DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

Sr" creed, whenever that service was likely to be repaid with plunder. When cruising in the Channel, he learned that a Spanish vessel had been freighted m Flanders, and was on its way home with a cargo of 80,000 ducats in gold, and a batch of Protestant prisoners who were being taken to serve in the Spanish galleys. Cobham gave chase to the vessel, caught her in the Bay of Biscay, fired into her, killed the captain and some of the crew, boarded her, sewed up the captain and the survivors of the crew in the sails of their own ship, flung them overboard, and made off with the booty. But of all the ‘sea-dogs,’ as these daring mariners were called, the most conspicuous and remarkable was Drake. He was born at Tavistock in the year 1545, on the farm of his father, who subsequently became Vicar of Upnor on the Medway. He began by serving as an apprentice in a Channel coaster, and then joined his kinsman Hawkins in an expedition to the Spanish main. Drake’s Puritanism, like Cobham’s, went hand in hand with his love of adventure. To kill Catholic Spaniards and to plunder their riches was, in his mind, a righteous work. Hawkins’ expedition turned out a failure ; but though Drake lost in it all he possessed, he began to sail shortly afterwards on his own account, and in the year 1572 he already took a convoy of Spanish