The Pelican was now the only one of his vessels left, as all the rest had either returned home or been lost.  Renaming the ship the Golden Hind, Drake swept up the western side of South America and took the ports of Chili and Peru by surprise.  He captured galleons carrying quantities of gold, silver, and jewelry, and acquired plunder worth millions of dollars.[20] Drake did not think it prudent to go home by the way he had come, but struck boldly northward in search of a northeast passage into the Atlantic.  He coasted along California as far as Oregon, repaired his ship in a harbor near San Francisco, took possession of the country in the name of Queen Elizabeth and called it Nova Albion.  Finding no northeast passage, he turned his prow to the west, and circumnavigated the globe by the Cape of Good Hope, arriving at Plymouth in November, 1580.[21]

The queen received him with undisguised favor, and met a request from Philip II. for Drake’s surrender by knighting the freebooter and wearing in her crown the jewel he offered her as a present.  When the Spanish ambassador threatened that matters should come to the cannon, she replied “quietly, in her most natural voice,” writes Mendoza, “that if I used threats of that kind she would throw me into a dungeon.”  The revenge that Drake had taken for the affair at San Juan de Ulloa was so complete that for more than a hundred years he was spoken of in Spanish annals as “the Dragon.”

His example stimulated adventure in all directions, and in 1586 Thomas Cavendish, of Ipswich, sailed to South America and made a rich plunder at Spanish expense.  He returned home by the Cape of Good Hope, and was thus the second Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.[22]

In the mean time, another actor, hardly less adventurous but of a far grander purpose, had stepped upon the stage of this tremendous historic drama.  Sir Humphrey Gilbert was born in Devonshire, schooled at Eton, and educated at Oxford.  Between 1563 and 1576 he served in the wars of France, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and was therefore thoroughly steeped in the military training of the age.[23] The first evidence of Gilbert’s great purpose was the charter by Parliament, in the autumn of 1566, of a corporation for the discovery of new trades.  Gilbert was a member, and in 1567 he presented an unsuccessful petition to the queen for the use of two ships for the discovery of a northwest passage to China and the establishment of a traffic with that country.[24]

Before long Gilbert wrote a pamphlet, entitled “A Discourse to Prove a Passage by the Northwest to Cathaia and the East Indies,” which was shown by Gascoigne, a friend of Gilbert, to the celebrated mariner Martin Frobisher, and stimulated him to his glorious voyages to the northeast coast of North America.[25] Before Frobisher’s departure on his first voyage Queen Elizabeth sent for him and commended him for his enterprise, and when he sailed, July 1, 1576, she waved her hand