I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do:
With a joyful spirit, I, Sir Richard Grenville, die!’
And he fell upon their decks, and he died.”
The ship in which Drake sailed round the world (The Golden Hind), when it became unfit for service, was laid up near the “Mast Dock” at Deptford, where it remained for a long series of years an object of curiosity and wonder. Hentzner, in 1598, says he saw here the ship of that noble pirate, Francis Drake. From a passage in one of Ben Jonson’s plays it appears to have become a resort for holiday people, the cabin being then converted into a banqueting house. Drake’s ship at Deptford is spoken of as one of the “sights” in some verses prefixed to the redoubtable Tom Coryat’s Crudities, 1611. When the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar saw the ship in 1613, but very little remained of it. It was then lying by the river-side in shallow water, in a dock; the lower part only was left, the upper part being all gone, for almost everybody who went there, and especially sailors, were in the habit of carrying off some portion of it. Philipott, History of Kent, 1659, says that in a very short time nothing was left of her. And in Moryson’s Itinerary, 1617, it is noticed as follows—“Not farre from hence (Deptford), upon the shore, lie the broken ribs of the ship in which Sir Francis Drake sailed round the world, reserved for a monument of that great action.” A chair, made out of the wood, is to be seen in the gallery of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Let us take a contemporary poet, to see how Drake’s own generation was affected by his exploits:—
“Awake, each Muse, awake!
Not one I need, but all
To sing of Francis Drake
And his companions tall.
One Muse may chance do well,