ed.

"Search now, and see (for I will not speak of mine own small
doings), in all those memorable voyages, which the worthy
and learned Mr. Hakluyt hath so painfully collected, and
which are to my old age next only to my Bible, whether in
all the fights which we have endured with the Spaniards,
their loss, even in victory, hath not far exceeded ours.
For we are both bigger of body and fiercer of spirit, being
even to the poorest of us (thanks so the care of our
illustrious princes), the best fed men of Europe, the most
trained to feats of strength and use of weapons, and put our
trust also not in any Virgin or saints, dead rags and bones,
painted idols which have no breath in their mouths, or St.
Bartholomew medals and such devil's remembrancers; but in
the only true God and our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom
whosoever trusteth, one of them shall chase a thousand. So
I hold, having had good experience; and say, if they have
done it once, let them do it again, and kill their eleven to
our two, with any weapon they will, save paper bullets blown
out of Fame's lying trumpet. Yet I have no quarrel with the
poor Portugal; for I doubt not but friend Lopez Vaz had
looking over his shoulder as he wrote some mighty black
velvet Don, with a name as long as that Don Bernaldino
Delgadillo de Avellaneda who set forth lately his
vainglorious libel of lies concerning the last and fatal
voyage of my dear friends Sir F. Drake and Sir John Hawkins,
who rest in peace, having finished their labors, as would
God I rested. To whose shameless and unspeakable lying my
good friend Mr. Henry Savile of this county did most pithily
and wittily reply, stripping the ass out of his lion's skin;
and Sir Thomas Baskerville, general of the fleet, by my
advice, send him a cartel of defiance, offering to meet him
with choice of weapons, in any indifferent kingdom of equal
distance from this realm; which challenge he hath prudently
put in his pipe, or rather rolled it up for one of his
Spanish cigarros, and smoked it, and I doubt not, found it
foul in the mouth."

"But the next day, gentlemen, in came some five-and-twenty more, being
the wreck of the other party, and with them a few negroes; and these
last proved themselves no honester men than they were brave, for there
bein