at Plymouth in November, 1580.[21]

The queen received him with undisguised favor, and met a request from
Philip II. for Drake's surrender by knighting the freebooter and
wearing in her crown the jewel he offered her as a present. When the
Spanish ambassador threatened that matters should come to the cannon,
she replied "quietly, in her most natural voice," writes Mendoza,
"that if I used threats of that kind she would throw me into a
dungeon." The revenge that Drake had taken for the affair at San Juan
de Ulloa was so complete that for more than a hundred years he was
spoken of in Spanish annals as "the Dragon."

His example stimulated adventure in all directions, and in 1586 Thomas
Cavendish, of Ipswich, sailed to South America and made a rich plunder
at Spanish expense. He returned home by the Cape of Good Hope, and was
thus the second Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.[22]

In the mean time, another actor, hardly less adventurous but of a far
grander purpose, had stepped upon the stage of this tremendous
historic drama. Sir Humphrey Gilbert was born in Devonshire, schooled
at Eton, and educated at Oxford. Between 1563 and 1576 he served in
the wars of France, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and was therefore
thoroughly steeped in the military training of the age.[23] The first
evidence of Gilbert's great purpose was the charter by Parliament, in
the autumn of 1566, of a corporation for the discovery of new trades.
Gilbert was a member, and in 1567 he presented an unsuccessful
petition to the queen for the use of two ships for the discovery of a
northwest passage to China and the establishment of a traffic with
that country.[24]