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224 dered various Spanish settlements, and made, at the expense of his enemies, a fortune vastly larger than that they had taken from him. He visited the isthmus of Darien, saw from a mountain-top the waves of the Pacific, and planned an expe- dition into those waters. lie lelurned to England in 1573, and was welcomed as a hero. Under the patronage of Elizabeth, he set sail from Plymouth, 13 Dec, 1577, with five vessels and 164 gentlemen and sailors, to follow the route that had been traced by Magellan. Of these vessels, the " Pelican " was the only one that completed the adventure. Her armament was twenty guns of brass and iron, with others stowed away in the hold Drake ])illaged the Spanish settlements of Chili and Peru, and every vessel he found, among them a royal galleon, laden with gold, silver, and precious stones, to the value of about $3,000,000. He then sailed north- ward, and, landing on the coast of California, took possession in the name of his sovereign, and named it Nova Albion. lie remained for some weeks, and made friends with the natives, who regarded the new-comers as gods. The chief, dressed in furs, came with his official attendants, and indulged in a wild dance. Drake was asked to sit down, and the king, singing with all the rest, set a crown on Drake's head and saluted him as Hioh (" sover- eign.") On leaving the place, Drake, fearing lest he should meet the Spaniards in sujierior force if he returned by the way he came, sailed to the north, and sought a passage to the Atlantic through Bering strait. Repelled by the intense cold, he again sought the Pacific, and determined by sail- ing westward to make the circuit of the globe. He traversed the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, doubled the Cape of Grood Hope, and arrived at Plymouth in November, 1580, after an absence of two years and ten months. Elizabeth received him with favor, dined on board his ship, and made him a knight. The Spaniards demanded that he should be given up to them as a pirate, but Eliza- beth refused, and the rupture that followed be- tween her and Philip II. gave Drake a new oppor- tunity. Within one year he captured and plun- dered Cartagena and other towns, burned the forts of San Antonio and Saint Augustine, then visited and carried back to England the remams of the colony that Raleigh had planted in Virginia. In 1587 he was placed in command of a fleet of about thirty sail designed to attack the Spanish ports. He destroyed 100 ships in the harbor of Cadiz, which were des- tined for the in- vasion of Eng- land, and capt- ured an immense carrack, from pa- pers in which the English first learned the value of the East India traffic, and the mode of carrving it on. In 1588, as vice-admiral, he coirimanded one squadron of the fleet, by which, with the assist- ance of the elements, the armada sent by Spain against England was annihilated, and in 1589 rav- aged the coasts of the Spanish peninsula. In 1592-'3 he was a member of parliament for Plymouth. In 1594, a report having reached England that Spain was preparing a fleet more numerous and powerful than the armada, he again entered the service. Convinced that the West Indies was the point where Spain could be best attacked, he sailed for America in 1595 with 26 vessels, in company with Admiral Hawkins. A divided command produced its usual bad results, and their first attempts were fruitless. The Spaniards were also forewarned, and the English expedition proved a melancholy failure. At Puerto Rico Hawkins died, either of a wound or of chagrin, and Drake then gained new triumphs. He burned Santa Marta, Rancheria, Nombre de Dios, and Rio Hacha ; but a fatal mal- ady broke out among the sailors, and as he heard of the defeat of a division of his forces, which he had sent to operate by land, he fell sick and died from the combined effects of fever and of mental agitation on account of the reverses of the expedi- tion. His remains were placed in a leaden casket and buried at sea off Puerto Cabello, Venezuela.

DRAKE, Joseph Rodman, poet, b. in New York city, 7 Aug., 1795 ; d. there, 21 Sept., 1820. He was an only son, one of four children, who, early bereaved of their parents, were subjected to many of the pains and pri- vations incident to poverty and the loss of their natural protect- ors. Like his sis- ters Caroline and Louise, he was a poet from child- hood. Some of his juvenile verses were found by thewriteramong Halleck's pa- pers. At four- teen Drake wrote the " Mocking- Bird" and "The Past and Pres- ent," a part of

which furnished the concluding passage of " Leon " in the published volume of his poems. Four years later he abandoned merchandise from a distaste for business, and began the study of medicine with Drs. Bruce and Romayne. In the winter of 1812-'3 Drake and Halleck met and immediately became friends. When the young and handsome physician was mar- ried in the summer of 1816 to a daughter of Henry Eckford, the opulent ship-builder, it was Halleck who officiated as groomsman ; when he went to Europe with his accomplished wife, it was to his brother-poet that he addressed several amusing epistles ; when their daughter and only child was born, she was christened Halleck ; when the pulsa- tions of his gentle heart were daily growing weaker, it was his faithful friend " Fitz " who with more than a brother's love soothed his dying pillow; and, when the grave had forever closed over Drake, it was the same sorrow-stricken friend who wrote those exquisitely touching lines so familiar to the English-speaking world, and which will ever con- tinue to be among Halleck's and Drake's most en- during monuments. " The Culprit Pay," on which Drake's reputation as a poet chiefly rests, was writ- ten in his twenty-second year, and not, as it has always been said, in the summer of 1819. A MS. copy now before the writer states that it was com- posed in August, 1816. In March, 1819, the liter- ary partners began contributing anonymously to the " Evening Post " a series of good-natured verses known as " The Croakers," which appeared almost daily during three months and occasionally after- ward. These humorous poems were in 1860 col-