The best likeness of Drake that I know is an engraving in Sir William Stirling-Maxwell’s collection of sixteenth-century notabilities, representing him, as a scroll says at the foot of the plate, at the age of forty-three.  The face is round, the forehead broad and full, with the short brown hair curling crisply on either side.  The eyebrows are highly arched, the eyes firm, clear, and open.  I cannot undertake for the colour, but I should judge they would be dark grey, like an eagle’s.  The nose is short and thick, the mouth and chin hid by a heavy moustache on the upper lip, and a close-clipped beard well spread over chin and cheek.  The expression is good-humoured, but absolutely inflexible, not a weak line to be seen.  He was of middle height, powerfully built, perhaps too powerfully for grace, unless the quilted doublet in which the artist has dressed him exaggerates his breadth.

I have seen another portrait of him, with pretensions to authenticity, in which he appears with a slighter figure, eyes dark, full, thoughtful, and stern, a sailor’s cord about his neck with a whistle attached to it, and a ring into which a thumb is carelessly thrust, the weight of the arms resting on it, as if in a characteristic attitude.  Evidently this is a carefully drawn likeness of some remarkable seaman of the time.  I should like to believe it to be Drake, but I can feel no certainty about it.

We left him returned home in the Judith from San Juan de Ulloa, a ruined man.  He had never injured the Spaniards.  He had gone out with his cousin merely to trade, and he had met with a hearty reception from the settlers wherever he had been.  A Spanish admiral had treacherously set upon him and his kinsman, destroyed half their vessels, and robbed them of all that they had.  They had left a hundred of their comrades behind them, for whose fate they might fear the worst.  Drake thenceforth considered Spanish property as fair game till he had made up his own losses.  He waited quietly for four years till he had re-established himself, and then prepared to try fortune again in a more daring form.

The ill-luck at San Juan de Ulloa had risen from loose tongues.  There had been too much talk about it.  Too many parties had been concerned.  The Spanish Government had notice and were prepared.  Drake determined to act for himself, have no partners, and keep his own secret.  He found friends to trust him with money without asking for explanations.  The Plymouth sailors were eager to take their chance with him.  His force was absurdly small:  a sloop or brigantine of a hundred tons, which he called the Dragon (perhaps, like Lope de Vega, playing on his own name), and two small pinnaces.  With these he left Plymouth in the fall of the summer of 1572.  He had ascertained that Philip’s gold and silver from the Peruvian mines was landed at Panama, carried across the isthmus on mules’ backs on the line of M. de Lesseps’ canal, and re-shipped at Nombre de Dios, at the mouth of the Chagre River.