Three ships only, the Pelican, Elizabeth, and Marigold, left the port on 17 August 1578, Nuño da Silva's and the others having served their turn and been abandoned or broken up. Only three days brought them to Cape Virgins, where the Pelican was given the more famous and resounding name of the Golden Hinde (Figure Plate XVII, “THE GOLDEN HINDE. ”)—a compliment to Hatton, whose crest bore that heraldic beast, and doubtless a bid for a friend at Court should things go wrong. For the next phase of the voyage, Drake had a large and costly world map obtained from Lisbon, probably drawn by the great Portuguese cartographer Vaz Dourado, and it is also possible that he carried a Portuguese rutter of 1577 giving the coasts and courses from Brazil round to Chile, though beyond La Plata only sketchily;^[57] his exploit was not such a daring of the unknown as Magellan's.

The passage was unhurried: islands were annexed, according to da Silva a great tree was taken as a souvenir—if so, it is perhaps a hint that he did not mean to return this way. It was however remarkably swift, only sixteen days, and this in mid-winter. By 6 September they had emerged into the South Sea, and for the next three days they sailed northwest, parallel to the Chilean coast as shown on Ortelius's standard map, but away from the immediate trend of that of Terra Australis.^[58] But now their winter's luck ran out: tremendous contrary winds drove them for three weeks far to the south, down to 57°; the Marigold was lost ‘in the uiolent force of the winds intollerable workinge of the wrathfull seas …’^[59] Early in October the wind changed, and in a week the two remaining ships were among islands a degree or two north of Cabo Deseado: but almost at once a new storm forced them to sea, and by the morning of 8 October the Elizabeth had disappeared. Her captain John Winter lit fires just inside the Straits, but after two or three days he retreated further in and stocked up with penguin meat before returning to England, whether compelled by his crew or compelling them is now impossible to say.

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Meanwhile the now solitary Golden Hinde was again driven south, once more to 55–57°, but this time with more easting, closer to the ‘Breaker Coast’ and the wild fiord shores southeast from Isla Santa Ines. While his actual tracks and landfalls remain matters of dispute, Drake now indisputably made what may fairly be claimed as the most notable geographical discovery by any Englishman before James Cook: in Fletcher's fitting words, ‘The vttermost cape or hedland … without [outside] which there is no maine or Iland to be seene to the Southwards, but that the Atlanticke Ocean and the South Sea, meete in a most large and free scope.’

The precise location of the uttermost cape is indeed most uncertain. Consciously or subconsciously, the student of such a problem will always be torn between a feeling of ‘How splendid if it really were so!’ and a desire to maintain a cool scepticism, unseduced by the romantic or ironic but in any case dramatic- 248 -coincidence; anyone who claims immunity must either deceive himself or be singularly insensitive. In British tradition, Drake's landfall has been associated with Cape Horn itself, the true southernmost land, and Corbett gave this belief his sober and weighty support. Although this view has been somewhat blown upon, as late as 1971 Richard Hough admits uncertainty in his text, but on his map opts clearly for Cape Horn; and its case has recently been revived, on new lines, by Robert Power.^[60]

H. R. Wagner, arguing mainly from distances and bearings, made a plausible case for Henderson Island (55°40′S; cf. Fletcher's ‘neere in 56′), and is followed by S. E. Morison: these are weighty authorities. Felix Riesenberg, a sea captain with much experience in Magellanic waters, reconstructed a possible course from Nuño da Silva's log, allowing for usually neglected currents, and came up with the novel suggestion that this farthest south point of land is now under water: the Pactolus or Burnham Bank, where a sounding of 67 fathoms, black sand and small rocks, is surrounded by depths of 2000 fathoms and more: clearly a volcanic sea-mount, and such are notoriously likely to disappear. Moreover, several maps—French, Spanish and German as well as English, and as late as 1775—show in this general area the ‘Elizabethides’ or a port or land named for Drake. Again, while Fletcher's concept of an island is normally a crude rectangle, in this instance he does give some internal detail, a water body suggesting a (still rectangular!) crater lake. But the position seems much too isolated to square with Fletcher's suggestion of near-by inhabited islands, and this also weakens the likelihood of the assumption that has to be made, that this volcanic summit was well supplied with wood and ‘herbes of great virtue’: Horn Island has at least some vegetation, but obviously there can be no evidence at all of its existence on a hypothetical island. It is risky to rely too implicitly on the accuracy of da Silva's observations, made by astrolabe in far from ideal conditions and with some gaps; and indeed, like Riesenberg using nautical rather than academic arguments, Brett Hilder analyses the same data and concludes that the solution is the Diego Ramirez group, which seems as reasonable as Henderson Island and more reasonable than Cape Horn.

