‘This done,’ writes an eye-witness, ’the general made divers speeches to the whole company, persuading us to unity, obedience, and regard of our voyage, and for the better confirmation thereof willed every man the Sunday following to prepare himself to receive the Communion as Christian brothers and friends ought to do, which was done in very reverend sort; and so with good contentment every man went about his business.’

You must take this last incident into your conception of Drake’s character, think of it how you please.

It was now midwinter, the stormiest season of the year, and they remained for six weeks in Port St. Julian.  They burnt the twelve-ton pinnace, as too small for the work they had now before them, and there remained only the Pelican, the Elizabeth, and the Marigold.  In cold wild weather they weighed at last, and on August 20 made the opening of Magellan’s Straits.  The passage is seventy miles long, tortuous and dangerous.  They had no charts.  The ships’ boats led, taking soundings as they advanced.  Icy mountains overhung them on either side; heavy snow fell below.  They brought up occasionally at an island to rest the men, and let them kill a few seals and penguins to give them fresh food.  Everything they saw was new, wild, and wonderful.

Having to feel their way, they were three weeks in getting through.  They had counted on reaching the Pacific that the worst of their work was over, and that they could run north at once into warmer and calmer latitudes.  The peaceful ocean, when they entered it, proved the stormiest they had ever sailed on.  A fierce westerly gale drove them 600 miles to the south-east outside the Horn.  It had been supposed, hitherto, that Tierra del Fuego was solid land to the South Pole, and that the Straits were the only communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific.  They now learnt the true shape and character of the Western Continent.  In the latitude of Cape Horn a westerly gale blows for ever round the globe; the waves the highest anywhere known.  The Marigold went down in the tremendous encounter.  Captain Winter, in the Elizabeth, made his way back into Magellan’s Straits.  There he lay for three weeks, lighting fires nightly to show Drake where he was, but no Drake appeared.  They had agreed, if separated, to meet on the coast in the latitude of Valparaiso; but Winter was chicken-hearted, or else traitorous like Doughty, and sore, we are told, ‘against the mariners’ will,’ when the three weeks were out, he sailed away for England, where he reported that all the ships were lost but the Pelican, and that the Pelican was probably lost too.