It was needless for Drake to sack more Spanish floats. He had all the
plunder he could carry. From the charts he learned that the Spaniards
always struck north for favorable winds. Heading north, month after
month, the _Golden Hind_ sailed for the shore that should have led
northeast, and that puzzled the mariners by sheering west and yet west;
fourteen hundred leagues she sailed along a leafy wilderness of tangled
trees and ropy mosses, beauty and decay, the froth of the beach combers
aripple on the very roots of the {160} trees; dolphins coursing round
the hull like greyhounds; flying fish with mica for wings flitting over
the decks; forests of seaweed warning out to deeper water. Then, a
sudden cold fell, cold and fogs that chilled the mariners of tropic
seas to the bone. The veering coast pushed them out farther westward,
far north of what the Spanish charts showed. Instead of flying fish
now, were whales, whales in schools of thousands that gambolled round
the _Golden Hind_. As the north winds--"frozen nimphes," the record
calls them--blew down the cold Arctic fogs, Drake's men thought they
were certainly nearing the Arctic regions.
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