of a sudden attack, and on the third day it came. The English had insisted upon keeping possession of the island, but the men who had been appointed to stand on guard broke into a panic and fled, leaving the guns mounted for the protection of the English ships to be turned upon them by the Spaniards. The panic spread to the ships. The crews cast off their moorings and endeavoured to fly, but, attacked as they were by the battery on the island and by the Spanish ships, they were all destroyed except two--the =Minion=, in which Hawkins made his own escape, and the =Judith=, commanded by his cousin, Francis Drake. This, the treachery of the Spaniards, makes a great epoch in the history of the naval adventures of Elizabeth's reign. It killed for ever the hope of establishing a peaceful trade with the Spanish possessions in the West Indies. It showed our men that if they were to have their share of the wealth of the New World, it must be got sword in hand. Hawkins, in whom there seems to have been very much more of the fox than the lion, did not again appear in the West Indies, till he came there to die in the disastrous failure of 1594. But the work was taken up by other hands. The strongest and the most famous were Francis Drake's. After two small voyages, probably smuggling ventures with slaves, in 1570 and 1571, Drake boldly entered the West Indies to plunder in 1572 with two very small vessels, the =Pasha= of Plymouth, of 72 tons, and the =Swan=, of 25. This was a pure-and-simple buccaneering venture, conducted with spirit and skill, and finally with success. He was, indeed, beaten off at Nombre de Dios, which the historian of his voyage mendaciously asserts to have been a town as big as Plymouth. It was, in fact, a mere temporary trading station, consisting of a storehouse and twenty or thirty wood huts in a very unhealthy position, and was afterwards given up by the Spaniards in favour of Porto Bello. But after this check, and some months of cruising on the coast, made melancholy by the loss of a brother and nearly half his crews in scuffles with the Spaniards or by fever, Drake had the good fortune to capture a _recua_, the Spanish name for a string of pack mules laden with gold. The profits of the voyage were immense, and the audacity of it, not unnaturally somewhat exaggerated by his countrymen, gained Drake great renown. But the real fruits of his invasion of the West Indies were seen in the voyage of circumnavigation which followed in 1577 and 1578. A detailed history of this famous enterprise would be out of place here. It belongs, properly speaking, to discovery, and such feats as the capture of Spanish merchant ships and of the galleon _Cacafuego_ hardly entitle it to rank among the exploits of the navy. The importance of the voyage lies mainly in the immense stimulus it gave to the enterprise of the whole nation, and in this, that it was an unmistakable proclamation to