s. Drake's little
_Judith_, of only fifty tons, could have given no relief, as she was
herself overfull. Hawkins asked all the men who preferred to take their
chance on land to get round the foremast and all those who wanted to
remain afloat to get round the mizzen. About a hundred chose one course
and a hundred the other. The landing took place about a hundred and
fifty miles south of the Rio Grande. The shore party nearly all died.
But three lived to write of their adventures. David Ingram, following
Indian trails all round the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic seaboard,
came out where St. John, New Brunswick, stands now, was picked up by a
passing Frenchman, and so got safely home. Job Hortop and Miles Philips
were caught by the Spaniards and sent back to Mexico. Philips escaped to
England fourteen years later. But Hortop was sent to Spain, where he
served twelve years as a galley-slave and ten as a servant before he
contrived to get aboard an English vessel.

The ten Spanish hostages were found safe and sound aboard the _Jesus_;
though, by all the rules of war, Hawkins would have been amply justified
in killing them. The English hostages were kept fast prisoners. 'If all
the miseries of this sorrowful voyage,' says Hawkins's report, 'should
be perfectly written, there should need a painful man with his pen, and
as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths of martyrs.'

Thus, in complete disaster, ended that third voyage to New Spain on
which so many hopes were set. And with this disastrous end began those
twenty years of sea-dog rage which found their satisfaction against the
Great Armada.

CHAPTER VI

DRAKE'S BEGINNING

We must now turn back for a moment to 1545, the year in which the Old
World, after the discovery of the mines of Potosi, first awoke to the
illimitable riches of the New; the year in which King Henry assembled
his epoch-making fleet; the year, too, in which the British National
Anthem was, so to say, born at sea, when the parole throughout the
waiting fleet was _God save the King!_ and the answering countersign was
_Long to reign over us!_

In the same year, at Crowndale by Tavistock in Devon, was born Francis
Drake, greatest of sea-dogs and first of modern admirals. His father,
Edmund Drake, was a skipper in modest circumstances. But from time
immemorial there had been Drakes all round the countryside of Tavistock
and the family name stood high. Francis was called after