His next venture was nothing less than that famous voyage of his round the world, with the fairy-story of which we have here nothing to do save to say that the fame of it, no less than the enormous treasure, the plunder of a hundred ships and a score of towns, with which the poor sea-worn, worm-eaten, wind-weary _Golden Hind_, staggered one Michaelmas morning into Plymouth Sound, at last convinced Queen Bess that in her dear Little Pirate--whom, by the way, she had never yet openly recognised--she had a champion who was worth a good many thousands of King Philip’s soldiers and sailors. But now the first of Drake’s open rewards was to be his. The _Golden Hind_ was hauled on to the slips at Deptford, and Gloriana and her court dined on board. When the dinner was over she bade her Little Pirate kneel before her, touched him on the shoulder with his own sword and bade him rise Sir Francis Drake. The Spaniards, by the way, had another title for him, no less honourable in his eyes, and this was “the Master-Thief of the New World.” For some considerable time nothing happened beyond the failure of one or two trifling expeditions--which failure was Gloriana’s fault, and not Drake’s--and the setting of a price of £40,000 by favour of the King of Spain on the Little Pirate’s head--an investment of which Drake was soon to pay the dividend in the craft-crowded harbour of Cadiz. Meanwhile, matters between England and Spain were going from bad to worse. For a few months unscrupulous intrigue, backed up by wholesale lying, hampered Drake most sorely in the preparation of that great work which was nothing less than the establishment of the sea-power of England. Everything that the fickleness of his mistress, the weathercock support of so-called friends at court, and the still more dangerous machinations of English statesmen in the pay of Spain could do, was done. The fleet, to his unutterable rage and disgust, was even placed on a peace-footing, despite the fact that the noise of the Armada’s preparations was still sounding across the Narrow Seas. But at last, by some means or other, a certain Spanish spy had got himself suspected and stretched on the rack. Now the rack, as an aid to cross-examination, is not an ideal instrument, but it certainly served its purpose this time, for the spy in his torment gave away all the details of a vast scheme which embraced an alliance between France, Spain, and Scotland, together with a general Catholic uprising in England, which was to take place simultaneously with the Triple Invasion.