HOW ENGLAND WAS SA BY A PIRATE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18075, 13 January 1921, Page 6

HOW ENGLAND WAS SA BY A PIRATE.

By H. de VERE STACFOOLE. Did you ever hear of Flemming? Hume, in his massive history, only gives him three lines. That is how histories are written, and one of ihe reasons no doubt why the mouse in Alice in Wonderland used Hume as a towel to dry the birds and beast* after their bath in the pool of tears. Fleinming was a pirate in the days of Elizabeth. He kept the Channel and plundered small merchant vessels; a sea robber o£ the worst description, selfish, dirty, illiterate. Round about May and June, 1588, they wanted Flemming badly in Plymouth. They wanted to hang him. Flemming did not want to be hanged, and he would no more have entered Plymouth Harbour than you would enter a red-hot oven. THE MENACING CLOUD. On the morning of July 20. 1588, Flemming lay asleep in liis bunk in the dog-hole cabin of his little old ship, one great fist clenched on his massy breast; dreaming of rum, most likely, dreaming of anything most certainly but the fact that the whole future of the western world lay in his keeping. That in fifteen minutes he was to crown with his dirty hands all the future kings of England, robe all the future Archbishops of Canterbury, create Nelson, and found the British Empire, and that he was to work this miracle not by the agency of a magician, but simply by and through the virtue of his own manhood. The bang of a marlinspike on the cabin hatch and the voice of his mate brought him tumbling out of his bunk and on deck. The day had just broken, the Lizard lay away to the north-west, and on the sea line beyond the Lizard and away southward rolling with the wind was a cloud—a cloud of ships, galleons, zabras, patasses, galleasses, hulks, and galleys, sixty thousand tons of shipping, all vague as yet. far, but steadily advancing under the pressure of the west wind. RACE TO PLYMOUTH. Then the sun touched the piture, and Flemming saw the castellated ships and the colours of Spain, the bulging sails and the banners of Medina Sidonia stretching far as the eye could reach.

He knew nothing of history or the Spanish Armada. He only knew that here was the enemy, and that England was threatened with destruction. He knew that the Lord High Admiral of England was waiting to hang him at Plymouth, and that if he did not get to Plymouth to be hanged England would be destroyed. Placing the safety of England far above his own life, he turned his ship and cracked on all sail for Plymouth. Had he not done so Effingham would have, been trapped. They did not hang him, they have not even hung him in the Royal Academy, nor is there a statue to him—though London, badly wants it. this day.