The air was thick with rumors of war with Spain when Drake arrived in London years later, in the company of a new friend, Thomas Doughty,—­courtier, soldier, scholar, familiar with every shifting undercurrent of European court life.  Never at a loss for a phrase, ready of wit and quick of understanding, Doughty could put into words what the frank-hearted young sea-captain had thought and felt and dreamed.  Both knew the peace with Philip to be only deceptive.  Walsingham and Leicester were for war; Burleigh for peace; between the two the subtle Queen played fast and loose with her powerful enemy.

Drake avowed to Doughty his belief that to strike effectively at the gigantic power of Spain, England must raid the colonies—­not the West Indies alone, but the rich western provinces of Peru and Chili.  No one had been south of Patagonia since its discovery, sixty years before.  Geographers still held that beyond the Straits of Magellan a huge Antarctic continent existed.  From that unknown region of darkness and tempest came the great heaving ground-swell, the tidal wave and the hurricane.  Even Spanish pilots never used the perilous southern route.  Treasure went overland across the Isthmus.  Every year an elephantine treasure-ship sailed from Panama westward through the South Sea; and there was a rich trade between the American mines and the Orient and the Spanish peninsula, by way of the Cape of Good Hope.  Doughty’s imagination was fired by the gorgeous possibilities of the idea, and when he became the secretary of Christopher Hatton, the Queen’s handsome Captain of the Guard, he laid the plan before him with all the eloquence of his persuasive tongue.  Hatton finally obtained from Elizabeth a promise to contribute a thousand crowns to the cost of an expedition to penetrate the South Seas.  This, however, was only on condition that the affair should be kept secret, above all from Burleigh, who was certain to use every effort to stop it.  She had already, in a private audience with Drake, been informed of the main features and even the details of the scheme, and had assured him that when the time was ripe he should be chosen to avenge the long series of injuries which Philip had inflicted upon England’s honor and her own.

When in mid-November, 1577, Drake ran out of Plymouth with his tiny fleet, he had with him all told one hundred and fifty seamen and fourteen boys, enlisted for a voyage to Alexandria, although it was pretty well known that this was a blind.  His flagship, the Pelican, afterward re-christened the Golden Hynde for Hatton’s coat-of-arms, was a hundred-ton ship carrying eighteen guns.  The Marygold, a barque of thirty tons and fifteen guns, and the Swan, a provision ship of fifty tons, were commanded by two of the gentlemen volunteers, Mr. John Thomas and Mr. John Chester.  Captain John Wynter commanded the Elizabeth, a new eighty-ton ship, and a fifteen-ton pinnace called the Christopher in honor of Hatton, was commanded by Tom Moore.  Thomas Doughty was commander of the land-soldiers, and his brother John was enlisted among the gentlemen adventurers.