Who seeks the way to win renown,
   Or flies with wings to high desire,
   Who seeks to wear the laurel crown,
   Or hath the mind that would aspire—­
   Let him his native soil eschew,
   Let him go range and seek a new.

Grenville himself was a wild and roving blade, no great commander, but an adventurer of the most daring kind by land or sea.  He rather enjoyed the consternation he caused by aping the airs of a pirate king.  He had a rough way with him at all times; and Ralph Lane was much set against his being the commander of the ‘Virginia Voyage’ of which Lane himself was the governor on land.  But in action he always was, beyond a doubt, the very beau ideal of a ‘first-class fighting man.’  A striking instance of his methods was afforded on his return from Virginia, when he found an armed Spanish treasure ship ahead of him at sea.  He had no boat to board her with.  But he knocked some sort of one together out of the ship’s chests and sprang up the Spaniard’s side with his boarding party just as this makeshift boat was sinking under them.

The last fight of the Revenge is almost incredible from the odds engaged—­fifty-three vessels to one.  But it is true; and neither Raleigh’s glowing prose nor Tennyson’s glowing verse exaggerates it.  Lord Thomas Howard, ‘almost famished for want of prey,’ had been cruising in search of treasure ships when Captain Middleton, one of the gentlemen-adventurers who followed the gallant Earl of Cumberland, came in to warn him that Don Alonzo de Bazan was following with fifty-three sail.  The English crews were partly ashore at the Azores; and Howard had barely time to bring them off, cut his cables, and work to windward of the overwhelming Spaniards.

Grenville’s men were last.  The Revenge had only ’her hundred fighters on deck and her ninety sick below’ when the Spanish fleet closed round him.  Yet, just as he had sworn to cut down the first man who touched a sail when the master thought there was still a chance to slip through, so now he refused to surrender on any terms at all.  Then, running down close-hauled on the starboard tack, decks cleared for action and crew at battle quarters, he steered right between two divisions of the Spanish fleet till ‘the mountain-like San Felipe, of fifteen hundred tons,’ ranging up on his weather side, blanketed his canvas and left him almost becalmed.  Immediately the vessels which the Revenge had weathered hauled their wind and came up on her from to-leeward.  Then, at three o’clock in the afternoon of the 1st of September, 1591, that immortal fight began.