Sparke was greatly taken with the unknown art of smoking.  ’The Floridians ... have an herb dried, who, with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with fire and the dried herbs put together, do suck through the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live four or five days without meat or drink.  And this all the Frenchmen used for this purpose; yet do they hold opinion withal that it causeth water and steam to void from their stomachs.’  The other ‘commodities of the land’ were ‘more than are yet known to any man.’  But Hawkins was bent on trade, not colonizing.  He sold the Tiger, a barque of fifty tons, to Laudonniere for seven hundred crowns and sailed north on the first voyage ever made along the coast of the United States by an all-English crew.  Turning east off Newfoundland ’with a good large wind, the 20 September [1565] we came to Padstow, in Cornwall, God be thanked! in safety, with the loss of twenty persons in all the voyage, and with great profit to the venturers, as also to the whole realm, in bringing home both gold, silver, pearls, and other jewels great store.  His name, therefore, be praised for evermore.  Amen.’

Hawkins was now a rich man, a favorite at court, and quite the rage in London.  The Queen was very gracious and granted him the well-known coat of arms with the crest of ‘a demi-Moor, bound and captive’ in honor of the great new English slave trade.  The Spanish ambassador met him at court and asked him to dinner, where, over the wine, Hawkins assured him that he was going out again next year.  Meanwhile, however, the famous Captain-General of the Indian trade, Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, the best naval officer that Spain perhaps has ever had, swooped down on the French in Florida, killed them all, and built the fort of St. Augustine to guard the ‘Mountains of Bright Stones’ somewhere in the hinterland.  News of this slaughter soon arrived at Madrid, whence orders presently went out to have an eye on Hawkins, whom Spanish officials thenceforth regarded as the leading interloper in New Spain.

Nevertheless Hawkins set out on his third and very ‘troublesome’ voyage in 1567, backed by all his old and many new supporters, and with a flotilla of six vessels, the Jesus, the Minion (which then meant darling), the William and John, the Judith, the Angel, and the Swallow.  This was the voyage that began those twenty years of sea-dog fighting which rose to their zenith in the battle against the Armada; and with this voyage Drake himself steps on to the stage as captain of the Judith.

There had been a hitch in 1566, for the Spanish ambassador had reported Hawkins’s after-dinner speech to his king.  Philip had protested to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth had consulted with Cecil, afterwards ’the great Lord Burleigh,’ ancestor of the Marquis of Salisbury, British Prime Minister during the Spanish-American War of 1898.  The result was that orders went down to Plymouth stopping Hawkins and binding him over, in a bond of five hundred pounds, to keep the peace with Her Majesty’s right good friend King Philip of Spain.  But in 1567 times had changed again, and Hawkins sailed with colors flying, for Elizabeth was now as ready to hurt Philip as he was to hurt her, provided always that open war was carefully avoided.