The second voyage, begun in 1564, was that in which Florida was visited. In this venture the Earl of Pembroke and Lord Robert Dudley, afterward the Earl of Leicester, were foremost as investors. Four ships constituted the fleet. These were the “Jesus of Lubec,” as “admiral,” or flag-ship, a fine vessel of seven hundred tons belonging to the queen and lent by her; the “Solomon,” Hawkins’s flag-ship in the previous voyage; the “Tiger,” a bark of fifty tons; and the “Swallow,” a bark of thirty tons. The fleet were well supplied with ordnance, including several “faulcons of brasse”—small brass guns—and a plenty of small arms for the men. The company enlisted numbered one hundred and seventy in all. They sailed from Plymouth on the eighteenth of October. On the ninth of November they had arrived at Teneriffe; and later in November and through December they were cruising along the African coast in the hunt for Negroes. This time the natives were everywhere hostile and they had to be fought for. The sharpest battle was at a point below Cape Verde. An attack was made upon a town from which Hawkins expected to capture a hundred and more Negroes, men, women, and children, comprising the most of the population. But they fought desperately and only ten were taken while seven of Hawkins’s men were slain and twenty-seven wounded. Farther down the coast the hunt was more successful. By the close of January the ships were at Sierra Leone all laden with “a great company of Negroes”; and on the twenty-ninth of that month they set sail with a crowded freight for the West Indies. But they were “only reasonably watered,” and before they had been long at sea there was much suffering among the ships’ companies and the living cargo alike. For eighteen days they were becalmed; afterward they were beset by baffling winds. By mid-February, however, fortune again favoured them, when, as the devout slave-catcher’s chronicler recorded, “The Almightie God who never suffereth the elect to perish,” sent just the right breeze to waft them to their destination.