given to one Gianbattista Agnello, an assayer, and from each piece he produced a little powder of gold!

The excitement was immense. The report spread and grew, and there were those who believed that the very place had been found whence Solomon had taken his gold for the Temple.

A company was formed for Cathay, Frobisher was made highadmiral of all seas and waters of new discovery; the Queen herself subscribed 10007., and in 1577 Frobisher set off again with the same two ships, and the Aid, of 200 tons, lent by the Queen. This party found and named land both to the north and south of the place he had touched at before. They fancied themselves between Asia and America. The leathern doublet of one of the five men who had been lost was recovered, pierced with arrows; more barter and more quarrels took place, and at different times a man, a woman, a baby, and an old woman were captured. The old woman was so hideous that the crew took her for a witch or demon, and insisted on taking off her buskins to see whether she had cloven feet. She was allowed to escape, but the other three, Frobisher hoped to exchange for three of the five men whom the natives gave them to understand were still living.

Three natives actually appeared with whitened faces, waving a flag made out of a piece of bladder, but it was a very transparent stratagem, for crowds of their fellows, fancying themselves unseen, were creeping down to overwhelm the strangers. Frobisher was too prudent to permit his crew to revenge this cunning attack, and he brought his whole numbers safely away. One man was washed overboard and lost from the Gabriel on the homeward voyage, and a great storm parted the squadron. Frobisher reached Milford Haven in the Aid, and rode from thence to London, thinking the two barques lost. The Gabriel, however, had safely reached Bristol, and the Michael arrived in London without mischance.

The ore was shut up in Bristol Castle under four locks, and the company paid the seamen's wages, and produced 8007. for the building of furnaces in which the precious metal was to be extracted! Three assayers were set to work, one Italian and two German. Of course they quarrelled and laid the blame of the tardy appearance of the gold upon one another. They called for expensive materials, and those who credited them fed upon hope and became poorer in everything else.

However, a third expedition was fitted out, on a much larger scale, and carried a hundred men and the frame of a house in timber, with intent to colonise. Fifteen ships were placed under Frobisher's command, and when the Queen took leave of him, she threw a great gold chain round his neck, and gave her hand to be kissed by all the captains. As on the former expeditions, there were strict orders against swearing, gambling, and vicious practices; daily matins and evensong were enjoined, and indeed carried out. Frobisher was a devout man, and thoroughly averse to all wanton violence or plunder.

PART 181.

This time the discoverer reached what we now know as Hudson's Straits. Fogs and ice had beset him, but here he had a clear sky and sea. However, he had been sent, not to make discoveries, but to bring home auriferous stone; so with much private disappointment he turned back, instead of pushing on, and either perishing, or anticipating the discovery of the passage by three hundred years. He was bound to make his way to the place where he had found the ore, a good way further north. His larger fleet was, however, less easy to manage, the crews were less obedient, the weather was unpropitious, and when they reached the spot in what they had named the Countess of Warwick Island, the season was advanced, and the carpenters declaring that it would take seven or eight weeks to erect the fort, it was decided to be too late to attempt to establish the colony that season. Again did Martin Frobisher bring all his ships safely into harbour, a marvel, as it seems to us, considering what ships then were, and in what seas they sailed, without a chart, or any previous knowledge to guide them.

In 1861, Captain Hall found the tradition of the visits of Frobisher fresh among the Esquimaux, and was shown the traces they had left behind. He even learnt so much of the fate of the five lost men, as that they built a boat, and set sail in it, but early in the season; some had frozen hands when they started, and they never were heard of more. Captain Hall had not at that time read the history of Frobisher's voyages, so (that this tradition must have been genuine, not suggested by leading questions.

Plenty of black stone had come back, but the gold never came out of it, though good gold pieces in plenty were called for by the assayers. Hope was given up, Frobisher was a ruined man, and a poor unfortunate old lady, whom he had married in his thirst for means to fit out his expeditions, was reduced to beggary. To do him justice, it was not the lust of gold that led him on his voyages; he had the true zeal of an explorer, and only cared for the gold as a bait to induce others to send him on these voyages; but that made little difference to the unfortunate Isabel Frobisher, the most miserable poor creature in the world,' as she calls herself in her petition on behalf of her children and grandchildren by her first husband, whose portions had sailed away in the sanguine Admiral's fleet.

