on, he claimed it for Queen Elizabeth. In July 1579
he weighed anchor and steered south-west. {9} He reached the Molucca
Islands in November, and arrived at Java in March. In June he rounded
the Cape of Good Hope and then beat his way up the Atlantic to England.
In September 1580 the _Golden Hind_ entered the harbour of Plymouth.
How Drake became the lion of the hour when he reached England, after
having circumnavigated the globe, need not be told. Ballads were
recited in his honour. Queen Elizabeth dined in state on the _Golden
Hind_, and, after the dinner, with the sword which she had given him
when he set out, she conferred on Drake the honour of knighthood, as
the seal of his country's acclaim.

Drake's conclusions regarding the supposed passage from the Pacific to
the Atlantic were correct, though for two hundred years they were
rejected by geographers. His words are worth setting down: '_The Asian
and American continents, if they be not fully joined, yet seem they to
come very neere, from whose high and snow-covered mountains, the north
and north-west winds send abroad their frozen nimphes to the infecting
of the whole air--hence comes it that in the middest of their summer,
the snow hardly departeth from these hills at all; hence come those
thicke mists and {10} most stinking fogges, ... for these reasons we
coniecture that either there is no passage at all through these
Northerne coasts, which is most likely, or if there be, that it is
unnavigable_.'

{11}

CHAPTER II

VITUS BERING ON THE PACIFIC

Since Drake's day more than a century had rolled on. Russia was
awakening from ages of sleep, as Japan has awakened in our time, and
Peter the Great was endeavouring to pilot the ship of state out to the
wide seas of a world destiny. Peter, like the German Kaiser of to-day,
was ambitious to make his country a world-power. He had seen enough of
Europe to learn that neighbouring nations were increasing their
strength in three ways--by conquest, by discovery, and by foreign
commerce--and that foreign commerce meant, not only buying and selling,
but carrying the traffic of other nations. The East India Company, in
whose dockyards he had worked as a carpenter, was a striking instance
of the strength that could be built up by foreign commerce. Its ships
cruised from Nova Zembia to Persia and East India, carrying forth the
products of English workshops and {12} farms, and bringing back the
treasures of