Portugal was exploiting by way of the East, though still between the two the invisible Papal line held firm. One can only compare these days to the modern era of scientific. discovery. Another link in the chain of circumstance is forged, and searchers become fraught with higher hopes. The years went on, and still the search was unavailing. In 1535 Pizarro had sailed southwards on his way to conquer Peru, and seven years later, despairing of finding a passage, Ruy Lopez determined to strike across the Pacific direct from Mexico to the Philippines. How he and his crew reached the islands, what they endured, the disasters that overtook them these are things that no man knows of, only years later some half-dozen broken travel-weary men arrived back in Spain on a Portuguese vessel coming from the Spice Islands round Africa. The Pacific, despite its name, was for twenty more years a place of terror to Spanish seamen. Ships sailed into it and disappeared or were driven back. The secret of the courses of the Trade Winds had not been discovered, and ships battled with winds seeking a direct course when a longer beat northwards would have let them through. From the year 1564 things changed. Four vessels under Gomez de Legaspi reached the Philippines, and on their return voyage found the Great Circle route with steady-blowing winds that went east to the coast of California. There they made

Manila became the entrepôt of the whole trade of the Eastern seaboard of Asia. China, Japan, and the Malay Archipelago sent thither all their wealth, and Mexico became the new stepping-stone between the old world of Europe and the ancient civilisations of Asia. The Portuguese, who had come to the East Indies as traders, not conquerors, faded away, and the two Spains bestrode the world like monstrous Colossi.

Into this halcyon existence came Drake-Drake, who was first a simple merchant seaman, but by the force of circumstances soon found himself an unlicensed unlicensed privateer with a price upon his head. For diplomatic reasons letters of marque had been refused to him by the queen-letters which were regarded internationally as a proper warranty for exacting retribution for wrongs suffered at sea; but the queen's refusal did not convert him into a pirate, and his moral rights of action remained valid, but action was taken at his own risk.

Truth to say, however, this great sea-captain became a law to himself, for he threw off the shackles of make-believe and tortuous diplomacy, and saw

the vital truth of the situation. England had been set upon the path of sea knowledge by Henry VII., and after the lapse of eighty years found the world of waters denied to her by a Papal fiction which two nations grasped for their own aggrandisement. Peaceful trade penetration was denied to Englishmen. Their own queen had not yet recognised that sea protection of commerce was a State responsibility. Eliza beth's encouragement of Drake was probably no whit more disinterested than was King Charles of Spain's when he helped Magellan. Both thought in terms of Exchequer revenues. Drake for his part planned otherwise. He went out on his world cruise of 1577, not as a trader, but as the first admiral of a commerce-protecting fleet, though the fleet was provided from his own resources and those of a few friends, not as was Magellan's armada by the State and by merchant princes. He had once already led a cutting-out expedition into New Spain, but he realised that any operation of this character could not be carried out more than once on land. With the mobility that the sea and ships gave it might be done many times, and the attacker could select his own point of impact. The more unexpected the point, the greater would be the moral effect.

It was for these and not for trading objects that his fleet left Plymouth for the Horn on 15th November 1577-the

Pelican of 100 tons (in the course of the voyage renamed the Golden Hind in honour of the crest of his friend Sir Christopher Hatton), the Elizabeth of 80, the Swan of 50, the Marygold of 30, and the Christopher, a toy of 15. The total of the souls on board was 164. Drake felt that not only was he an admiral, but also an ambassador from his own country to unknown lands. "Neither did he omit to make provision for ornament and delight, carrying to this purpose with him expert musicians, rich furniture (all the vessels for his table-yea, many belonging to the cook-room, being of pure silver), with divers shows of all sorts of curious workmanship whereby the civility and magnificence of his native country might among all nations whither he should come, be the more admired." Drake, indeed, combined the tastes of the cultured courtier with the hardihood of the pioneer.

Much of the earlier part of his voyage resembled that of Magellan. The fleet coasted down Africa, touched at the Cape Verde Islands, then across to Brazil, and southward by the Plate. They came to anchor in Port St Julian, and there stood the gallows-tree on which still hung the mouldering bones of some of Magellan's crew. The gloom of the region seemed to be infectious, for here, too, Drake after a fair trial executed one of his captains who had given trouble from the outset. The land seems to breed death and de

solation, a horror of great loneliness. It has lasted to our day. Fate hangs over those who pass by it-Cradock went there; his men lived for months in that biting cold, and they went out of it northwards into the lonely seas by Mas-a-Fuera and Coronel, the setting sun and the closing waters. Then Von Spee, fresh from his victory, bore south, his men moving out of the tropical waters of the Pacific into the seething waves and cramping cold of the Horn. They doubled the Cape, and in a few days the great albatrosses were swooping at their bodies that tossed in the leaden waves.

