to Sea”; but to sea she went nevertheless. Upon the coast of Spain she was “readie to sinke with a great Leake,” and (though she did not sink) “at her return into the harbour of Plimouth, she beat upon Winter Stone”—again without fatality. She escaped a still greater danger when, soon after, she twice ran aground in going out of Portsmouth Haven, lay twenty-two hours beating upon the shore, and was forced off with eight feet of water in her, only to ground again “upon the Oose,” where she stuck for six months, until the following spring, testifying to the skill of those who built and the clumsiness of those who sailed her. Being at last got off and brought round into the Thames to be docked, “her old Leake breaking upon her, had like to
have drowned all those which were in her.” Neither then, however, nor in any of her mishaps, does she appear to have actually drowned anyone, not even when, in 1591, “with a storme of wind and weather, riding at her moorings in the river of Rochester, nothing but her bare Masts overhead, shee was turned topse-turvie, her Kele uppermost.” One might have thought that this final proof of her indestructibility would convince her detractor. Drake, at any rate, knew a good sea-boat when he saw one, for he chose her for his flagship when he sailed against the Armada as Vice-Admiral, and the Calendar of State Papers contains, under the date of November, 1588, a “Device of Lord Admiral Howard, Sir F. Drake, Sir W. Wynter, Sir John Hawkyns, Capt. Wm. Borough and others, for the construction of four new ships to be built on the
model of the Revenge, but exceeding her in burthen.” (She was but of 500 tons herself, and carried at most 260 men and forty guns.) To this evidence we may add the statement of a Spanish prisoner, bearing the delightful name of Gonsalo Gonsalez del Castillo, who writes in 1592 that in England “they have been much pained by the loss of one of the Queen’s galleons, called the Revenge; they say she was the best ship the Queen had, and the one in which they had the most confidence for her defence.”
Such was the Revenge, and, if she had her share of misfortune she had also her full share of prosperous service. She bore Drake’s flag as Vice-Admiral from January 3, 1588. On May 23, at the head of sixty sail, she escorted the Lord Admiral Howard into Plymouth; then, till July 12,