of Cadiz, and destroyed ten thousand tons of shipping, with their contents, in the very face of a dozen great galleys, which the nimble English vessels soon drove under their forts for shelter.  Two nights and a day, Sir Francis, that “hater of idleness,” was steadily doing his work; unloading, rifling, scuttling, sinking, and burning those transportships which contained a portion of the preparations painfully made by Philip for his great enterprise.  Pipe-staves and spikes, horse-shoes and saddles, timber and cutlasses, wine, oil, figs, raisins, biscuits, and flour, a miscellaneous mass of ingredients long brewing for the trouble of England, were emptied into the harbour, and before the second night, the blaze of a hundred and fifty burning vessels played merrily upon the grim walls of Philip’s fortresses.  Some of these ships were of the largest size then known.  There was one belonging to Marquis Santa Cruz of 1500 tons, there was a Biscayan of 1200, there were several others of 1000, 800, and of nearly equal dimensions.

Thence sailing for Lisbon, Sir Francis, captured and destroyed a hundred vessels more, appropriating what was portable of the cargoes, and annihilating the rest.  At Lisbon, Marquis Santa Cruz, lord high admiral of Spain and generalissimo of the invasion, looked on, mortified and amazed, but offering no combat, while the Plymouth privateersman swept the harbour of the great monarch of the world.  After thoroughly accomplishing his work, Drake sent a message to Santa Cruz, proposing to exchange his prisoners for such Englishmen as might then be confined in Spain.  But the marquis denied all prisoners.  Thereupon Sir Francis decided to sell his captives to the Moors, and to appropriate the proceeds of the sale towards the purchase of English slaves put of the same bondage.  Such was the fortune of war in the sixteenth century.

Having dealt these great blows, Drake set sail again from Lisbon, and, twenty leagues from St. Michaels, fell in with one of those famous Spanish East Indiamen, called carracks, then the great wonder of the seas.  This vessel, San Felipe by name, with a cargo of extraordinary value, was easily captured, and Sir Francis now determined to return.  He had done a good piece of work in a few weeks, but he was by no means of opinion that he had materially crippled the enemy.  On the contrary, he gave the government warning as to the enormous power and vast preparations of Spain.  “There would be forty thousand men under way ere long,” he said, “well equipped and provisioned;” and he stated, as the result of personal observation, that England could not be too energetic in, its measures of resistance.  He had done something with his little fleet, but he was no braggart, and had no disposition to underrate the enemy’s power.  “God make us all thankful again and again,” he observed, “that we have, although it be little, made a beginning upon the coast of Spain.”  And modestly as he spoke of what he had accomplished, so