Drake left his anchorage on 23 July, calling at the Farallon Islands next day. After that there was no landfall until 30 September, when they fell in with islands in 8–9°N; many canoes came off, but so thievish were the people that to be ‘ridde of this vngracious company’ it was necessary to make ‘some of them feele some smart as well as terror’—according to John Drake, a score were killed. The identity of this ‘Island of Theeues’ has hardly such interest or importance as attaches to Drake's Magellanic or Californian visits, but it has attracted its share of attention. The choice lies between Yap, favoured by Wagner and Power, and Palau, and after an exhaustive analysis of every scrap of ethnographical data which can be extracted from the narratives, the anthropologist W. A. Lessa opted for Palau over Yap, in the last resort on the ground of location; but this seems his- 262 -weakest ground since, as Robert Power points out, the distance from Palau to the next landfall a fortnight later on Mindanao is such as to give an unacceptably slow rate of sailing, under half the average on the whole California-Mindanao run. Lessa does, however, convincingly refute Andrew Sharp's view that both the first and second landfalls were on Mindanao (this depended on a misreading of ‘within’ for ‘without’ sight of land, which has crept into modern editions of The World Encompassed); and he has also probably established the position of the Mindanao landfall, about 75km north of the Gulf of Davao.^[96]

Passing down the coast of Mindanao, Drake had a brush with a Portuguese galleon, and rumour of his presence filtered through to Manila. He was making for Tidore when a chance encounter diverted him to Ternate, whose Sultan Baber was bitterly hostile to the Portuguese who had murdered his father. Hence the welcome to Drake was princely, and the English were much impressed by the colour and civility of the Court. The Sultan offered to ‘sequester the commodities and traffique of his whole Iland from others … and reserue it to the intercourse of our Nation’; nevertheless, though he formally came out to the Golden Hinde, he did not venture aboard, and Drake in turn declined a personal visit ashore. Beneath all the courtesies there was mutual suspicion; and it is significant that there is no mention of any presentation of official credentials from the Queen—so much for that much-vaunted commission, and for Wagner's insistence on a Moluccan motive. As for the treaty, nothing was formalised, nothing written down. Although to English minds the visit marked a great break-through into the eastern trade, and was the proximate inspiration of Fenton's expedition of 1582–3 (the first English voyage destined for, though not reaching, the East Indies), the immediate results were six tons of cloves, a vague feeling of goodwill mixed with uneasiness, and some useful intelligence.^[97] This included a first-hand but much slanted report on China by an exile from that country—amongst other items, the Chinese had ‘brass ordnance of all sorts (much easier to be trauersed than ours were, and so perfectly made that they would hit a shilling) aboue 2000 yeares agoe’: rating this at what it was worth, Drake cannily declined a pressing invitation to the Celestial Empire, but this was very likely the first face-to-face meeting of an Englishman and a Chinese.

The Golden Hinde spent only four or five days (5–9 November) in this Moluccan paradise, just about enough time to load the cloves. The passage onwards through the archipelago was not without incident: a month was spent on a small island near Celebes (Sulawesi), careening and refitting and enjoying the land-crabs, so big ‘that one was sufficient to satisfie foure hungry men at a dinner, being a very good and restoratiue meate’. This idyllic interlude was followed by near-disaster, when on 8 or 9 January 1580 the ship struck a reef off Celebes: for some time they were in serious danger, and Fletcher preached a moralising sermon on judgments—probably too near the bone, for once they were free Drake put him in the stocks with a mocking inscription. The Golden Hinde was got off by jettisoning some stores and guns and (what must have hurt)- 263 -three tons of cloves. Drake probably passed between Alor and Timor, and spent an agreeable fortnight (10–26 March) in Southern Java, most likely at Tjilatjap, victualling, cleaning the ship, and hobnobbing with half a dozen or more local rajas. They passed the Cape of Good Hope in June, called at Sierra Leone for water and provisions, and on 26 September 1580 the Golden Hinde entered Plymouth harbour:^[98] a great voyage, some thirty-four months, with remarkably few lives lost, and the first circumnavigation carried out by the one commander.

Boldness at sea must be matched by caution at Court: this Drake well knew, and his first act was to communicate to the Queen, urgently and confidentially, the results of his campaign. News of his depredations had of course reached Spain and England, but Philip had instructed his new ambassador Mendoza to hold his hand until Drake should return. When he did, probably no English commoner had as yet been so popular a hero: amongst the more respectable there were some murmurings over Doughty, over Nuño da Silva, over the negress carried off from New Spain and abandoned, pregnant, in the Indies. But these were whispers in a storm. San Juan de Ulua was more than avenged.

There was a party on the Queen's Council for returning the booty, and also a compromise proposal to repay the promoters their capital plus 100 per cent, restoring the rest on condition that Spanish subversion in Ireland should cease. The recent abortive invasion of Ireland by Papal volunteers, massacred at Smerwick, and the fact that much of the plunder, being unregistered bullion, had no really licit ownership, greatly strengthened the Queen's hand in playing Mendoza, a game in which she seemed to take an aesthetic delight. It could be argued that refunding so much treasure would simply build up Philip's power for the subjugation of the Netherlands, if not England itself, and that a repudiation of Drake (dangerously unpopular as that would be) could only lead to further abject appeasement, putting the whole cause of the Reformed Churches at grave risk. Though Burghley and Sussex refused Drake's proffered douceurs, the big investors—Leicester, Hatton, Walsingham—soon prevailed over any further tendency to morbid probity; and indeed, a year before Drake's return steps were being taken to receive—and conceal—his treasure.^[99] The stakes were simply too high for customary morality to hold.

Just how high they were can never be known. Even before the registration for the Crown began, Drake was allowed to abstract £10,000, but this was far from the total of preliminary deductions. The recorded bullion came to £307,000 and altogether the treasure must have exceeded £600,000, or say £18,000,000 in the early 1970s; perhaps it may have been twice as much. The return to the shareholders was stated on good evidence at a trifle of 4700 per cent, on an investment of the order of £5000. The Crown itself seems to have received around £300,000, more than a year's Exchequer receipts. The result of course was a boom in the privateering industry; but beyond that, in the much-quoted words of Keynes,- 264 -

This in the long term. Immediately, the monopoly of the Spanish Lake had been broken, and clearly from the Spanish official point of view, this was no time for the diversion of forces, needed for the defence of existing holdings, into the founding of new and yet further-flung colonies, mere tempting trifles to be snapped up by the heretic sea-rovers: a factor in the long gap between Mendaña's first and second voyages. Meanwhile, Anglo-Spanish tension was screwed up to a new pitch; but so too was the English temper: as massive and as enduring as the fiscal dividend was the gain to the nation's confidence and pride. The great clash was to be fought out in Atlantic waters and the English Channel; but before it took place the Pacific was to be the scene of Cavendish's reprise of Drake's exploit, and before that of a heroic but tragic Spanish riposte, Sarmiento's.