All of Drake’s experience and sagacity had gone to the fitting out of the ships.  There were less than fifty men on board besides the regular crews, and among them were special artisans, two trained surveyors, skilled musicians furnished with excellent instruments, and the adventurous sons of some of the best families in England.  As page the Admiral had his own nephew, Jack Drake.  There were stores of wild-fire, chain-shot, arquebuses, pistols, bows, and other weapons.  The Queen herself had sent packets of perfume breathing of rich gardens, and Drake’s table furniture was of silver gilt, engraved with his arms; even some of the cooking utensils were of silver.  Nothing was spared which became the dignity of England, her Admiral and her Queen.  On calm nights the sea was alive with music.  And on board the little flagship Doughty and Drake talked together as those do whose minds answer one another like voices in a roundelay.

Men who have time and again run their heads into the jaws of death are often inclined to fatalism.  Drake had never expressed it in words, but he had a feeling that whatever he was meant to do, God would see that he did, so long as he gave himself wholly to the work.  One evening when the Southern Cross was lifting above the darkling sea, and the violins were crooning something with a weird burden to it, Doughty mused aloud.

“’T is the strangest thing in life, that whatever we are most averse to, that we are fated to do.”

“Eh?” said Drake with a laugh, looking up from Eden’s translation of Pigafetts.  “Accordin’ to that you can’t even trust yourself.  D’you look to see me set up an image to be worshiped?” Then he added in a lower tone, “That’s foolish, Tom.  God don’t shape us to be puppets.”

“That sounds like old Saavedra,” was Doughty’s idle comment.  “He had great store of antiquated sentiments—­like those in the chronicles of the paladins.  I knew his nephew well—­a witty fellow, but visionary.  He laughed at the old cavalero, but he was fond of him, and our affections rule us and ruin us.  A man should have no loves nor hates if he would get on at court.”

Sheer surprise kept the other silent for the moment, and Doughty went on,—­

“The old man had been in Mexico with Cortes, and might have risen to Adelantado in some South American province if he had not been too scrupulous to join Pizarro.  He was in London, ten or fifteen years before I knew him, and I believe he was the destruction of a well-considered Spanish plot for the assassination of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth—­the assassins nearly killed him.  He was left for dead and was picked up by some sailors.”

“He was in luck.”  Drake’s eyes twinkled.

“They would have been luckier—­if they had let the Spanish agents in London know they had him.  He paid them well of course, but he gave them credit for the most exalted motives.  All his geese were swans.”

“Maybe they acted out o’ pure decency,” Drake said dryly.