With five ships, the largest the Pelican of one hundred tons burden, the smallest a pinnace of fifteen tons, manned in all with only 164 men, Drake sailed from Plymouth, November 15, 1577, to visit seas where no English vessel had ever sailed. Without serious loss, or adventure worthy of notice, the fleet arrived at Port St. Julian, on the coast of Patagonia, June 20, 1578. Here the discoverer Magalhaens had tried and executed his second in command on a charge of mutiny, and the same spot did Drake select to perform a similar tragedy. He accused the officer next to himself, Thomas Doughty, of plots to defeat the expedition and take his life; plots undertaken, he said, before they had left England. “Proofs were required and alleged, so many and so evident, that the gentleman himself, stricken with remorse, acknowledged himself to have deserved death;” and of three things presented to him, either immediate execution, or to be set on shore on the main, or to be sent home to answer for his conduct, he chose the former; and having at his own request received the sacrament together with Drake, and dined with him in farther token of amity, he cheerfully laid his head on the block, according to the sentence pronounced by forty of the chiefest persons in the fleet. Such is the account published by Drake’s nephew, in ‘The World Encompassed,’ of which we shall only observe, without passing judgment on the action, that Drake’s conduct in taking out a person whom he knew to be ill affected to him, was as singular as is the behaviour and sudden and acute penitence attributed to Doughty. But we have no account from any friend of the sufferer. It is fair to state the judgment of Camden, who says, “that the more unprejudiced men in the fleet thought Doughty had been guilty of insubordination, and that Drake in jealousy removed him as a rival. But some persons, who thought they could see further than others, said that Drake had been ordered by the Earl of Leicester to take off Doughty, because he spread a report that Leicester had procured the death of the Earl of Essex.”