phers. Drake's friend,
Frobisher, had thought he found it on the Atlantic side. After taking
counsel with his ten chosen advisers, Drake decided to give the Spanish
frigates the slip by returning through the mythical Northeast Passage.
Stop was made at Guatalco, off the west coast of New Spain, for
repairs. Here, the poor Portuguese pilot brought all the way from the
islands off the west coast of Africa, was put ashore.[9] He was
tortured by the Spaniards for piloting Drake to the South Seas. In the
course of rifling port and ship at Guatalco, charts to the Philippines
and Indian Ocean were found; so that even if the voyage to England by
the Northeast Passage proved impossible, the _Golden Hind_ could follow
these charts home round the world by the Indian Ocean and Good Hope up
Africa.

It was needless for Drake to sack more Spanish floats. He had all the
plunder he could carry. From the charts he learned that the Spaniards
always struck north for favorable winds. Heading north, month after
month, the _Golden Hind_ sailed for the shore that should have led
northeast, and that puzzled the mariners by sheering west and yet west;
fourteen hundred leagues she sailed along a leafy wilderness of tangled
trees and ropy mosses, beauty and decay, the froth of the beach combers
aripple on the very roots of the {160} trees; dolphins coursing round
the hull like greyhounds; flying fish with mica for wings flitting over
the decks; forests of seaweed warning out to deeper water. Then, a
sudden cold fell, cold and fogs that chilled the mariners of tropic
seas to the bone. The veering coast pushed them out farther westward,
far north of what the Spanish charts showed. Instead of flying fish
now, were whales, whales in schools of thousands that gambolled round
the _Golden Hind_. As the north winds--"frozen nimphes," the record
calls them--blew down the cold Arctic fogs, Drake's men thought they
were certainly nearing the Arctic regions. Where were they? Plainly
lost, lost somewhere along what are now known as Mendocino, and Blanco,
and Flattery. In a word, perhaps up as far as Oregon, and Washington.
One record says they went to latitude 43. Another record, purporting
to be more correct, says 48. The Spaniards had been north as far as
California, but beyond this, however far he may have gone, Drake was a
discoverer in the true sense of the word. Mountains covered with snow
they saw, and white cliffs, and low shelving s