The only two English vessels that escaped were the Minion and the Judith.  When nothing else was left to do, Hawkins shouted to Drake to lay the Judith aboard the Minion, take in all the men and stores he could, and put to sea.  Drake, then only twenty-three, did this with consummate skill.  Hawkins followed some time after and anchored just out of range.  But Drake had already gained an offing that caused the two little vessels to part company in the night, during which a whole gale from the north sprang up, threatening to put the Judith on a lee shore.  Drake therefore fought his way to windward; and, seeing no one when the gale abated, and having barely enough stores to make a friendly land, sailed straight home.  Hawkins reported the Judith, without mentioning Drake’s name, as ‘forsaking’ the Minion.  But no other witness thought Drake to blame.

Hawkins himself rode out the gale under the lee of a little island, then beat about for two weeks of increasing misery, when ’hides were thought very good meat, and rats, cats, mice, and dogs, parrots and monkeys that were got at great price, none escaped.’  The Minion was of three hundred tons; and so was insufferably overcrowded with three hundred men, two hundred English and one hundred negroes.  Drake’s little Judith, of only fifty tons, could have given no relief, as she was herself overfull.  Hawkins asked all the men who preferred to take their chance on land to get round the foremast and all those who wanted to remain afloat to get round the mizzen.  About a hundred chose one course and a hundred the other.  The landing took place about a hundred and fifty miles south of the Rio Grande.  The shore party nearly all died.  But three lived to write of their adventures.  David Ingram, following Indian trails all round the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic seaboard, came out where St. John, New Brunswick, stands now, was picked up by a passing Frenchman, and so got safely home.  Job Hortop and Miles Philips were caught by the Spaniards and sent back to Mexico.  Philips escaped to England fourteen years later.  But Hortop was sent to Spain, where he served twelve years as a galley-slave and ten as a servant before he contrived to get aboard an English vessel.

The ten Spanish hostages were found safe and sound aboard the Jesus; though, by all the rules of war, Hawkins would have been amply justified in killing them.  The English hostages were kept fast prisoners.  ’If all the miseries of this sorrowful voyage,’ says Hawkins’s report, ’should be perfectly written, there should need a painful man with his pen, and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths of martyrs.’

Thus, in complete disaster, ended that third voyage to New Spain on which so many hopes were set.  And with this disastrous end began those twenty years of sea-dog rage which found their satisfaction against the Great Armada.