When yet a boy Francis Drake was a trained sailor. He was early apprenticed to the master of a bark employed in a coasting trade, and sometimes carrying merchandise into Zealand and France. The youth’s industry and aptness in this business, says Camden, so “pleased the old man,” his master, that, “being a bachelor, at his death he bequeathed his bark unto him by will and testament.” At twenty, assuming the true date of his birth to have been about 1545, he joined with one Captain John Lovell in a trading voyage to Guinea and across to the West Indies and the Spanish Main. The next year, 1566, they made a second voyage to the same points, and on the Spanish Main, at Rio del Hacha, they suffered losses through the Spaniards. Doubtless the knowledge gained in these two voyages made him particularly serviceable to his kinsman, John Hawkins, and brought him the command of the “Judith” in their fatal voyage of the following year. He is said to have invested in this disastrous venture the whole of his little property acquired in his previous voyages and in the earlier coasting trade, and to have lost it all through the affair at San Juan d’Ulloa. [Illustration: SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.] Upon reaching home with the “Judith,” bringing the first news of the fate of this expedition, he was immediately, on the very night of his arrival, despatched to London by Hawkins’s brother William, at that time governor of Plymouth, to inform the privy council and Sir William Cecil, then the secretary of state, “of the whole proceedings,” "to the end that the queen might be advertised of the same." Thus he was brought to the attention of the influential minister and, indirectly, to the favour of the court. At least he was given the support of letters from the queen in the move that he at once instituted for recompense from Spain for his losses. When at length he had become satisfied that nothing could be obtained through diplomatic councils, he determined to “use such helps as he might” to redress by ravaging the Spanish Main on his own account. Accordingly he first made two voyages in succession, the one in 1570 with two small ships, the “Dragon” and the “Swan,” the other in 1571 with the “Swan” alone, particularly to obtain “certain notice of the persons and places aimed at.” These reconnoitring expeditions convinced him that the towns would fall an easy prey to a small armed force, and were also gainful in plunder taken off the coast along the way. Thereupon he promptly arranged for his freebooting voyage, to avenge not only the San Juan d’Ulloa affair but the earlier one at Rio del Hacha.