let go full blast all thirty cannon, as fast as he could shift and veer for the cannoneers to take aim. Yards, sails, masts fell shattered and torn from the splendid Spanish ship. The English clapped their grappling-hooks to her sides, and naked swords did the rest. To save their lives, the Spanish crew, after a feeble resistance, surrendered, and bullion to the value in modern money of almost a million dollars fell into the hands of the men of the Golden Hind.

Drake's vessel was now loaded deep with treasure, and preparations were made to sail homeward, but her commander realized that it would be dangerous to attempt to return to England by way of the Spanish Main with a ship so heavily laden that she must sail slowly. It was then that legends of a North-East Passage came into his mind. He would sail northward in search of the strait that was supposed to lead through the continent to the Atlantic—the mythical strait of Anian. As the world knows, there was no such passage; but how far north did Drake sail seeking it? Some accounts say as far as Oregon; others, as far as the northern coast of California; but, at all events, as he advanced farther north he found that the coast sheered farther and farther west. So he gave over his attempt to find the strait of the legends, and turned back and anchored in 'a faire and good bay,' which is now known as Drake's Bay, a short distance north of San Francisco; and, naming the region New Albion, he claimed it for Queen Elizabeth. In July 1579 he weighed anchor and steered south-west. He reached the Molucca Islands in November, and arrived at Java in March. In June he rounded the Cape of Good Hope and then beat his way up the Atlantic to England. In September 1580 the Golden Hind entered the harbour of Plymouth. How Drake became the lion of the hour when he reached England, after having circumnavigated the globe, need not be told. Ballads were recited in his honour. Queen Elizabeth dined in state on the Golden Hind, and, after the dinner, with the sword which she had given him when he set out, she conferred on Drake the honour of knighthood, as the seal of his country's acclaim.

Drake's conclusions regarding the supposed passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic were correct, though for two hundred years they were rejected by geographers. His words are worth setting down: 'The Asian and American continents, if they be not fully joined, yet seem they to come very neere, from whose high and snow-covered mountains, the north and north-west winds send abroad their frozen nimphes to the infecting of the whole air—hence comes it that in the middest of their summer, the snow hardly departeth from these hills at all; hence come those thicke mists and most stinking fogges, ... for these reasons we coniecture that either there is no passage at all through these Northerne coasts, which is most likely, or if there be, that it is unnavigable.'

CHAPTER II

VITUS BERING ON THE PACIFIC

Since Drake's day more than a century had rolled on. Russia was awakening from ages of sleep, as Japan has awakened in our time, and Peter the Great was endeavouring to pilot the ship of state out to the wide seas of a world destiny. Peter, like the German Kaiser of to-day, was ambitious to make his country a world-power. He had seen enough of Europe to learn that neighbouring nations were increasing their strength in three ways—by conquest, by discovery, and by foreign commerce—and that foreign commerce meant, not only buying and selling, but carrying the traffic of other nations. The East India Company, in whose dockyards he had worked as a carpenter, was a striking instance of the strength that could be built up by foreign commerce. Its ships cruised from Nova Zembia to Persia and East India, carrying forth the products of English workshops and farms, and bringing back the treasures of all lands.

By conquest, Peter had extended the bounds of his empire from the Ural Mountains to the seas of China. By discovery, what remained to be done? France and England had acquired most of the North American continent. Spain and Portugal claimed South America; and Spain had actually warned the rest of the world that the Pacific was 'a closed sea.' But there were legends of a vast domain yet undiscovered. Juan de Fuca, a Greek pilot, employed, as alleged, by Spanish explorers between 1587 and 1592, was reported to have told of a passage from the Pacific to the Arctic through a mountainous forested land up in the region of what is now British Columbia. Whether Juan lied, or mistook his own fancies for facts, or whether the whole story was invented by his chronicler Michael Lok, does not much matter. The fact was that Spanish charts showed extensive unexplored land north of Drake's New Albion or California. At this time geographers had placed on their maps a vast continent called Gamaland between America and Asia; and, as if in corroboration of this fiction, when Peter's Cossacks struggled doggedly across Asia, through Siberia, to the Pacific, people on these far shores told tales of drift-wood coming from America, of islands leading like steps through the sea to America, of a nation like themselves, whose walrus-hide boats sometimes drifted to Siberia and Kamchatka. If any new and wealthy region of the world remained to be discovered, Peter felt that it must be in the North Pacific. When it is recalled that Spain was supposed to have found in Peru temples lined with gold, floors paved with silver, and pearls readily exchanged in bucketfuls for glass beads, it can be realized that the motive for discovery was not merely scientific. It was one that actuated princes and merchants alike. And Peter the Great had an additional motive—the development of his country's merchant shipping. It was this that had induced him to establish the capital of his kingdom on the Baltic. So, in 1725, five weeks before his death—one of the most terrible deaths in history, when remorse and ghosts of terrible memories came to plague his dying hours till his screams could be heard through the palace halls—he issued a commission for one of the greatest expeditions of discovery that ever set out for America—a commission to Vitus Bering, the Dane, to explore the Pacific for Russia.

Like Peter the Great, Vitus Bering had served an apprenticeship with the East India Company. It is more than probable that he first met his royal patron while he was in this service. While other expeditions to explore America had but to cross the sea before beginning their quest, Bering's expedition had to cross the width of Europe, and then the width of Asia, before it could reach even the sea. Between St Petersburg and the Pacific lay six thousand miles of mountain and tundra. Caravans, flat-boats, and dog-trains must be provided to transport supplies; and the vessels to be used at the end of the land journey must be built on the Pacific. The explorers were commissioned to levy tribute for food and fur on Tartar tribes as their caravans worked slowly eastward. Bering's first voyage does not concern America. He set out from Kamchatka on July 9, 1728, with forty-four men, and sailed far enough north to prove that Asia and America were not united by any Gamaland, and that the strait now bearing his name separated the two continents; but, like the tribes of Siberia, he saw signs of a great land area on the other side of the rain-hidden sea. Out of the blanketing fog drifted trees, seaweed, bits of broken boats. And though Bering, like the English navigator Drake, was convinced