Note 145 — Chapter IV

There must have been strong reasons indeed to have induced Elizabeth to have conferred such honours upon Francis Drake. On the 26th May, 1572, long before war had been declared between England and Spain, he had set out with his brothers John and Joseph on an expedition of pure piracy in two small vessels, manned by seventy-three seamen almost as daring as himself. Starting from the Gulf of Florida, he landed near St. Martha, where he built a fort and commenced an attack on the house of the Spanish governor, which he had ascertained contained a very large amount of bar-silver. Defeated in his designs to plunder it, he set out with eighteen Englishmen, part of his crew, and thirty runaway slaves, whom he had entered into his service, for Vera Cruz, which he plundered. Thence he proceeded again toward Nombre de Dios, capturing on the road a caravan of mules laden with silver, appropriating as much of it as he and his gang of marauders could carry away, and returned to England with his ill-gotten spoils in August 1573.