AN INTERESTING FIND

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 138, 7 December 1912, Page 14

AN INTERESTING FIND

" Our own historians had better wake up,° ■ says the Pall Mall. "It was Parkman, an American, who toiled through the French archives and gave us the true story of Wolfe at Quebec ; and now we owe it to an American lady that - th© Mexican records have yielded a fresh ha-rvest of material concerning Sir Francis Drake. Mrs. Nutt&U gave the Hakluyt Society some -account of her .labours; and we shall be impatient till we get the result in the book she promises for the spring. For at the present moment it is safe to say that a few such documents as she has found tire more precious to Englishmen than «11 the moidores and pieces of eight that Dtfake and his roew -ever took from the galleons of Spain. " What does the new evidence amount to? 'We learn that Drake sailed for discovery and trade, not for plunder, and that he carried a license from Queen Bess. He had » chaplain; with him, bttt conducted the daily service aboard in person, and read the Bible out. He' kept his prisoners at his own table, talked to them fluently in Spanish, and treated them so ■well that none of them ■ abused or hated him. A side u>su© ia that the valiant Sir Richard Grenville, he of the Revenge, refused a similar 1 license from the Queen because it forbade his seizing any lands from King Philip. But the main thing is that Drake's character comes out well even from witnesses under the duress of the Inquisition, and praise in such a quarter is praise indeed."