This was not in
Drake's line. He kept to prose and fact. He studied the globe. He
examined all the charts that he could get. He became known to the Privy
Council and the Queen, and prepared for an enterprise which would make
his name and frighten Philip in earnest.
The ships which the Spaniards used on the Pacific were usually built on
the spot. But Magellan was known to have gone by the Horn, and where a
Portuguese could go an Englishman could go. Drake proposed to try. There
was a party in Elizabeth's Council against these adventures, and in
favour of peace with Spain; but Elizabeth herself was always for
enterprises of pith and moment. She was willing to help, and others of
her Council were willing too, provided their names were not to appear.
The responsibility was to be Drake's own. Again the vessels in which he
was preparing to tempt fortune seem preposterously small. The _Pelican_,
or _Golden Hinde_, which belonged to Drake himself, was called but 120
tons, at best no larger than a modern racing yawl, though perhaps no
racing yawl ever left White's yard better found for the work which she
had to do. The next, the _Elizabeth_, of London, was said to be eighty
tons; a small pinnace of twelve tons, in which we should hardly risk a
summer cruise round the Land's End, with two sloops or frigates of fifty
and thirty tons, made the rest.
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