being disregarded, he swore to take by force what had been denied to his solicitations.

Never was an oath better kept. In 1772 he contrived to equip and arm two small vessels, and obtained from the queen a commission such as was requisite for his purpose. Joined by a third vessel in the South American waters, he suddenly descended upon the coasts of New Granada, plundered the settlements, burnt the Spanish shipping, and held the whole region at his mercy. He returned to England laden with a prodigious booty,-enough to make him one of the richest private persons in Europe. This sudden attack upon a defenceless people was hailed in England as a most heroic and proper act, and the queen received him with distinguished favor. We must not, however, judge of those times by modern standards. Spain and England, though technically at peace, were really at war, and so remained until the total destruction of the armada, in 1588, reduced Spain to the rank of a second-rate power.

Captain Drake had not yet done with the Spaniards. While he was upon the Isthmus of Darien he had seen from a mountain-top the Pacific Ocean. He now laid before the queen a project of sailing round South America, by way of the newly discovered Straits of Magellan, and falling upon the unprotected coasts of Peru, whence the Spaniards were drawing cargoes of gold. Elizabeth, we may almost say, jumped at the proposal. With six vessels and one hundred and sixty-four men, this bold adventurer set sail, and made his way to Patagonia. He was five weeks in getting through the straits, and when he emerged into the broad Pacific, he had but the ship commanded by himself, named the Golden Hind. Two vessels he had himself emptied and turned adrift, and three others had turned back and gone to England. On board his own ship he had fifty-seven men, and three casks of water.

Undaunted, he held to his purpose, and reached in safety the shores of Peru. He plundered the Spanish settlements; he captured a Spanish ship loaded with gold and silver; he sailed along the coast to California, of which he took formal possession in the name of the Queen of England. Then, laden deep with booty, he thought to find a northern passage back into the

Atlantic. Northward he sailed until he reached the region of eternal cold, but found no gap in the ice-bound coast. Desirous, above all things, to avoid the Spanish cruisers, he came to the resolution to sail westward, and endeavor to reach England by completing the circumnavigation of the globe. He accomplished his purpose, and reached England in 1580, after an absence of two years, nine months, and thirteen days. This was regarded as an immense achievement. The queen knighted Captain Drake, and came on board his ship, where she partook of a banquet; and when the Spanish king demanded his surrender, as a buccaneer, she refused to give him up.

Drake soon had an opportunity of glutting his vengeance against the Spaniards. Such exploits as his, sanctioned and rewarded by the Queen of England, led, finally, to open and declared war between the two powers. Again, in command of a powerful fleet, he ravaged and plundered the Spanish towns in America, and, visiting Virginia, brought away to England the settlers planted there by Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1587, with a fleet of thirty armed ships, he sailed boldly into Cadiz, and there destroyed a hundred Spanish vessels, which he called singeing the beard of the King of Spain." Next year, the Invincible Armada approached the shores of England. On the great, immortal day which saw that mighty armament defeated and dispersed, Sir Francis Drake was second in command of the British fleet, and bore a man's part in the tremendous conflict. In the year following he was again on the coast of Spain with a great fleet, desolating every point which he attacked, and keeping the whole peninsula in terror.

There was then a short interval of peace between the two countries, during which Admiral Drake represented the town of Plymouth in parliament. War being renewed in 1594, we see him once more in the West Indies, under his old patron, Sir John Hawkins. This was the last of his services. Hawkins dying from a wound received in action, Drake assumed command of the forces, and committed great havoc among the Spanish settlements; but part of his troops having met with a reverse, he took it so much to heart that he fell sick of a fever.

He died on board his ship, aged fifty years, and his remains were committed to the deep.

