“Your life is more precious to us and England than all the gold of the Indies!” they replied, and so by kindly force they carried him down to the boats and rowed away, having accomplished perhaps the most splendid failure in history. The fame of this exploit instantly echoed through the whole Spanish Main and thence across the Atlantic to Europe. A few days later he avenged his failure at Nombre de Dios by cutting a big ship out from under the guns of Cartagena. Then he vanished, leaving no other trace behind him than the poor little abandoned _Swan_. For the next few months nothing was seen of him, though his hand was felt far and wide along the coast. Spanish store-ships disappeared, dispatch boats were intercepted, and coast-towns were raided with bewildering rapidity and effectiveness. But all this time the deadly tropical fever was playing havoc with his little handful of men. His brother John died of it, and man after man was struck down till at last, out of the seventy-three who had sailed with him from Plymouth, he could only muster eighteen fighting men when he at length started to plunder the mule-train from Panama. On the fourth day of the journey a very memorable thing happened, for that noon he reached the top of the dividing ridge of the Isthmus, and lo! there before him, only a few miles away, lay the smooth, shining expanse of the Pacific Ocean, that long-hidden, jealously-guarded sea on which his were the first English eyes that had ever gazed. He did just what such a man would have done in such circumstances. He fell on his knees and, raising his hands to heaven, cried aloud: “Almighty God, of Thy goodness, give me life and leave once to sail an English ship on yonder sea!” Years afterwards the prayer was granted, and not only did he sail on the Golden Sea, but crossed it while he was making the first voyage that an Englishman ever made round the world. Were I writing a book instead of an essay I could tell of the plundering of the mule-trains, of the taking of Vera Cruz--where, to the astonishment of the Spaniards, he would not allow a single woman or an unarmed man to be hurt--and Nombre de Dios, which did not resist him so well the second time. It must, however, be enough to say that this time everything ended happily for the remnant that survived, and that on Sunday morning, August 9, 1573, while the good folks of Plymouth were in church, they heard a roar of artillery from the batteries followed by an answering salute from the sea and, straightway quitting their devotions, they ran out to learn the good news that Gloriana’s Little Pirate had come back safe at last and well loaded up with plunder.