On the 2nd April, Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth with four ships belonging to the Queen, and with twenty-four furnished by the merchants of London, and other private individuals.  It was a bold buccaneering expedition—­combining chivalrous enterprise with the chance of enormous profit—­which was most suited to the character of English adventurers at that expanding epoch.  For it was by England, not by Elizabeth, that the quarrel with Spain was felt to be a mortal one.  It was England, not its sovereign, that was instinctively arming, at all points, to grapple with the great enemy of European liberty.  It was the spirit of self-help, of self-reliance, which was prompting the English nation to take the great work of the age into its own hands.  The mercantile instinct of the nation was flattered with the prospect of gain, the martial quality of its patrician and of its plebeian blood was eager to confront danger, the great Protestant mutiny.  Against a decrepit superstition in combination with an aggressive tyranny, all impelled the best energies of the English people against Spain, as the embodiment of all which was odious and menacing to them, and with which they felt that the life and death struggle could not long be deferred.

And of these various tendencies, there were no more fitting representatives than Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins and Essex, Cavendish and Grenfell, and the other privateersmen of the sixteenth century.  The same greed for danger, for gold, and for power, which, seven centuries before, had sent the Norman race forth to conquer all Christendom, was now sending its Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman kindred to take possession of the old world and the new.

“The wind commands me away,” said Drake on the 2nd April, 1587; “our ship is under sail.  God grant that we may so live in His fear, that the enemy may have cause to say that God doth fight for her Majesty abroad as well as at home.”

But he felt that he was not without enemies behind him, for the strong influence brought to bear against the bold policy which Walsingham favoured, was no secret to Drake.  “If we deserve ill,” said he, “let us be punished.  If we discharge our duty, in doing our best, it is a hard measure to be reported ill by those who will either keep their fingers out of the fire; or who too well affect that alteration in our government which I hope in God they shall never live to see.”  In latitude 40 deg. he spoke two Zeeland ships, homeward bound, and obtained information of great warlike stores accumulating in Cadiz and Lisbon.  His mind was instantly made up.  Fortunately, the pinnace which the Queen despatched with orders to stay his hand in the very act of smiting her great adversary, did not sail fast enough to overtake the swift corsair and his fleet.  Sir Francis had too promptly obeyed the wind, when it “commanded him away,” to receive the royal countermand.  On the 19th April, the English ships entered the harbour