We go on our way through Yealmpton and Brixton, on a surface that gradually becomes very rough, and cross the toll-bridge into Plymouth.
This is a name that stirs the blood of every true child of Britain. In the days of Elizabeth’s great sailors it was from Plymouth that Britannia ruled the waves. And to-day there is no end to the interest that this place holds for those who love the navy and the sea as is the wont of Englishmen; no end to the modern interests of port and harbour, of dockyard and battleship, nor to the crowding memories on Plymouth Hoe.
DRAKE’S ISLAND, FROM THE HOE.
Here on the Hoe, with Drake’s statue beside us, and his island below us, and behind it those fair woods of Mount Edgecumbe on which Medina Sidonia cast a covetous eye, we are looking down at the channel through which all the gallant adventurers of the sixteenth century sailed out to their distant goals. This statue is the symbol of them.[5] “He was of stature low,” says John Prince of Francis Drake, “but set and strong grown; a very religious man towards God and his houses, generally sparing churches wherever he came; chaste in his life, just in his dealings, true of his word, merciful to those that were under him, and hating nothing so much as idleness.” The words fit the statue well. It was here where we are standing that he and the other captains played their memorable game of bowls, while the Armada called Invincible swept nearer and nearer. His ship and her half-fed crew lay down there in the Sound, under the lee of the island that has borne his name ever since that day, and the flagship, further out, “danced lustily as the gallantest dancer at Court.” Through that channel he and the rest sailed out into the gale when their game was done, to do their thorough work. Many times he had sailed through it already on various quests of war and adventure—and, it must be owned, of pillage: and it was from this harbour, afterwards, that he went on the voyage that “was marred before it was begun, so great preparations being too big for a cover,” the voyage to Nombre de Dios Bay, where he lies “dreaming all the time of Plymouth Hoe.”
Very long and very stirring is the visionary pageant that rises before us here: the Black Prince, triumphant, sailing in with his prisoner, the King of France; poor Katherine of Aragon, landing here in an outburst of welcome; John Hawkins, setting forth on those dubious but gallant undertakings that the Queen called “private enterprise” and Hawkins called “the Queen’s business.” His son Sir Richard long remembered a scene that took place when he was a boy, under that green hill that faces us. A fleet of Spaniards, bound for Flanders to fetch a new bride for Philip II., dared to sail between the island and the mainland “without vayling their top-sayles, or taking in of their flags; which my father Sir John Hawkins perceiving, commanded his gunner to shoot at the flag of the admiral, that they might thereby see their error.” They saw it quickly, and the matter ended with feasting.
Sir Richard’s own ship, too, takes part in the ghostly pageant, sailing close to the land to bid goodbye, for many more years than he suspected, to the throng that stood here on the Hoe to do him honour. Amid blowing of trumpets, and music of bands, and roaring of guns he left the harbour, with his thoughts full of the lady who took pleasure in red carpets. And it was there, below us, that the brave heart of Blake gave its last throb as he entered English waters—the heart that is buried, they say, in St. Andrew’s Church.
The long procession of adventurous ships winds endlessly on, past the island, and out of the harbour, and away into the world of the past. The ships of Frobisher and Gilbert, of Grenville and of Raleigh are there, and the Mayflower with the Pilgrim Fathers, and the ship of Captain Cook. And at the last I see a little ship sail in alone, and on her deck a disappointed, disillusioned woman; the woman whom the French have never forgiven because, when they broke her heart, she omitted to repay them with smiles—the daughter of Marie Antoinette. The Duchesse d’Angoulême came hither from Bordeaux, in exile for the second, but not for the last time, with the marshals’ vows of fidelity and the news of their joining Napoleon still ringing in her ears together.