They buried Captain Plott and Captain Egerton, and Drake himself sickened with dysentery. After twelve days he resolved to go and take the wind as God sent it. It carried the ships back towards Puerto Bello, and as each day passed Drake’s sickness increased. He kept his cabin now, conversing much with Captain Maynarde, who chose this moment to reproach him for luring him out of England with such fair promises. Drake answered him sadly:
“I know no more of the Indies than you do. I never thought a place could be so changed, as it were from a delicious and pleasant arbour into a vast and desert wilderness.”
He had never known winds so variable and blusterous, but most of all he wondered that since leaving England he had never seen a sail worthy of pursuit. But he would rouse himself in the end, to cry out undaunted in the greatness of his mind:
“It matters not, man. God hath many things in store for us; and I know many means to do Her Majesty good service, and to make us rich. For we must have gold before we return to England.”
But there was to be no return for Francis Drake either with gold or without. His sickness increased, he became delirious, and as the Defiance came abreast of Puerto Bello at seven o’clock on the morning of January 28th, 1596, he died raving.
Sir Thomas Baskerville, in virtue of his Commission, took command of the fleet. He led it out to sea on the following day, and a league off the shore buried his great Admiral in the waters of which the surge and thunder still seem to reverberate with the terror of his name. That sacred duty done, Baskerville returned to Puerto Bello and burned that half-finished city to the ground to make a funeral pyre. News had reached him that a fleet sent by Philip was waiting for him off the Cabo San Antonio of Cuba, and he set off homewards by way of Jamaica. But a storm separated his ships, and in the end they forced their way out by the Florida passage into the Atlantic, after a running battle in which they had the best of it.
But Francis Drake was dead. It is recorded in the Venetian State Papers that upon hearing of it His Majesty King Philip showed the keenest delight and declared that the good news would help him rapidly to get well of his sickness. In England it needed a lapse of years for men to recognize the debt under which he had laid them. His genius as a navigator and his audacity as a combatant — these qualities were ungrudgingly acknowledged. But the failure of his last two expeditions inclined even responsible minds to look upon him as the child of fortune, a man born under a capricious star, greatly to be blamed when disaster overtook him and lightly to be praised when he sailed home with the long tale of his enemy’s ships sunk and his own hold bursting with their treasure.
But the world knows now that the individual prowess, the name which emptied the seas like a tornado in the Caribbean and made Philip in the far Escorial sleep restlessly as a sick man in a fever, were amongst the smallest of his services. The two most outstanding voyages were the circumnavigation of the world and the attack upon Cadiz. This last one, flawless in its execution, marked the beginning of naval strategy as practised in England. Up to then we hugged our own coasts. He first of sailors said: “Seek out the enemy on his coasts, bring him to action there and there destroy him.” It took time for the creed to sink into the minds of Admiralty and Government. But before his death it was making its way. The meaning of sea-power was beginning to be understood. Even as Baskerville was entering Plymouth Harbour with the ships which had sailed out under Drake and Hawkins, Lord Howard was setting forth with the greatest fleet which had ever put out of England to carry the Spanish war into Spanish waters. Drake’s principle of naval strategy had won the day, and down the great line of English Admirals it prevailed henceforth and so prevails today. The voyage round the world was of a wider consequence. It had certain practical results. It began, for instance, the social recognition of the sailor. “I must have the gentleman to hale and draw with the mariner.” Drake’s famous utterance after the execution of Doughty at Port Saint Julian is a white stone in the history of England. He proved, moreover, that the Spaniard, in spite of his name for gallantry and martial spirit, was very vulnerable in his own house; and he was the first, or amongst the first, to demonstrate that the English way of making friends of the less forward races is better than the foreign way of converting them by massacre and cruelty into slaves. But quite apart from these definite benefits, that voyage turned the thoughts of this island people to the sea and made of it, not a road, but a second home.
We talk loosely of the heritage of the sea. But it was wrested from the Spaniards and the Portuguese, and the man who wrested it and bequeathed it was Francis Drake. Up to his day, a man like Hawkins ran slaves from Africa and sold them in the West Indies. A few men like John Lok and Martin Frobisher made expeditions to the Guinea Coast with great profit and at an appalling cost of life. Henry VII proposed to send Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to the Bahamas and did send the Venetian John Cabot, who discovered Newfoundland. In both cases the goal was the same, the fabled wealth of Cathay, to be reached by some North-West Passage between the chain of islands which North America was supposed to be. But the English effort was in the main North-Eastwards, round the North Cape to Archangel and the White Sea; and in the long years of poverty which Henry VIII bequeathed to England, the great voyages the great discoveries, the great empires were made by others than the English. In October, 1492, Columbus landed at San Salvador. In 1486, Bartholomew Diaz of Portugal doubled the Cape of Good Hope. In 1500, Pinzon, a Spaniard, and Cabral, a Portuguese, discovered Brazil. In 1505, the Portuguese found Mauritius, and two years later Madagascar, and after another two years Malacca. In 1513, Vasco Nuñez de Balbao first saw the Pacific Ocean from a hill in Darien. In 1520, Magellan broke through the Magellan Straits into it and, though he ran upon a foolish death in the Philippines, his ship Victoria circumnavigated the world. Between 1520 and 1530, Cortez conquered Mexico and Pizarro plundered the treasure houses of the Incas. Not an English name anywhere. But Drake’s voyage round the world and the wealth he brought back from it fired the manhood of England. England took over, as it were, the exploration of the world, and took it from the hands of Francis Drake.
