Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/135

 outdone in this respect by the Inquisitors of Spain. Froude says of him that, whilst cruising in the Channel, he caught sight of a Spanish ship, which had been freighted in Flanders for Bilbao, with a cargo valued at eighty thousand ducats, and forty prisoners who were going to Spain to serve in the galleys, and that he chased her into the Bay of Biscay, where he fired into her, killed the captain's brother and a number of his men, and, boarding her when all resistance had ceased, sewed up the captain himself and the survivors of the crew in their own sails, and flung them overboard. Having scuttled the ship, Cobham made off with the booty to his pirate's den in the south of Ireland.

Though English hearts had often been broken with the news of brothers, sons, or husbands wasting to skeletons in the dungeons of Cadiz, or burning to ashes in the Plaza at Valladolid, the eighteen drowned bodies, with the mainsail for their winding sheet, which were washed upon the Spanish shores, tended only to increase the horrors and to magnify the punishments to which English prisoners in Spain had long been subjected. *