlow (1584) to explore what was

then first called Virginia in honor of the Queen; and the year after, Raleigh sent an ineffectual colony to establish itself within what is now North Carolina. Then the tumults of war arose again; and Sir Francis Drake was summoned to lead a great naval expedition, a real "armada," to the attack on Spanish America.

He sailed from Plymouth, England, September 17, 1585, with twenty-five vessels carrying 2300 men, and he had under him, as Vice - admiral, Captain Martin Frobisher, famous by his endeavor after the North-west passage. I must pass lightly over the details of Drake's enterprise. It was full of daring, though it must be remembered that the Spanish forts in the West Indies were weak, their ordnance poor, and their garrisons small. At the city of San Domingo, which is described as "the antientest and chief inhabited place in all the tract of country hereabout," Drake landed a thousand or twelve hundred men. A hundred cavalrymen hovered near them, but quickly retreated; the thousand Englishmen divided in two portions, assaulted the two city gates, carried them easily, and then reunited in the market-place. Towards midnight they tried the gates of the castle; it was at once abandoned, and by degrees, street by street, the invaders got possession of half the town. The Spanish commissioners held the other half, and there were constant negotiations for ransom; "but upon disagreement," says the English narrator, "we still spent the early mornings in firing the outmost houses; but they being built very magnificently of stone, with high lofts, gave us no small travail to ruin them." They kept two hundred sailors busy at this work of firing houses, while as many soldiers stood guard over them; and yet had not destroyed more than a third part of the town when they consented to accept 25,000 ducats for the ransom of the rest.

It is hard to distinguish this from the career of a buccaneer; but, after all, Drake was a mild-mannered gentleman,

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and kept a chaplain. There are, to be sure, in the anonymous "short abstract" of this voyage "in the handwriting of the time," published by the Hakluyt Society, some ugly hints as

to the private morals of the officers of Drake's ship, including the captain himself. And there is something very grotesque in the final fall from grace of the chaplain, Francis Fletcher, himself, as described in a memorandum among the Harleian MSS. This is the same chaplain who had the chalice and the altar-cloth as his share of the plunder of a church at Santiago. Drake afterwards found him guilty of mutiny, and apparently felt himself free to pronounce both temporal and spiritual penalties, as given in the following narrative by an eye-witness:

"Drake excommunicated Fletcher shortly after. . . . He called all the company together, and then put a lock about one of his legs, and Drake sytting cros legged on a chest, and a paire of pantoffles [slippers] in his hand, he said, Francis Fletcher, I doo heere excomunicate the out of ye Church of God, and from all benefites and graces thereof, and I denounce the to the divell and all his angells; and then he charged him vppon payne of death not once to come before the mast, for if hee did, he swore he should be hanged; and Drake cawsed a posy [inscription] to be written and boñd about Fletcher's arme, with chardge that if hee took it of hee should then be hanged. The poes [posy or inscription] was, Francis fletcher, y falsest knave that liveth."

Carthagena was next attacked by Drake, and far more stoutly defended, the inhabitants having had twenty days' notice because of the attack on San Domingo. Carthagena was smaller, but for various reasons more important; there had been preparations for attack, the women and children had been sent away, with much valuable property; a few oldfashioned cannon had been brought together; there were barricades made of earth and water-pipes across the principal streets; there were pointed sticks tipped with Indian poisons, and stuck in the ground, points upward. There were also Indian allies armed with bows and poisoned arrows. Against all these obstacles the Englishmen charged pell-mell with pikes and swords, relying little upon fire - arms. They had longer pikes than the Spaniards, and more of the Englishmen were armed. "Every man came so willingly on to the service, as

the enemy was not able to endure the fury of such hot assault." It ended in the ransoming of the town for 110,000 ducats, or about £30,000. It seems, by the report of the council of captains, that 100,000 had been the original demand, but these officers say that they can "with much honor and reputation,” accept the smaller sum after all, "inasmuch," they add, “as we have taken our full pleasure, both in the uttermost sacking and spoiling of all their household goods and merchandise, as also in that we have consumed and ruined a great part of the town by fire." After all, the Englishmen insisted that this ransom did not include the abbey and the block-house or castle, and they forced the Spaniards to give "a thousand crowns" more for the abbey, and because there was no money left with which to redeem the castle, it was blown up by the English. Drake afterwards took St. Augustine, already settled by the Spaniards, and after sailing northward, and taking on board the survivors of Raleigh's unsuccessful colony in what is now North Carolina, he sailed for England.

What a lawless and even barbarous life was this which Drake led upon the American coast and among the Spanish settlements! Yet he was not held to have dishonored his nation, but the contrary. His Queen rewarded him, poets sang of him, and Sir Philip Sidney, the mirror of all chivalry at that day, would have joined one of his expeditions had not his royal mistress kept him at home. The Spaniards would have done no better, to be sure, and would have brought to bear all the horrors of the Inquisition besides. Yet the English were apt pupils in all the atrocities of personal torture. Cavendish, who afterwards sailed in the track of Drake, circumnavigating the globe like him, took a small bark on the coast of Chili, which vessel had on board three Spaniards and a Fleming. These men were bound to Lima with letters warning the inhabitants of the approach of the English, and they

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