citizens were quite on their guard against adventurers and ready to hide what they had in the most inaccessible places.  Drake then put the town up to ransom and sent out his own Maroon boy servant to bring in the message from the Spanish officer proposing terms.  This Spaniard, hating all Maroons, ran his lance through the boy and cantered away.  The boy came back with the last ounce of his strength and fell dead at Drake’s feet.  Drake sent to say he would hang two Spaniards every day if the murderer was not hanged by his own compatriots.  As no one came he began with two friars.  Then the Spaniards brought in the offender and hanged him in the presence of both armies.

That episode cleared the air; and an interchange of courtesies and hospitalities immediately followed.  But no business was done.  Drake therefore began to burn the town bit by bit till twenty-five thousand ducats were paid.  It was very little for the capital.  But the men picked up a good deal of loot in the process and vented their ultra-Protestant zeal on all the ‘graven images’ that were not worth keeping for sale.  On the whole the English were well satisfied.  They had taken all the Spanish ships and armament they wanted, destroyed the rest, liberated over a hundred brawny galley-slaves—­some Turks among them—­all anxious for revenge, and had struck a blow at Spanish prestige which echoed back to Europe.  Spain never hid her light under a bushel; and here, in the Governor’s Palace, was a huge escutcheon with a horse standing on the earth and pawing at the sky.  The motto blazoned on it was to the effect that the earth itself was not enough for Spain—­Non sufficit orbis. Drake’s humor was greatly tickled, and he and his officers kept asking the Spaniards to translate the motto again and again.

Delays and tempestuous head winds induced Drake to let intermediate points alone and make straight for Cartagena on the South American mainland.  Cartagena had been warned and was on the alert.  It was strong by both nature and art.  The garrison was good of its kind, though the Spaniards’ custom of fighting in quilted jackets instead of armor put them at a disadvantage.  This custom was due to the heat and to the fact that the jackets were proof against the native arrows.

There was an outer and an inner harbor, with such an intricate and well-defended passage that no one thought Drake would dare go in.  But he did.  Frobisher had failed to catch a pilot.  But Drake did the trick without one, to the utter dismay of the Spaniards.  After some more very clever manoeuvres, to distract the enemy’s attention from the real point of attack, Carleill and the soldiers landed under cover of the dark and came upon the town where they were least expected, by wading waist-deep through the water just out of sight of the Spanish gunners.  The entrenchments did not bar the way in this unexpected quarter.  But wine casks full of rammed earth had been hurriedly piled there in case the mad English