Drake, however, was not the man to sit brooding. The horror which the region struck into the hearts of the sailors of Southern Europe impressed itself less on the imaginations of his men, more accustomed to the wintry seas and perpetual storms of northerly latitudes. The narrators of the expedition-the Portuguese pilot da Silva and the Chaplain Fletcher, a very human soul-belittled the accounts of bad weather, both here and subsequently round the Cape of Good Hope, that Portuguese and Spaniards-perhaps with the object of keeping other nations from entering on their preserves had spread abroad. The natives appeared to them of less superhuman size, and to approach more nearly to those aborigines who still cling to-day to these inhospitable regions, eking out a precarious existence from

fishing, suspicious of the white sailors who for three centuries have too often deemed their lives as valueless as those of the penguins that line their shores, and their womenfolk as fair spoil. Drake and his men seemed to have treated natives fairly wherever they went, though inevitably suspicion at times bred fighting. They, too, saw more than barrenness in these regions round Port Julian and in the Straits, something more than bleak cliffs and fathomless waters. The ever-green beeches, the fern and the fuchsia, then as to-day, grew there, and Fletcher notes the continual greenness and the "good and sweet herbs." Yet despite their beauty as they clothe the hills against a background of snowy peaks, he would be an optimist who could be enamoured of these forests soaked by incessant fogs and sleet, of the numberless bogs that dry but in the height of summer. "Clouds rest on the black splintered crests so heavy that even the ice-fields lose their whiteness; the reddish bogs and the deep dark forest patches which cling to the steep cliffs and get thicker and closer towards the sea bearing a solid impenetrable covering to everything down to the water itself." As the sun turns the glaciers to green, pink, and blue, a stark beauty falls suddenly upon the scene of desolation-a scene where death reigns, the channels silent save for the incessant scream of the wind, no hoarse voice of sea

bird or other life filling the empty echoes.

Through the Straits Drake passed in sixteen days, having first destroyed two of his vessels in order to keep close convoy, but once through his troubles increased as a fierce storm raged for a month driving the three vessels blindly about. The Marygold was lost and never heard of again; the Elizabeth, finding herself once more at the western end of the Strait, waited for a month, then, like one of Magellan's ships, grew weary and sailed home. The Golden Hind, after anchoring at Cape Horn, fought her way north up the Chilian coast. Of Drake's exploits, of his rifling ships at anchor in Spanish harbours, of his capture of galleons on the high seas, as he leisurely proceeded onwards to Nicaragua, it is not necessary to inquire. Suffice that he did these things, all in a cool gentleman-like manner, manner, very unlike the methods of the buccaneers of these seas one hundred years later. Those captured by him testify to the wonderful discipline on board, the cleanliness of the ships, the respect and veneration that he inspired amongst his officers and men, the evidences of culture and refinement evinced everywhere. "The service is of silver, richly gilt and engraved with his arms. He has, too, all possible luxuries, even to perfumes. He dines and sups to the music of violins."

the Spaniard his break through to this Spanish preserve was as fateful as was the appearance of German submarines to allied shipping in the Mediterranean in the Great War, or the escape of a German raider into the Atlantic. Drake's procedure was very similar to that of the latter. He worked on the trade routes for a short time at one focal point, then swiftly moved to another. He gathered the captured crews together on a single prize, and brought them in company till he could put them ashore at a landing-place remote from the scenes of his next exploits. He knew that his methods could not be followed for long, even though the Spaniards made no real efforts to cope with the situation. They had five months in which to do something as he cruised leisurely northward, but in the whole of that time he had to fight no real action. Instead they confined themselves (as Drake guessed) to sending ships to cut him off at the south in case he doubled on his tracks.

But Drake did no such thing. Like the Spaniards of twenty years earlier, he still thought that there must be some more central way from the west to the east coast of North America. He became the explorer once more, and went north, keeping well away from land for a great space. Colder grew the climate, sparser became the vegetation. He was already near the coast of Alaska, but as no sign of a passage appeared he turned south once more, and boldly