The very next morning the fleet arrived. Hawkins was terribly tempted to keep it out, which would have made his own fleet safe and would have struck a heavy blow at Spain; for all the Spanish vessels together were worth many millions. But he feared the wrath of Queen Elizabeth, who did not want war with Spain; so he let the Spaniards "enter with their accustomed treason" after they had agreed not to attack him.
For a few days everything went well. Then suddenly the Spaniards set on the English, killed every Englishman they could catch ashore, and attacked the little English fleet by land and sea. Once the two Spanish fleets had joined they were in overwhelming force and could have smothered Hawkins to death by sheer weight of numbers. But he made a brave fight. Within an hour the Spanish flagship and another vessel had been sunk, a third was on fire, and every English deck was clear of Spanish boarding parties. But the King's Island, to which Hawkins had moored his vessels, now swarmed with Spaniards firing cannon only a few yards off. To hearten his men he drank their health and called out, "Stand by your ordnance lustily!" As he put the goblet down a round shot sent it flying. "Look," he said, "how God has delivered me from that shot; and so will He deliver you from these traitors." Then he ordered his own battered ship to be abandoned for the Minion, telling Drake to come alongside in the Judith. In these two little vessels all that remained of the English sailed safely out, in spite of the many Spanish guns roaring away at point-blank range and of two fire-ships which almost struck home.
Drake and Hawkins lost each other in the darkness and gale outside. Drake's tiny Judith, of only fifty tons, went straight to England, with every inch of space crowded by her own crew and those she had rescued from the other vessels. Hawkins was so overcrowded in the Minion (which then meant "darling") that he asked all who would try their luck ashore to go forward, while all who would stand by the Minion stayed aft. A hundred went forward, were landed south of the Rio Grande, and died to a man, except three. One of these walked all round the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic sea-board, till he reached the mouth of the St. John in New Brunswick, when a Frenchman took him home. The other two were caught by the Spaniards and worked as slaves, one in Mexico, the other as a galley-slave in Europe. Both escaped in the end, one after fourteen, the other after twenty-two, years. The Spaniards found their own hostages all safe and sound aboard the flagship that Hawkins had abandoned at the King's Island. This surprised them very much; for they had kept all the English hostages Hawkins had sent them in exchange for theirs when they had made the agreement never to attack him, and they knew that by the laws of war he had the right to kill all the Spaniards who were in his power when the other Spaniards broke their word.
The treason of Ulua took place in 1568, just twenty years before the Great Armada. During those fateful twenty years the storm of English hatred against the Spanish tyrants grew and grew until it burst in fury on their heads.
Nothing daunted, Drake and his dare-devils went, three years running, to the Spanish Main. The third year, 1572, brought him into fame. He had only two tiny vessels, the Pasha and the Swan, with seventy-three men, all told. But with these faithful few he sailed into a secret harbour, intending to seize the whole year's treasure chest of Spain. To his surprise the found this letter from a scout on the coast: "Captain Drake! If you fortune to come to this port, make haste away! For the Spaniards have betrayed the place and taken away all that you left here." The date was fourteen days before. He soon saw that others knew his secret harbour; for in came Rance, an Englishman, who then joined forces. Stealing quietly along the coast, the hundred and twenty English lay in wait off Nombre de Dios, the place on the Atlantic coast of the Isthmus of Panama where the treasure was put aboard for Spain. An hour before dawn Drake passed the word along the waiting line: "Shove off!" Bounding into the bay he saw a Spanish rowboat, which at once saw him and pulled hard-all for the shore. The English won the desperate race, making the Spaniards sheer off to a landing some way beyond the town. Then they landed and tumbled the Spanish guns off their mountings on the wharf, to the amazement of the sleepy Spanish sentry, who ran for dear life.
