And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and Woolaston, and Parker’s intentions to ‘pirate’ separately, if it be true, agree with King James’s story of Raleigh’s calling a council of war and proposing an attack on the Plate-fleet? One or the other must needs be a lie; probably both. Witney’s ship was of only 160 tons; Woolaston’s probably smaller. Five such ships would be required, as any reader of Hakluyt must know, to take a single Carack; and it would be no use running the risk of hanging for any less prize. The Spanish main was warned and armed, and the Western Isles also. Is it possible that these two men would have been insane enough in such circumstances to go without Raleigh, if they could have gone with him? And is it possible that he, if he had any set purpose of attacking the Plate-fleet, would not have kept them, in order to attempt that with him which neither they nor he could do without each other. Moreover, no ‘piratical’ act ever took place; if any had, we should have heard enough about it; and why is Parker to be believed against Raleigh alone, when there is little doubt that he slandered all the rest of the captains? Lastly, it was to this very Parker, with Mr. Tresham and another gentleman, that Raleigh appealed by name on the scaffold, as witnesses that it was his crew who tried to keep him from going home, and not he them. My own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational enough, that Raleigh’s ‘brains,’ as he said, ‘were broken’; that he had no distinct plan: but that, loth to leave the New World without a second attempt on Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to re-victual, ‘and with good hope,’ as he wrote to Winwood himself, ‘of keeping the sea till August with some four reasonable good ships,’ probably, as Oldys remarks, to try a trading voyage; but found his gentlemen too dispirited and incredulous, his men too mutinous to do anything; and seeing his ships go home one by one, at last followed them himself, because he had promised Arundel and Pembroke so to do; having, after all, as he declared on the scaffold, extreme difficulty in persuading his men to land at all in England. The other lies about him, as of his having intended to desert his soldiers in Guiana, his having taken no tools to work the mine, and so forth, one only notices to say that the ‘Declaration’ takes care to make the most of them, without deigning, after its fashion, to adduce any proof but anonymous hearsays. If it be true that Bacon drew up that famous document, it reflects no credit either on his honesty or his ‘inductive science.’