DRAKE AND THE TUDOR NAVY
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in store for the enterprise, to secure the support of the For what it is worth it is one rising favourite at Court. more indication of the nature and power of the opposition, which Drake now expected to encounter on his return. Having thus secured his position as far as possible,
on the morrow he entered the Straits, and on the fourth day reached the group of three islands which lie close by the mainland where the passage turns to the southward. On the largest of these he landed, and with his gentlemen about him solemnly took possession of it in the queen's name and called it after her 'Elizabeth Island.' Here too they reprovisioned with some three thousand penguins, which they found a very good and wholesome victual and salted down. Continuing their way down the Broad Keach they soon were involved in a maze of tortuous channels, where, buffeted hither and thither by constantly changing winds that without warning swept down upon them in icy squalls from every direction, they were in continual danger of wreck. Above them frowned tiers of glaciers and peaks higher and more fantastic than they had ever seen below them were depths no cable could fathom all the terrors of the abandoned passage were about Still they them, and they seemed at the mercy of God. struggled on, and by the seventeenth day had the South Sea open before them. On Cape Pillar, then called Deseado or Desired,' it had been Drake's intention, after a sermon,' to have left a monument of her Majesty's title He engraven in metal for a perpetual remembrance. had all the materials in readiness but the wind proving foul for landing and the anchorage bad, without further delay he stood out to realise the fulfilment of the prayer and vow he had made on the summit of the Darien '
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Cordilleras.
For two days they stood north-west for on the Spanish charts of the time the trend of the coast was thus marked and the worst of their dangers seemed past, 1
This error was corrected by Ortelius in the 1587 edition of his Atlas, probably in consequence of the survey which Sarmiento was ordered to make 1