No time was to be lost now; for the news spread like wildfire, and the alarm bells were ringing from every steeple in the town. So Drake made straight for the Governor's palace, while his lieutenant, Oxenham, (the hero of Westward Ho!), went by a side street to take the enemy in flank. The Spaniards fired a volley which killed Drake's trumpeter, who had just sounded the Charge! On went the English, swords flashing, fire-pikes blazing, and all ranks cheering like mad. When their two parties met each other the Spaniards were in full flight through the Treasure Gate of Panama, which Drake banged to with a will. The door of the Governor's Palace was then burst open, and there, in solid gleaming bars, lay four hundred tons of purest silver, enough to sink the Pasha and the Swan and all Drake's boats besides. But Drake would not touch a single bar. It was only diamonds, pearls, and gold that he had room for now; so he made for the King's great Treasure House itself. But a deluge of rain came on. The fire-pikes and arquebusses had to be taken under cover. The immensely strong Treasure House defied every effort to break it in. The Spaniards, finding how very few the English were, came on to the attack. Drake was wounded, so that he had to be carried off the field. And the whole attack ended in failure, and dead loss.
The game seemed up. Rance and his men withdrew, and Drake was left with less than fifty. But he was determined to be revenged on Spain for the treachery to Hawkins at Ulua (the modern Vera Cruz); and equally determined to get some Spanish treasure. So, keeping out of sight for the next five months, till the rainy season was over and the next treasure train was ready, he went wide of Nombre de Dios and made for Panama (the Pacific end of the trail across the Isthmus). He had nineteen picked Englishmen and thirty-one Maroons, who, being the offspring of Negro slaves and Indians, hated Spaniards like poison and knew the country to a foot.
On the 7th of February, 1573, from the top of a gigantic tree that stood on the Divide, Drake first saw the Pacific. Vowing to sail an English ship across the great South Sea he pushed on eagerly. Three days later his fifty men were lying in wait for the mule train bringing gold from Panama. All had their shirts on over their coats, so as to know one another in the night attack. Presently the tinkle of mule bells told of the Spanish approach. When the whole line of mules had walked into his trap Drake's whistle blew one long shrill blast and his men set on with glee. Their two years of toil and failure seemed to have come to an end: for they easily mastered the train. But then, to their intense disgust, they found that the Spaniards had fooled them by sending the silver train this way and the gold one somewhere else.
Without losing a moment Drake marched back to the Atlantic, where he met Têtu, a very gallant Frenchman, who, with his own seventy men, gladly joined company; for Spain hated to see the French there quite as much as she hated to see the English. The new friends then struck inland to a lonely spot which another Spanish train of gold and jewels had to pass on its way to Nombre de Dios. This time there was no mistake. When Drake's whistle blew, and the leading mules were stopped, the others lay down, as mule trains will. Then the guard was quickly killed or put to flight, and all the gold and jewels were safely seized and carried to the coast. Here again disaster stared Drake in the face; for all his boats were gone, and not one of the men left with them was in sight. But once more Drake got through, this time by setting up an empty biscuit bag as a sail on a raft he quickly put together. With one other Englishman and two Frenchmen he soon found his boats, divided the treasure with the French, put the English share on board ship, and, after giving many presents to the friendly Maroons, sailed for home. "And so," says one of his men, "we arrived at Plymouth on Sunday, the 9th of August, 1573, at what time the news of our Captain's return did so speedily pass over all the church that very few remained with the preacher, all hastening to see the evidence of God's love towards our Gracious Queen and Country."
The plot kept thickening fast and faster after this. New Spain, of course, was Spanish by right of discovery, conquest, and a certain kind of settling. But the Spaniards wanted to keep everyone else away, not only from all they had but from all they wished to have. Their Governor-General plainly showed this by putting up in his palace the figure of a gigantic war-horse pawing at the sky, and by carving underneath, "The Earth itself is not enough for Us." Nor was this the worst. No whites, not even the Germans, have ever been so fiendishly cruel to any natives as the Spaniards were to those they had in their power. They murdered, tortured, burnt alive, and condemned to a living death as slaves every native race they met. There were brutal Belgians in the Congo not so very long ago. American settlers and politicians have done many a dark deed to the Indians. And the British record in the old days of Newfoundland is quite as black. But, for out-and-out cruelty, "the devildoms of Spain" beat everything bad elsewhere. Moreover, while English, French, and Spaniards all wanted gold when they could get it, there was this marked difference between the two chief opponents, that while Spain cared mostly for tribute England cared mostly for trade. Now, tribute simply means squeezing as much blood-money as possible out of an enslaved country, no matter at what cost of life and liberty to the people there; while trade, though often full of cheating, really means an exchange of goods and some give-and-take all round. When we consider this great difference, and remember how cruel the Spaniards were to all whom they had made their enemies, we can understand why the Spanish Empire died and why the British lives.