Now, at the age of twenty-two, Francis Drake was embarking on the voyage of life with the prospect of great adventures, as he had always dreamed of doing. Slave trading was not considered wrong four hundred years ago. The ships would go to Africa and buy or carry off negroes and take them to some foreign country to work in fields and mines. There the blacks would be sold for gold, silver, pearls and other things of great value. Sometimes the owner of a fleet would make a fortune in a single adventure. Of course, there was a great risk to run. Although England and Spain were not then at war, the English and Spanish treated each other as enemies when they met on the high seas. For this voyage, Captain Hawkins got leave of Queen Elizabeth “to load negroes in Guinea and sell them in the West Indies.” As a sign that the hundred and seventy men on Hawkins’s fleet saw nothing wrong in stealing black men from their homes and selling them to be slaves, here is a motto which that captain had written to govern his soldiers and sailors: “Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keep good company.” Hawkins and Drake seem to have had no trouble in seizing negroes on the coast of Africa, or in selling their human cargo in the Spanish ports of America. But as these slavers were starting back to England they were caught in a storm and had to go into a harbor in Mexico for safety and to repair damages. While they were there a Spanish fleet five times as large as theirs, loaded with gold and pearls, came in also for repairs. The English agreed to leave the Spaniards without touching their ships if the Spaniards would let them alone. But the Spanish captain did not keep his word and there was a fierce battle. Hawkins and Drake did great damage to the Spanish fleet. They reached England safely with two of their ships, though they had lost nearly all the treasure they had received as pay for the slaves. Captain Drake complained to the queen of the way in which the Spaniards had deceived them, but she was afraid to go to war with a country which had such a powerful navy as Spain’s was then. So the bold English captain took matters into his own hands. He made one voyage after another, attacking Spanish settlements where gold and silver were stored, boarding Spanish vessels, killing the men or taking them prisoners, and bringing their rich cargoes to England. Within a few years the Spaniards lived in terror of their lives when they heard that Francis Drake was near, and the king of Spain appealed to Queen Elizabeth to stop those attacks, calling Drake “the master thief of the western world.”