ff the sea. But the best
guns Drake used against the Spanish Armada in 1588 were not at all bad
compared with those that Nelson used at Trafalgar in 1805. There is
more change in twenty years now than there was in two hundred years
then. The chief improvements were in making the cannon balls fit
better, in putting the powder into canvas bags, instead of ladling it
in loose, and in fitting the guns with tackle, so that they could be
much more easily handled, fired, and aimed.

The change in ships during the sailing age was much greater than the
change in guns. More sails and better ones were used. The old
forecastle, once something really like a little castle set up on deck,
was made lower and lower, till it was left out altogether; though the
name remains to describe the front part of every ship, and is now
pronounced fo'c's'le or foxle. The same sort of top-hamper (that is,
anything that makes the ship top-heavy) was cut down, bit by bit, as
time went on, from the quarter-deck over the stern; till at last the
big British men-of-war became more or less like the _Victory_, which
was Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, and which is still kept in
Portsmouth Harbour, where Henry VIII's first promise of a sailing fleet
appeared in 1545, the year that Drake was born.

Drake was a first-rate seaman long before he grow up. His father, also
a seaman, lived in a man-of-war on the Medway near where Chatham
Dockyard stands today; and Drake and his eleven sturdy brothers spent
every minute they could in sailing about and "learning the ropes."
With "the master of a barque, which used to coast along the shore and
sometimes carry merchandise into Zeeland (Holland) and France" Drake
went to sea at the age of ten, and did so well that "the old man at his
death bequeathed his barque to him by will and testament."

But the Channel trade was much too tame for Drake. So in 1567, when he
was twenty-two, he sailed with Hawkins, who was already a famous
Sea-Dog, to try his fortune round the Spanish Main, (that is, the
mainland of northern South America and of the lands all round Panama).
Luck went against them from start to finish. Hawkins, who founded the
slave trade that lasted till the nineteenth century, was attacked this
time by the negroes he tried to "snare" in Africa. "Envenomed arrows"
worked havoc with the Englishmen. "There hardly escaped any that had
blood drawn, but died in strange sort, with their mouths shut some ten
da