“Your Majesty,” he answered, “give me a good vessel under me and plenty of sea-room, and I’ll trouble no council to care for me and my right.” Elizabeth was in a rarely good-natured mood. She patted the captain on his broad shoulder.
“I’d gladly know what the king of Spain would do with such a saucy fellow as you,” she said. “You’d better go home and think no more about the New World. One side of the Atlantic is enough for a man.” The captain withdrew, but Elizabeth bade an attendant call him back.
“Let me understand when it is your will to go on another trip,” she said, “for no one could expect a pirate to obey his queen, and then, too, I have a vessel that might be the better for a voyage or two, even in the hands of a simple sailor like yourself.”
Cecil objected and the Spanish ambassador raged, but it was not long before Hawkins set out on another voyage, this time in a great ship of the queen’s, and she as well as many of her council took shares in the enterprise. “See you to it that you do no wrong to the king of Spain,” were the queen’s orders, but she lent the commander one hundred good soldiers. When Hawkins came back in all the glory of a successful voyage and with bags of Spanish coins for queen and councilors, he was invited to dine with his sovereign. The Spanish ambassador was also dining at court, but he could have had little pleasure in his dinner, for he was thinking of what he should have to write to the king of Spain. What Philip said when the letters reached him no one knows, but whenever he came to the name of Hawkins, he wrote on the margin “Beware, beware!”
On one of Hawkins’s voyages went a kinsman of his own named Francis Drake. He was a young man of medium height, with broad shoulders, reddish beard, and keen, kindly eyes. The voyage on which he went was unsuccessful, for a Spanish ship set upon the Englishmen and robbed them. Worse than that, there were not provisions enough to last on the trip home, and one hundred of his comrades volunteered to take their chances on the land that the rest of the company might be sure of safety.
Drake made up his mind that the king of Spain should pay for his own lost investment and his kinsman’s captured hides to say nothing of reprisal for the suffering and perhaps death of the hundred brave men who had sacrificed themselves for their comrades. He did very little talking about his plans, but there were sailors enough in Plymouth who were ready to go anywhere with him, and he had friends who were willing to invest in any undertaking that he would lead. He set sail for America.
He was not going out vaguely into the west, hoping that somewhere he might pick up something worth bringing home, he had a very definite plan. He sailed straight for Panama and landed. There he waited. While he was waiting, he climbed a tall tree one day, and far to the westward the Pacific Ocean spread out before him. “If the almighty God will give me life,” said he, “I’ll sail a ship in those waters before many years.”
After a while he and his men heard bits of Spanish song, the tinkling of bells on the necks of mules, and the sound of the feet of the animals striking upon the well-trodden path. Then the English dashed out, for this was King Philip’s treasure train that once a year paced leisurely up the path with the output of the mines, with gold, silver, emeralds, and diamonds. There were more than the ship could carry, says the old story. The ship could easily come again, the ocean was free; so they buried the great bars of silver and steered for England.
When Drake arrived, he made no boast of what he had done, he divided the treasure and did no talking. He read books on geography, he studied charts and globes, he questioned seamen who had been on the farther side of the ocean, and he had more than one interview with the queen and different members of her council. To agree as a council to support Drake would be to declare war against Spain, and it would not answer to have the names of the councilors who invested in the enterprise made public, but many a one among them, and even the queen herself was ready to fill a coffer or two with good Spanish gold.
The preparations were so unusual that the voyage could not be kept secret. “I pray your Majesty,” wrote the Spanish ambassador to Philip, “I pray you order your planters in the New World to hang every Englishman upon whom they can lay hands, and bid your sailors sink every ship that comes in their sight.”