That episode cleared the air; and an interchange of courtesies and hospitalities immediately followed. But no business was done. Drake therefore began to burn the town bit by bit till twenty-five thousand ducats were paid. It was very little for the capital. But the men picked up a good deal of loot in the process and vented their ultra-Protestant zeal on all the 'graven images' that were not worth keeping for sale. On the whole the English were well satisfied. They had taken all the Spanish ships and armament they wanted, destroyed the rest, liberated over a hundred brawny galley-slaves—some Turks among them—all anxious for revenge, and had struck a blow at Spanish prestige which echoed back to Europe. Spain never hid her light under a bushel; and here, in the Governor's Palace, was a huge escutcheon with a horse standing on the earth and pawing at the sky. The motto blazoned on it was to the effect that the earth itself was not enough for Spain—Non sufficit orbis. Drake's humor was greatly tickled, and he and his officers kept asking the Spaniards to translate the motto again and again.
Delays and tempestuous head winds induced Drake to let intermediate points alone and make straight for Cartagena on the South American mainland. Cartagena had been warned and was on the alert. It was strong by both nature and art. The garrison was good of its kind, though the Spaniards' custom of fighting in quilted jackets instead of armor put them at a disadvantage. This custom was due to the heat and to the fact that the jackets were proof against the native arrows.
There was an outer and an inner harbor, with such an intricate and well-defended passage that no one thought Drake would dare go in. But he did. Frobisher had failed to catch a pilot. But Drake did the trick without one, to the utter dismay of the Spaniards. After some more very clever manoeuvres, to distract the enemy's attention from the real point of attack, Carleill and the soldiers landed under cover of the dark and came upon the town where they were least expected, by wading waist-deep through the water just out of sight of the Spanish gunners. The entrenchments did not bar the way in this unexpected quarter. But wine casks full of rammed earth had been hurriedly piled there in case the mad English should make the attempt. Carleill gave the signal. Goring's musketeers sprang forward and fired into the Spaniards' faces. Then Sampson's pikemen charged through and a desperate hand-to-hand fight ensued. Finally the Spaniards broke after Carleill had killed their standard-bearer and Goring had wounded and taken their commander. The enemies ran pell-mell through the town together till the English reformed in the Plaza. Next day Drake moved in to attack the harbor fort; whereupon it was abandoned and the whole place fell.
But again there was a dearth of booty. The Spaniards were getting shy of keeping too many valuables where they could be taken. So negotiations, emphasized by piecemeal destruction, went on till sickness and the lateness of the season put the English in a sorry fix. The sack of the city had yielded much less than that of San Domingo; and the men, who were all volunteers, to be paid out of plunder, began to grumble at their ill-success. Many had been wounded, several killed—big, faithful Tom Moone among them. A hundred died. More were ill. Two councils of war were held, one naval, the other military. The military officers agreed to give up all their own shares to the men. But the naval officers, who were poorer and who were also responsible for the expenses of their vessels, could not concur. Finally 110,000 ducats (equivalent in purchasing power to nearly three millions of dollars) were accepted.
It was now impossible to complete the programme or even to take Havana, in view of the renewed sickness, the losses, and the advance of the season. A further disappointment was experienced when Drake just missed the treasure fleet by only half a day, though through no fault of his own. Then, with constantly diminishing numbers of effective men, the course was shaped for the Spanish 'plantation' of St. Augustine in Florida. This place was utterly destroyed and some guns and money were taken from it. Then the fleet stood north again till, on the 9th of June, it found Raleigh's colony of Roanoke.
Ralph Lane, the governor, was in his fort on the island ready to brave it out. Drake offered a free passage home to all the colonists. But Lane preferred staying and going on with his surveys and 'plantation.' Drake then filled up a store ship to leave behind with Lane. But a terrific three-day storm wrecked the store ship and damped the colonists' enthusiasm so much that they persuaded Lane to change his mind. The colonists embarked and the fleet then bore away for home. Though balked of much it had expected in the way of booty, reduced in strength by losses, and therefore unable to garrison any strategic point which would threaten the life of New Spain, its purely naval work was a true and glorious success. When he arrived at Plymouth, Drake wrote immediately to Burleigh: 'My very good Lord, there is now a very great gap opened, very little to the liking of the King of Spain.'
This 'very great gap' on the American side of the Atlantic was soon to be matched by the still greater gap Drake was to make on the European side by destroying the Spanish Armada and thus securing that mightiest of ocean highways through which the hosts of emigration afterwards poured into a land endowed with the goodly heritage of English liberty and the English tongue.
The year of Drake's return (1586) was no less troublous than its immediate predecessors. The discovery of the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and to place Mary on the throne, supported by Scotland, France, and Spain, proved Mary's complicity, produced an actual threat of war from France, and made the Pope and Philip gnash their teeth with rage. The Roman Catholic allied powers had no sufficient navy, and Philip's credit was at its lowest ebb after Drake's devastating raid. The English were exultant, east and west; for the True Report of a Worthie Fight performed in the voiage from Turkie by Five Shippes of London against 11 gallies and two frigats of the King of Spain at Pantalarea, within the Straits [of Gibraltar] Anno 1586 was going the rounds and running a close second to Drake's West India achievement. The ignorant and thoughtless, both then and since, mistook this fight, and another like it in 1590, to mean that English merchantmen could beat off Spanish men-of-war. Nothing of the kind: the English Levanters were heavily armed and admirably manned by well-trained fighting crews; and what these actions really proved, if proof was necessary, was that galleys were no match for broadsides from the proper kind of sailing ships.
Turkey came into the problems of 1586 in more than name, for there was a vast diplomatic scheme on foot to unite the Turks with such Portuguese as would support Antonio, the pretender to the throne of Portugal, and the rebellious Dutch against Spain, Catholic France, and Mary Stuart's Scotland. Leicester was in the Netherlands with an English army, fighting indecisively, losing Sir Philip Sidney and angering Elizabeth by accepting the governor-generalship without her leave and against her diplomacy, which, now as ever, was opposed to any definite avowal that could possibly be helped.
Meanwhile the Great Armada was working up its strength, and Drake was commissioned to weaken it as much as possible. But, on the 8th of February, 1587, before he could sail, Mary was at last beheaded, and Elizabeth was once more entering on a tricky course of tortuous diplomacy too long by half to follow here. As the great crisis approached, it had become clearer and clearer that it was a case of kill or be killed between Elizabeth and Mary, and that England could not afford to leave Marian enemies in the rear when there might be a vast Catholic alliance in the front. But, as a sovereign, Elizabeth disliked the execution of any crowned head; as a wily woman she wanted to make the most of both sides; and as a diplomatist she would not have open war and direct operations going down to the root of the evil if devious ways would do.