It thus appears that this brave man spent his life in warring upon the Spaniards. What ought we to think of him? Was he a buccaneer, or a patriot sailor waging legitimate warfare? I answer the question thus:

The worst man of whom history gives any account, and the most formidable enemy modern civilization has had to encounter, was Philip II., King of Spain. He was a moody, ignorant, cruel, sensual, cowardly hypocrite. So long as that atrocious tyrant wielded the resources of the Spanish monarchy — then the most powerful on earth- the first interest of human nature was the reduction of his power. To do this was the great object and the almost ceaseless effort of Queen Elizabeth and the protestant powers in alliance with her. In lending a hand to this work, Francis Drake was fighting on the side of civilization, and preparing the way for such an America as we see around us now; for, in limiting the power of Philip, he was rescuing the fairest portions of America from the blight of Spanish superstition, Spanish cruelty, and Spanish narrowness. That he fought his share of this fight in a wild, rough, buccaneering manner, was the fault of his age, more than his own. His voyage round the world, too, marks an era in the history of navigation.

HENRY HUDSON.

Not Heindrick Hudson, as it is sometimes printed, and as it is painted on the sides of a large steamboat that plies on the river which Hudson discovered. Captain Hudson was no Dutchman; he was an English sailor, with an English name, and that name was Henry.

The reason why his name is so frequently spelt in the Dutch manner is, that, when he discovered the Hudson river, he was sailing in the service of a company of Dutch merchants. This was the reason, too, why Manhattan Island and the shores of the Hudson river once belonged to Holland and were settled by the Dutch, and why, to this day, many of the old families of New York have Dutch names, Dutch faces, a Dutch build, and a comfortable Dutch disposition. Down to the time of the revolutionary war there was more Dutch spoken in the streets of New York than English, and Albany was almost as Dutch a town as Amsterdam itself. All this was because an English sailor chanced to make one of his many voyages in a ship belonging to Dutchmen.

Henry Hudson lived in this world about fifty years, but nothing whatever is known of his life except of the last four years of it. Born about the year 1560, when Queen Elizabeth was still in the bloom of young womanhood, he does not appear in history until 1607, in the spring of which year we discover him captain of a vessel anchored in the Thames, about to sail on a voyage of discovery. The idea still haunted the minds of all geographers that there must be a way of getting to China and the East Indies nearer than by going round the Cape of Good Hope, a voyage of sixteen thousand miles. They thought that, somewhere in the northern part of one of the continents, there must

be an opening through which those rich countries could be reached by a short cut, that would save, at least, one-half the distance. The wish was father to the thought. Kings and merchants, for three hundred years, poured out their treasures freely in expeditions to discover this imaginary opening. The vessel lying in the Thames, below London, in April, 1607, of which Henry Hudson was master, had been fitted by a company rich London merchants to continue the search.

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It was a small vessel, with a crew consisting of the captain, ten men and a boy. Sailing on the 1st of May, Captain Hudson directed his course toward the north-west, and, after sailing forty-three days, saw what he concluded to be the eastern coast of Greenland. A month later he had reached Spitzbergen isles, where he landed, and found traces of cattle, as well as of seals, and some streams of fresh water. He pushed northward until he was within eleven hundred miles of the north pole, where he was stopped by mountains of ice. He struggled with the ice for a while, skirting along the glittering barrier, seeking a passage, but finding none. He was compelled, at length, to turn his prow southward, and he reached England in September, baffled, but not discouraged. He had been absent four months and fifteen days.

In the April following, in the same little ship, and in the service of the same English company, he sailed again to the seas north of Europe, and spent another summer in an arduous but fruitless attempt to pierce the ice that had blocked his way the year before. Late in the month of August, after an absence of four months, he returned to England, again defeated, but as resolute to continue the search as ever. But the gentlemen who had to pay the expenses of the voyage now lost faith in the enterprise, and declined to bear the charge of another attempt.

Then it was that Henry Hudson repaired to Holland, one of the great sea powers of the world; perhaps the first of the maritime nations in 1608.

A company of Dutch merchants furnished him with a ship, and, in the spring of 1609, he was ready once more to sail for the frozen seas. His crew was composed of Dutch and English sailors. Early in April he sailed from Holland, and directed