"Be warned, my good Richard, for 'tis a presage of ill success this bad beginning; and remember, though the Queen named your ship the Dainty, yet she was first baptized Repentance; therefore, I would forewarn you heartily."
"I thank you, sir; yet the hazard of my credit and the danger of disreputation, if I took in hand that which I should not prosecute by all means possible, are more powerful with me than your grave and sage counsel. The pinnace has been raised; I see the wind is now fair, sir; can I prevail upon you to make one of our company? If not, my barge——"
"Oh! not on any account, friend Richard, not on any account, I protest!"
The troublesome adviser was off quicker than he had come; and if it had been Sir Francis Drake instead of Richard Hawkins, he would have winced under the hearty laugh of that boisterous rover.
But Richard had a quieter way of gentle sarcasm, though both could be very freezingly polite if the occasion called for it. Sir Francis, indeed, was thought by Spanish Dons to be the most courteous of English seamen.
In ten days' time, with the help of his wife's father, Hawkins was able to put all in as good state as before the storm. "Once again," he says, "in God's name, I brought my ships out into the Sound and began to take leave of my friends, and of my dearest friend, my second self, my wife, whose unfeigned tears had wrought me into irresolution, and sent some other in my room, had I not considered that he that is in the dance must needs dance on, though he do but hop, except he will be a laughing-stock to all."
On the afternoon of the 12th of June 1593, he says: "I looft near the shore to give my farewell to all the inhabitants of the town, whereof the most part were gathered together upon the Howe, to show their grateful correspondency to the love and zeal which I, my father and predecessors have ever borne to that place, as to our natural and mother-town. And first with my noise of trumpets, after with my waytes, and then with my other music, I made the best signification I could of a kind farewell. This they answered with the waytes of the town, and the ordnance on the shore, and with shouting of voices, which with the fair evening and silence of the night, were heard a great distance off."
We can see that Richard Hawkins had a greater gift of imagination and of love of nature than his father John; in fact his "Observations" on his voyage to the South Seas are well worth reading even in these days of common travel. When the three ships were near the equator, his men began to fall sick of the scurvy, as was usual; for they had no means in those days of counteracting the flesh food by stores of canned fruit and vegetables. "I wish," he writes, "some learned man would write of this disease, for it is the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners; ... in twenty years, since I have used the sea, I dare take upon me to give account of 10,000 men consumed by the scurvy."
He had found by practical experience that sour oranges and lemons were most profitable; the "oil of vitry," too, was beneficial, if one took two drops of it mingled in a draught of water with a little sugar. Then he spoils his scientific accuracy by a general statement which is on a par with the theory that nature abhors a vacuum. "But the principal of all is the air of the land, for the sea is natural for fishes, and the land for men."
As the winds were contrary and the voyage was prolonged, the scurvy grew so "fervent" that every day there died more or less; then the men lost heart and begged he would carry them homeward. But Hawkins assured them that the speediest refreshing they could look for was the coast of Brazil.