grew cold though it was summer.  The men felt it from having been so long in the tropics, and dropped out of health.  There was still no sign of a passage.  If passage there was, Drake perceived that it must be of enormous length.  Magellan’s Straits, he guessed, would be watched for him, so he decided on the route by the Cape of Good Hope.  In the Philippine ship he had found a chart of the Indian Archipelago.  With the help of this and his own skill he hoped to find his way.  He went down again to San Francisco, landed there, found the soil teeming with gold, made acquaintance with an Indian king who hated the Spaniards and wished to become an English subject.  But Drake had no leisure to annex new territories.  Avoiding the course from Mexico to the Philippines, he made a direct course to the Moluccas, and brought up again at the Island of Celebes.  Here the Pelican was a second time docked and scraped.  The crew had a month’s rest among the fireflies and vampires of the tropical forest.  Leaving Celebes, they entered on the most perilous part of the whole voyage.  They wound their way among coral reefs and low islands scarcely visible above the water-line.  In their chart the only outlet marked into the Indian Ocean was by the Straits of Malacca.  But Drake guessed rightly that there must be some nearer opening, and felt his way looking for it along the coast of Java.  Spite of all his care, he was once on the edge of destruction.  One evening as night was closing in a grating sound was heard under the Pelican’s keel.  In another moment she was hard and fast on a reef.  The breeze was light and the water smooth, or the world would have heard no more of Francis Drake.  She lay immovable till daybreak.  At dawn the position was seen not to be entirely desperate.  Drake himself showed all the qualities of a great commander.  Cannon were thrown over and cargo that was not needed.  In the afternoon, the wind changing, the lightened vessel lifted off the rocks and was saved.  The hull was uninjured, thanks to the Californian repairs.  All on board had behaved well with the one exception of Mr. Fletcher, the chaplain.  Mr. Fletcher, instead of working like a man, had whined about Divine retribution for the execution of Doughty.

For the moment Drake passed it over.  A few days after, they passed out through the Straits of Sunda, where they met the great ocean swell, Homer’s [Greek:  mega kuma thalasses], and they knew then that all was well.

There was now time to call Mr. Fletcher to account.  It was no business of the chaplain to discourage and dispirit men in a moment of danger, and a court was formed to sit upon him.  An English captain on his own deck represents the sovereign, and is head of Church as well as State.  Mr. Fletcher was brought to the forecastle, where Drake, sitting on a sea-chest with a pair of pantoufles in his hand, excommunicated him, pronounced him cut off from the Church of God, given over to the devil for the chastising of his flesh, and left him chained by the leg to a ring-bolt to repent of his cowardice.