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Updated: May 14, 2025
The feature of his experiences which most strikes the reader now, is the extraordinary courage and pugnacity of the natives. They took the Endeavour for a gigantic white-winged sea-bird, and her pinnace for a young bird. They thought the sailors gods, and the discharge of their muskets divine thunderbolts.
Carvel had commanded for the return trips were unloading. Scarce was the pinnace brought into the wind before I had leaped ashore and greeted with a shout the Hall servants drawn up in a line on the green, grinning a welcome. Dorothy and I scampered over the grass and into the cool, wide house, resting awhile on the easy sloping steps within, hand in hand.
The flamingo would not leave us, it went and came with us from the house to the pinnace. We took also oil, candles, fuel, and a large iron pot to cook our provisions in. For our defence, I took two more guns, and a small barrel of powder, all we had left. I added besides some changes of linen, not forgetting some for my dear wife, which I hoped might be needed.
With this View we got under sail at daylight in the morning, and stood out North-East for the North-West end of Lizard Island, having Eagle Island to windward of us, having the pinnace ahead sounding; and here we found a good Channell, wherein we had from 9 to 14 fathoms.
"Nineteen, if I remember rightly," replied I. "Very well; now if a small boat of about twenty-five feet long or thereabouts, open, mind you, from stem to starn, could live twenty hours with nineteen people in her, as the London's pinnace did, in weather that the old ship herself couldn't stand up agin, how long will a full-decked boat of, say, thirty to thirty-five feet long, carefully constructed, and in good trim, live with only two men in her?
Even had water travel been easier, it could not have been long continued perhaps not beyond a single day; and it was not deemed worth while to bring the pinnace with them. So thought the captain, and the others agreeing, the boat was left where they had long since concealed her under the banyan-tree. The captain's conjectures proved correct.
He gathered from the old mariner that a great ship of Seville lay moored just round the next point, with her yards across, "being bound the next morning for St Domingo," or Hispaniola. Drake "took this old man into his pinnace to verify that which he had informed, and rowed towards this ship." As he drew near, the Spanish mariners hailed them, asking "whence the shallops came."
"Let us lay the table," said Jack, arranging the coils of rope that crowded the deck. "Well, you see, Willis, we want for nothing on board the pinnace, not even a what-do-you-call-it?" "A caboose, Master Jack." "Well, not even a caboose." "Quite true; and if the Nelson were in the offing, I would not exchange my pilot's badge for the epaulettes of a commodore; but, alas! she is not there."
He prepared two small barks of twenty and five-and-twenty ton apiece, wherein he intended to accomplish his pretended voyage. Wherefore, being furnished with the aforesaid two barks, and one small pinnace of ten ton burden, having therein victuals and other necessaries for twelve months' provision, he departed upon the said voyage from Blackwall, the 15. of June, Anno Domini 1576.
"DEAR LAD, I have been wool-gathering all night after five great hulks, which the Pixies transfigured overnight into galleons, and this morning again into German merchantmen. I have sent to Dartmouth a sight of noblemen and gentlemen, maybe a half-hundred; and Valdez himself, who when I sent my pinnace aboard must needs stand on his punctilios, and propound conditions.
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