Hawkins did not have it all his own way with the negroes, by whom he once lost seven of his own men killed and twenty-seven wounded.  ’But the captain in a singular wise manner carried himself with countenance very cheerful outwardly, although inwardly his heart was broken in pieces for it; done to this end, that the Portugais, being with him, should not presume to resist against him.’  After losing five more men, who were eaten by sharks, Hawkins shaped his course westward with a good cargo of negroes and ‘other merchandises.’  ’Contrary winds and some tornados happened to us very ill.  But the Almighty God, who never suffereth His elect to perish, sent us the ordinary Breeze, which never left us till we came to an island of the Cannibals’ (Caribs of Dominica), who, by the by, had just eaten a shipload of Spaniards.

Hawkins found the Spanish officials determined to make a show of resisting unauthorized trade.  But when ’he prepared 100 men well armed with bows, arrows, arquebuses, and pikes, with which he marched townwards,’ the officials let the sale of blacks go on.  Hawkins was particularly anxious to get rid of his ‘lean negroes,’ who might die in his hands and become a dead loss; so he used the ‘gunboat argument’ to good effect.  Sparke kept his eyes open for side-shows and was delighted with the alligators, which he called crocodiles, perhaps for the sake of the crocodile tears.  ’His nature is to cry and sob like a Christian to provoke his prey to come to him; and thereupon came this proverb, that is applied unto women when they weep, lachrymoe crocodili.’

From the West Indies Hawkins made for Florida, which was then an object of exceptional desire among adventurous Englishmen.  De Soto, one of Pizarro’s lieutenants, had annexed it to Spain and, in 1539, had started off inland to discover the supposed Peru of North America.  Three years later he had died while descending the valley of the Mississippi.  Six years later again, the first Spanish missionary in Florida ’taking upon him to persuade the people to subjection, was by them taken, and his skin cruelly pulled over his ears, and his flesh eaten.’  Hawkins’s men had fair warning on the way; for ’they, being ashore, found a dead man, dried in a manner whole, with other heads and bodies of men,’ apparently smoked like hams.  ‘But to return to our purpose,’ adds the indefatigable Sparke, ’the captain in the ship’s pinnace sailed along the shore and went into every creek, speaking with divers of the Floridians, because he would understand where the Frenchmen inhabited.’  Finally he found them ’in the river of May [now St. John’s River] and standing in 30 degrees and better.’  There was ’great store of maize and mill, and grapes of great bigness.  Also deer great plenty, which came upon the sands before them.’