The ships which the Spaniards used on the Pacific were usually built on the spot.  But Magellan was known to have gone by the Horn, and where a Portuguese could go an Englishman could go.  Drake proposed to try.  There was a party in Elizabeth’s Council against these adventures, and in favour of peace with Spain; but Elizabeth herself was always for enterprises of pith and moment.  She was willing to help, and others of her Council were willing too, provided their names were not to appear.  The responsibility was to be Drake’s own.  Again the vessels in which he was preparing to tempt fortune seem preposterously small.  The Pelican, or Golden Hinde, which belonged to Drake himself, was called but 120 tons, at best no larger than a modern racing yawl, though perhaps no racing yawl ever left White’s yard better found for the work which she had to do.  The next, the Elizabeth, of London, was said to be eighty tons; a small pinnace of twelve tons, in which we should hardly risk a summer cruise round the Land’s End, with two sloops or frigates of fifty and thirty tons, made the rest.  The Elizabeth was commanded by Captain Winter, a Queen’s officer, and perhaps a son of the old admiral.

We may credit Drake with knowing what he was about.  He and his comrades were carrying their lives in their hands.  If they were taken they would be inevitably hanged.  Their safety depended on speed of sailing, and specially on the power of working fast to windward, which the heavy square-rigged ships could not do.  The crews all told were 160 men and boys.  Drake had his brother John with him.  Among his officers were the chaplain, Mr. Fletcher, another minister of some kind who spoke Spanish, and in one of the sloops a mysterious Mr. Doughty.  Who Mr. Doughty was, and why he was sent out, is uncertain.  When an expedition of consequence was on hand, the Spanish party in the Cabinet usually attached to it some second in command whose business was to defeat the object.  When Drake went to Cadiz in after years to singe King Philip’s beard, he had a colleague sent with him whom he had to lock into his cabin before he could get to his work.  So far as I can make out, Mr. Doughty had a similar commission.  On this occasion secrecy was impossible.  It was generally known that Drake was going to the Pacific through Magellan Straits, to act afterwards on his own judgment.  The Spanish ambassador, now Don Bernardino de Mendoza, in informing Philip of what was intended, advised him to send out orders for the instant sinking of every English ship, and the execution of every English sailor, that appeared on either side the isthmus in West Indian waters.  The orders were despatched, but so impossible it seemed that an English pirate could reach the Pacific, that the attention was confined to the Caribbean Sea, and not a hint of alarm was sent across to the other side.