Other men were fired with the same spirit of adventure and discovery. Sir Humfrey Gilbert, in his old manor house at Compton, was working out in theory problems, both mathematical and social, and longed to put them into practice; and, in the year 1578, he obtained from Queen Elizabeth a charter to discover and possess any distant lands which were unoccupied by any Christian ruler. He intended to form a colony under English rule, and he brought together five hundred gentlemen willing to cast in their lot with him. The most notable of these was his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, now

in his twenty-ninth year. Hitherto, the young man had been fighting in the Huguenot armies in France, but he had grown weary of the desultory warfare, and in the lull that followed the evasion of the King of Navarre, he had returned to England, and had become imbued with his brother's enthusiasm.

Eleven ships set sail from Plymouth, but the ideas of more than half the five hundred gentlemen were by no means of peaceful colonisation. They were set on attacking the Spanish treasure ships, and when some of these galleons came in sight, their eagerness was beyond the control of Gilbert. The attack was made, but the English ships were beaten off, and so much injured that it was necessary to put back to England, after eight months' absence; all Gilbert's means having been spent in this enterprise, which had been thus frustrated by his unworthy partners. It was four years before he could make another effort.

Captain John Hawkins, a man of much coarser mould, had made his fortune by the slave trade, and trained therein his young kinsman, Francis Drake. Drake was one of the large family of the chaplain of a ship, and was born in 1545, one report says on board a vessel in Plymouth harbour, another, at the living his father afterwards held near Tavistock. At twelve years old he became a sailor in a little trading vessel belonging to a friend of his father. His service was rewarded by his master leaving him the vessel at the age of twenty; but his spirit was too high for mere trading in the Channel, and he embarked all he had in Hawkins's ventures. His first great independent expedition was in 1577. He had been introduced, by Sir Christopher Hatton, to the Queen, and she had given her sanction to his sailing to the south, and thus endeavouring to rival the exploit which the Portuguese Magelhaen had not lived to accomplish.

With five ships, of which the largest, the Pelican, was but of 100 tons burden, he sailed from Plymouth in the end of December, 1577. He passed the coast of Barbary and Cape Verde, then ran into the Rio de la Plata, where he parted company with two of his ships, but recovered them again. However, as they were scarcely seaworthy, he took out their crews and stores and cast them adrift. Then, having laid in provisions, he made his way safely through Magelhaen's Straits, and further surveyed the south coast of Tierra del Fuego, though the honour of discovering and naming Cape Horn belongs not to him, but to one of the Dutch sailors, who called it after his native town of Hoorn.

Here Drake, detecting mutiny in a gentleman of his crew, tried him, and with much gravity and sorrow, sentenced him to be hung. It was done with deep seriousness, and the man was exhorted to repentance. Indeed, the English mixture of piracy and piety, was as curious as that of religion and cruelty by the Spaniards. Drake fixed Macao as the meeting-place with the other two ships, in case of their

losing sight of each other; Captain Winter, however, deserted, and went back to England, while Drake made his way up the South American coasts, plundering the Spanish settlements and galleons of Chili and Peru, till his two vessels, and a Spaniard which he had captured, were loaded with treasure. He sought in vain for an outlet from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and having gone nearly as far north as California, crossed the Pacific ocean to the Molucca isles, where the King received him hospitably. Thence he steered for the Cape of Good Hope, and returned to Plymouth on the 26th of September, 1580, with the Pelican and the Golden Hind, after a voyage occupying two years and nearly ten months.

England was in a rapture of wonder and delight. The Queen sent orders that the Pelican should be brought round to Deptford that she might see it; she came on board of it, and banqueted there, while such a throng followed her that the plank bridge on which they crossed gave way. More than a hundred fell into the river, but nobody was drowned. The Queen then knighted the bold circumnavigator, and the Pelican was kept at Deptford, where it served as a sort of clubhouse to the Elizabethan naval men and their friends. After many years it was broken up, and a chair made of the timber was presented to the University of Oxford.