Power's argument for the latter is novel and ingenious. Its main thrust is that the four islands shown south of the Straits on the well-known sketch map of South America in Fletcher's notes are to be read on two different scales:

This would be highly unorthodox but not impossible cartography. On one scale, the spread of the four islands would be comparable in size and shape to the Fuegian archipelago as a whole; on the other, to the southern Hermite Islands and Cape Horn. Apart from one or two side-points, the case really depends on whether one can reasonably make sophisticated inferences from maps admittedly- 249 -drawn in a ‘crude simplistic style’; so rudely drawn indeed that were it shorn of place-names, one might well fail to recognise West Africa on what Power calls a ‘crude but identifiable Map’. Given the premise, things fall neatly into place; but to deduce measurements from such barbarous cartography as Fletcher's seems very hazardous. Nevertheless, there is the striking though rough coincidence of the layout of his islands with the Hermite group, and if one could have confidence in Fletcher's cartography the case would be quite strong. As it is, it seems fair to say that Power has put the Cape Horn claim on a more reasoned basis than has been done heretofore.^[61]

However, as Hough says, the precise island, existing or not, does not matter much: the real point is that though Drake had not actually demonstrated the existence of what is now Drake Passage or Strait, he had sailed far enough to establish the virtual certainty that the two Oceans did indeed ‘meete in a most large and free scope.’ Fletcher's denial that the Strait of Magellan was a strait is pedantic perversity, and Terra Australis was broken down into islands for but a small sector of longitude; his riders owe more to bigotry than geography, but on the main point he did put the matter succinctly. Immediately, there was no attempt to use the route thus indicated, but this was probably not due, as has been suggested, to an English policy of secrecy. It is true that while the disposal of the treasure, with its political bearing, was still under advisement, publicity about the voyage was naturally muted; but in 1587 Richard Hakluyt himself

- 250 -published, in Paris, a map showing open water south of the Elizabethides, and by 1593 Hondius, in his famous Vera Totivs Expeditionis Navticae, showing Drake's and Cavendish's tracks, pushed Terra Australis (in these longitudes) down below 60°—in fact, almost to Graham Land. Moreover, as early as April 1582 Philip II's ambassador in England, Bernardino de Mendoza, reported to the King that a person who claimed to have seen Drake's own chart had affirmed to him that ‘there was the open sea beyond Tierra del Fuego.’^[62] For some thirty years before the new passage was actually used its secret, like its seas, was open.

The delay in using this new Southwest Passage was not without good reason. Drake's immediate successors (Cavendish, Chidley, Richard Hawkins) must have been greatly impressed by his amazingly quick transit, barely a fortnight from Cape Virgins to Cape Desire; and no less by the frightful tempests met in latitudes south of the exit into the South Sea. The Straits had also an important advantage in the many anchorages where wooding and watering were easy, and fresh stocks of penguin meat might be had for the taking—a matter of particular significance to those on plunder bent, whose ships were of necessity heavily manned.^[63] In contrast, the supremacy of Dutch shipping in the seventeenth century carrying trade was largely due to ship design which gave a maximum ratio of cargo space to crew; and the Dutch traders, Schouten and Le Maire, were to be the first to sail from ocean to ocean round the Horn—for the very Batavian technical reason that they desired to circumvent the [Dutch] East India Company's legal monopoly of trade by the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan—nothing said of a by-pass!