Francis Drake felt himself commissioned by a greater than Queen Elizabeth. "I am the man I have promised to be, beseeching God, the Saviour of all the world, to have us in His keeping "—so he writes in his letter to Winter.
The question now before them was how to get home. The whole west coast of America was now alarmed, and the Spaniards would stop him if he tried to return by the Straits as he came. So Drake called the ship's company together and took them into counsel. He desired to sail north and find a way home by the North-west Passage; for he, too, was possessed by that chimerical idea.
"All of us," writes one of his company, "willingly hearkened and consented to our general's advice; which was, first, to seek out some convenient place to trim our ship, and store ourselves with wood and water and such provisions as we could get; thenceforward to hasten on our intended journey for the discovery of the said passage, through which we might with joy return to our longed homes."
On 16th March they made the coast of Nicaragua and effected some captures. Swooping down upon the little port of Guatuleo, they found the judges sitting in court, and as a merry change for them, the whole court, judges and counsel and prisoners, were carried off to the Golden Hind, where, amid hearty laughter, the chief judge was bidden to write an order for all the inhabitants to leave the town for twenty-four hours. Then Drake and his men went ashore and replenished their cupboards from the Spanish storehouses. The next capture was a vessel containing two Chinese pilots, who had all the secret charts for sailing across the Pacific.
We may well believe that Drake, as he pored over these in his little cabin, may have thought to himself, "Why should not we go home that way, and thus have sailed round the globe?"
On 3rd June they had reached latitude 42° N., and were feeling the cold extremely. A storm was blowing as they reached Vancouver Island, and here they turned back, and after turning south ten degrees put into a fair and good bay, where the white cliffs reminded them of home, probably near San Francisco.
The natives came round in their canoes, and one threw a small rush basket full of tabah, or tobacco, into the ship's boat.
Tents were put up on the shore and fortified by stones, but the red folk who assembled seemed to be worshipping the strangers as gods. Presents were exchanged, but their women "tormented themselves lamentably, tearing chest and bosom with their nails, and dashing themselves on the ground till they were covered with blood." Drake at once ordered all his crew to prayers. The natives seemed to half-understand the ceremony, and chanted a solemn "Oh!" at every pause.
Next day the great chief came with his retinue in feathered cloaks and painted faces. The red men sang and the women danced, until the chief advanced and put his coronet on Drake's head. These people lived in circular dens hollowed in the ground; they slept upon rushes round a central fire. The men were nearly naked; the women wore a garment of bulrushes round the waist and a deer-skin over the shoulders.
When at the end of July the Golden Hind weighed anchor, loud lamentations went up and fires were lit on the hilltops as a last sacrifice to the divine strangers. For sixty-eight days they sailed west and saw no land; then they came to islands where the natives pilfered; then they made the Philippines, and in November the Moluccas. Drake anchored at a small island near Celebes, east of Borneo, and spent four weeks in cleaning and repairing his ship. Here they saw bats as big as hens, and land-crabs, "very good and restoring meat," which had a habit of climbing up into trees when pursued.