The treasure was placed under the Queen's charge. Some Spanish merchants who proved their claims were recompensed out of it; but a huge amount remained to be divided among the crews. Camden declares that Drake was much mortified that some of the chief gentlemen about court declined to accept gifts of the gold gained by piracy. Surely few, except perhaps Philip Sidney, were likely to object. The Queen certainly did not; and when the Spanish ambassador, who was now Mendoza, complained of Drake's boldness in daring to sail in the Indian seas, she boldly disputed any exclusive rights on the part of the Spaniards, declaring the ocean to be the highway of all nations, and denying the Pope's power to grant away lands and islands.

Sir Francis Drake, on his knighthood, had assumed the coat armour of a Devonshire family of his own name, consisting of three wyverns. Sir Bernard Drake, the head of this house, was furious at this presumption, and actually boxed the ears of the new-made knight, who appealed to the Queen. Thereupon Elizabeth granted him the unexampled bearing of a terrestrial globe, with a hand beyond, guiding round it a ship in full sail, with a wyvern hanging up by the heels in the rigging. However, this failed to mortify Sir Bernard.

'Her Majesty may have given you finer arms than mine,' he said, 'but neither she nor any one else can give you the right to the three wyverns, the ancient cognizance of my house.'

A piteous disaster had thrown Portugal, with all its navy and colonies, into the hands of Spain; Sebastião, a king at three years old, had grown up with all the fire of a crusader of old, burning to emulate the

victories of his forefathers on the coasts of Africa, and to drive back the Moors. In 1578, when twenty-four years old, he hoped that he saw his opportunity; Muley Hamet, a pretender to the crown of Morocco, sought his aid, and, contrary to the advice of all his counsellors, Sebastião prepared an army and fleet, and crossed to Morocco.

The reigning king, Muley Moluc, was full of ability and courage, and though sick of a fatal disease, defended his country with the utmost valour and prudence. At Alcaçer the battle took place. There were 150,000 well-commanded Moors to 15,000 Christians, conducted by a fiery young fanatic who expected a miracle. The result was such as alone could be expected, and the battle was chiefly remarkable for three kings having perished in it, the pretender, Muley Hamet, his uncle, Muley Moluc, who died in his litter, after rallying his men against Sebastião's desperate charge, and Sebastião himself. The last words the youth had been heard to say were, 'Now there is nothing for us to do but to die,' but his body was never recognised, and the Portuguese lived long in hope of his return, till he became one of the legendary heroes who are supposed to be living in some land of Avallon,' to appear in the extreme need of their country.

Sebastião was the last of the grand old house of Avis, descended from Philippa of Lancaster. He had indeed a grand-uncle, Henrique, a cardinal archbishop of seventy-seven years old, who wore the crown for two years, and then, in 1580, it fell to Philip II., as the son of the eldest sister of Sebastião's grandfather.

In fact, the old constitutions of Portugal declared that by marrying a foreign king, a princess forfeited all claims to the crown for herself and her descendants; and thus the real lawful heir was the Duke of Bragança, whose mother had been daughter to a brother of Henrique. There was also a certain Dom Antonio, an illegitimate son of another brother, besides a host of other claimants. The helpless old cardinal king could not nerve himself to make a choice between them, and it would probably have made little difference had he done so, for Philip II. came in by the right of the strongest, in spite of the national dislike of the Portuguese to the Castilians. The Duke of Alva put down all resistance, and Antonio, after taking up arms in vain, fled to the court of Elizabeth.

Thus Brazil, the Azores, and the other Portuguese settlements passed from the power of the allies of England to that of her enemy, and the Western Atlantic was more than ever the Spanish main.

There was more and more exasperation against the Spaniards, and the tidings that they were assisting the rebel Irish lashed the English up to fury. Queen Elizabeth had been granting lands to various English gentlemen, in the hope that they might conquer and reduce the Irish. Among these were Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, already known by his Shepherd's Calendar as a poet, and who was secretary to the Lord Deputy, Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton. The Earl of Desmond, after a long captivity in England, was as usual