“God made men afore the Devil made Dons,” growled Tom Moone.  “Yon’s a man.”

Drake had gone down the wharf with John Hawkins of Plymouth, a town that was warmly defiant of Spain’s armed monopoly of sea-trade.  Privateers were dodging about the trade-routes where Spanish and Portuguese galleons, laden with ingots of gold and silver, dyewoods, pearls, spices, silks and priceless merchandise, moved as menacing sea-castles.  Huger and huger galleasses were built, masted and timbered with mighty trunks from the virgin forests of the Old World, four and five feet thick.  The military discipline of the Continent made a warship a floating barrack; the decks of a Spanish man-of-war were packed with drilled troops like marching engines of destruction, dealing leaden death from arquebus and musquetoun.  The little ships of Cabot, Willoughby and William Hawkins had not exceeded fifty, sixty, at most a hundred tons; Philip’s leviathans outweighed them more than ten to one.  What could England do against the landing of such an army?  An English Admiral would be Jack the Giant-Killer with no magic at his command.  Yet in the face of all this, under the very noses of the Spanish patrol, Protestant craftsmen were escaping from the Inquisition in the Netherlands to England, where Elizabeth had contrived to let it be known that they were quite welcome.

To a perfectly innocent and lawful coasting trade Drake and his crew now added this hazardous passenger service.  They were braving imprisonment, torture and the stake, for in 1562 no less than twenty-six Englishmen were burned alive in Spain, and ten times as many lay in prison.  Before Drake was twenty all Spanish ports were closed to English trade.  He sold his ship and joined Hawkins in his more or less contraband trade with the West Indies.

With every year of adventure upon the high seas his hatred of the tyranny of Spain deepened and strengthened.  Yet though Spanish ferocity might soak the world in blood, he would not have his men tainted with the evil inheritance of the idolaters.  It came to be known that El Draque did not kill prisoners.  His crews fought like demons, but they slew no unarmed man, they molested no woman or child.  On these terms only would he accept allies.  Tons of plunder he took, but never a helpless life.  He landed the shivering crews of his prizes on some Spanish island or with a laugh returned to them their empty ships.  “A dead man’s no mortal use to anybody,” he would say cheerily, and go on using his cock-boats to sink or capture galleys.  At twenty-seven, beholding for the first time the shining Pacific, he vowed that with God’s help he would sail an English ship on that sea.  Alone upon the platform built in a great tree with steps cut in its trunk, to which his negro allies the Maroons had guided him, he conceived the sublimely audacious plan which he was one day to unfold to Walsingham and the Queen.