Let some imperishable lines of English poetry end the tale:
“Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish ‘mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-east distance dawn’d Gibraltar grand and gray;
‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?’ — say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.”
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
We are proud to present a listing of our complete catalogue of English titles, with new titles being added every month. Buying direct from our website means you can make great savings and take advantage of our instant Updates service. You can even purchase an entire series (Super Set) at a special discounted price.
Only from our website can readers purchase a complete Parts Edition of our titles. When you buy a Parts Edition, you will receive a folder of your chosen author’s works, with each novel, play, poetry collection, non-fiction book and more divided into its own special volume. This allows you to read individual novels etc. and to know precisely where you are in an eBook. For more information, please visit our Parts Edition page.
Series Contents
Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Joseph Conrad
Leo Tolstoy
L
ouisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
William Shakespeare
Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charles Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Series Seven
Adam Smith
Benjamin Disraeli
Confucius
David Hume
E. M. Delafield
E. Phillips Oppenheim
Edmund Burke
Ernest Hemingway
Frances Trollope
Galileo Galilei
Guy Boothby
Hans Christian Andersen
Ian Fleming
Immanuel Kant
Karl Marx
Kenneth Grahame
Lytton Strachey
Mary Wollstonecraft
Michel de Montaigne
René Descartes
Richard Marsh
Sax Rohmer
Sir Richard Burton
Talbot Mundy
Thomas Babington Macaulay
W. W. Jacobs
Series Eight
Anna Katharine Green
Arthur Schopenhauer
The Brothers Grimm
C. S. Lewis
Charles and Mary Lamb
Elizabeth von Arnim
Ernest Bramah
Francis Bacon
Gilbert and Sullivan
Grant Allen
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Hugh Walpole
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
John Locke
John Muir
Joseph Addison
Lafcadio Hearn
Lord Dunsany
Marie Corelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Ouida
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Sigmund Freud
Theodore Dreiser
Walter Pater
W. Somerset Maugham
Series Nine
Aldous Huxley
August Strindberg
Booth Tarkington
C. S. Forester
Erasmus
Eugene Sue
Fergus Hume
George Moore
Gertrude Stein
Giovanni Boccaccio
Izaak Walton
J. M. Synge
Johanna Spyri
John Galt
Maurice Leblanc
Max Brand
Molière
Norse Sagas
R. D. Blackmore
R. S. Surtees
Sir Thomas More
Stephen Leacock
The Harvard Classics
Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Paine
William James
Series Ten
A. E. W. Mason
Abraham Lincoln
Baruch Spinoza
Carolyn Wells
Charles Brockden Brown
Earl Derr Biggers
Evelyn Waugh
F. Marion Crawford
Fred M. White
Frederick Douglass
Gaston Leroux
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
George Berkeley
Howard Pyle
John Kendrick Bangs
John Steinbeck
John Stuart Mill
J. S. Fletcher
Martin Luther
Sherwood Anderson
Thomas Dekker
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Jefferson
Willa Cather
William Faulkner
William Le Queux
Series Eleven
A. Merritt
Blaise Pascal
Charles W. Chesnutt
D
ashiell Hammett
Dinah Craik
Elizabeth Inchbald
François Rabelais
George Griffith
George du Maurier
Hamlin Garland
Hugh Lofting
Joel Chandler Harris
John Calvin
M. P. Shiel
Matthew Lewis
Nevil Shute
Olaf Stapledon
P. G. Wodehouse
Philip Massinger
Raymond Chandler
Romain Rolland
Sabine Baring-Gould
Sarah Orne Jewett
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Browne
William Wycherley
Ancient Classics
Achilles Tatius
Aeschines
Aeschylus
Ammianus Marcellinus
Apollodorus
Appian
Apuleius
Apollonius of Rhodes
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arrian
Athenaeus
Augustine
Aulus Gellius
Bede
Callimachus
Cassius Dio
Cato
Catullus
Cicero
Claudian
Clement of Alexandria
Cornelius Nepos
Demosthenes
Dio Chrysostom
Diodorus Siculus
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Diogenes Laërtius
Ennius
Epictetus
Euclid
Euripides
Eusebius
Eutropius
Florus
Frontius
Fronto
Gregory I
Herodotus
Hesiod
Hippocrates
Homer
Horace
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 904