Then came his last voyage in company with his first commander, Sir John Hawkins. Once more the West Indies felt the awful weight of his arm, but now there were varying fortunes of defeat, of reprisals, and at the end, pestilence, which struck the fleet at Nombre de Dios, and felled this mighty seaman. His body was committed to the sea, his memory to the hearts of all brave men. [Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH] XXXII A. D. 1587 THE FOUR ARMADAS Here let us call a halt. We have come to the climax of the great century, the age of the Renaissance, when Europe was born again; of the Reformation, when the Protestants of the Baltic fought the Catholics of the Mediterranean for the right to worship in freedom; and of the sea kings who laid the foundations of our modern world. Islam had reached her fullest flood of glory with the fleets of Barbarossa, the armies of the Sultan Suleiman, and all the splendors of Akbar the Magnificent, before her ebb set downward into ruin. Portugal and Spain, under one crown, shared the plunder of the Indies and the mastery of the sea. Then, as the century waned, a third-class power, the island state of England, claimed the command of the sea, and planted the seeds of an empire destined to overshadow the ruins of Spain, as well as the wreck of Islam. Here opened broad fields of adventure. There were German and English envoys at the court of Russia; English merchants seeking trade in India, Dutch gunners in the service of eastern princes, French fishermen finding the way into Canada, seamen of all these nations as slaves in Turkish galleys or in Spanish mines; everywhere sea fights, shipwrecks, trails of lost men wandering in unknown lands, matters of desert islands, and wrecked treasures with all the usual routine of plague, pestilence and famine, of battle, of murder and of sudden death. In all this tangle we must take one thread, with most to learn, I think, from a Hollander, Mynheer, J. H. van Linschoten, who was clerk to the Portuguese archbishop of the Indies and afterward in business at Terceira in the Azores, where he wrote a famous book on pilotage. He tells us about the seamanship of Portuguese and Spaniards in terms of withering contempt as a mixture of incompetence and cowardice, enough to explain the downfall and ruin of their empires. The worst ships, he says, which cleared from Cochin were worth, with their cargo, one million, eight hundred thousand pounds of our modern money. Not content with that, the swindlers in charge removed the ballast to make room for more cinnamon, whereby the _Arreliquias_ capsized and sank.