Lord Howard consulted with Drake and Frobisher, but all held the daring scheme to be impracticable. The crews had not yet received their money due from before the Armada fight; many seamen and soldiers were in rags and half famished, in spite of all that indignant admirals had written. "Upon your letter," Howard writes to Walsingham on the 27th of August, "I presently sent for Sir Francis Drake and showed him the desire that her Majesty had for intercepting of the King's treasure from the Indies. So we considered it, and neither of us find any ships here in the fleet anyways able to go such a voyage before they have been aground, which cannot be done in any place but at Chatham, and it will be fourteen days before they can be grounded." Then with a touch of scorn for the ignorance that prompted such a desperate scheme for vessels just come from a long sea-fight, he adds, "Belike it is thought that the West Indian islands be but hereby! it is not thought how the year is spent. I thought it good, therefore, to send with all speed Sir Francis Drake, although he be not very well, to inform you rightly of all. He is a man of judgment and acquainted with it, and will tell you what must be done for such a journey." If Sir Francis Walsingham had turned up a file of old letters, he must have found a recent letter from the Lord High Admiral, written only four days before this, in which Howard writes with reference to the Armada returning from the north to renew the fight:-- "Sir, God knowethe what we shall dow if we have no men: many of our shypse ar so wekly maned that they have not maryners to way ther ankers. Well, we must dow what we chane (can). I hope in God that he will make us stronge anufe for them, for all men are of good corage heer." After re-reading this, Walsingham must surely have doubted his own judgment. We may notice that the spelling of those times varied with the mood of the writer, and it also gives us an insight into the manner of pronouncing words. When all men spell on the same dead level, there is nothing to be learnt from it. Drake must have spoken "a bit of his own mind" at Court, for we hear no more of any expedition to the Azores, but of an expedition under Drake to Spain. However, it was not until 1596 that the Lord Admiral again hoisted his flag; it was the year in which the British Navy lost by death three of its most eminent seamen--Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins.