DRAKE CAPTURES NOMBRE DE DIOS
Drake and his men rushed up the main street, some with firearms, others with bows and arrows, and carrying flaming pikes.
The upshot was that these thirty-eight men agreed to join Drake in his mad project; for there was a magnetic power in this born leader of men, as in all great leaders; they could not help believing in him and loving him for his very rashness and devilry—Drake, the Robin Hood of the ocean.
When the pinnaces were put together they stole along the coast, seized and questioned some negroes whom they found, and heard that all the country from Panama to Nombre de Dios was held by a savage, black people, a mixed race of African escaped slaves intermarried with Indian women, and forming a tribe of splendid giants, formidable to their late masters, the Spaniards, and terribly cruel. But, owing to their recent outrages, the people of Nombre de Dios had sent to Panama for help, and Drake's surprise did not look feasible.
However, with seventy-three men armed, some of them with bows and arrows and gear for holding blazing tow, Drake crept along near the shore in the dark.
As they landed under the shore battery they heard the city waking to a panic, for they dreaded an attack of the half-breeds: first came a confused murmur, then women's shrieks, then shouts of command and the tuck of drums. Drake and his men rushed up the main street, meeting at the Plaza a splutter of gun-shots and then a long roar of musketry. In the midst of the fray John Drake and Oxenham broke in upon the Spaniards' flank, who turned and fled, pursued by flaming pikes and arrows. On entering the governor's house Drake saw a great pile of silver bars shining from floor to ceiling—a pile seventy feet in length.
"Not one bar to be touched, lads," shouted Drake, "till the fighting be done."