Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen to America. Edited by Edward
John Payne. (Clarendon Press.)—The voyages of Hawkins, Fro- bisher, and Drake, here reproduced from Hakluyt, are well worth reproduction, though we can hardly agree with Mr. Payne that Mr. Fronde "happily" characterised Hakluyt as the prose epic of the English nation. There is a great deal too much prose for the epic. They contain, however, a good deal of quaint reading. It is curious to hear Hawkins, in 1565, voyaging across the Atlantic after his second slave-raid in Sierra Leone, very much like those of the Arabs now, when becalmed and in want of water, after stating." that many never thought to have reached to the Indies without great death of Negroes and themselves," calmly going on : "But the Almighty, who never sufferoth his elect to perish, sent us the 16th February the ordinary breeze" (or trade- wind). Then this "elect," when the Spaniards refuse to trade with him because of orders from home to the contrary, first forces them to do a trade, and then, when the prices they offer are not good enough, "he prepares one hundred men, well-armed with bows, arrows, arquebusos, and pikes, with which he marched to the town-wards." In Florida the French already had a colony, which was relieved from starvation by Hawkins ; though "the ground doth yield victuals sufficient, if they would have taken pains to get the same ; but they, being soldiers, desired to live by the sweat of other men's brows." Such is, and apparently over will be, French colonisation, from the Norman Conquest to that of Siam, with perhaps a partial exception in Canada. Not less interesting is the tale of Frobisher's attempts at the North- West Passage ; though, indeed, having found some gold-yielding ere on the first voyage, the rest became mere Eldorado-hunts under pretext of geographical discovery. So, too, Drake's voyage round the world was not undertaken from scientific motives, but because, after plundering all the Spanish towns on the Pacific coast, and having lost all his ships but one, he was afraid to go home again by the Straits of Magellan, for fear of being inter- cepted by the Spaniards. The plundering of the Spaniards was really almost too easy to be epic. At Tarapaca, "being landed, we found by the seaside a Spaniard lying asleep, who had lying by him thirteen bars of silver, which weighed four thousand ducats Spanish. We took the silver and left the man."
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