Drake in the Revenge. Of this prize he and his fellow-magistrate, Sir John Gilbert (Raleigh's stepbrother), took charge on behalf of the government, removing and forwarding at once to the lord admiral by the Roebuck her ample store of shot and powder, then much needed in the English fleet: her ordnance they were transferring as quickly as possible to another ship to be sent out to join the fleet.

On the November 5th following Cary has another busy day." He gets word that on her return voyage around the Orkneys the St. Peter the Great, one of the two hospital ships of the Spanish navy, had stranded in Hope Bay near Salcombe. At the end of a rapid ride of twenty miles, Cary's first care was to disperse the country people who were already on hand plundering the wreck, and having secured the prize in the queen's name, he took order for disposition of the crew and the recovery of the remnants of the cargo. The ordnance was saved, but the plate and treasure had already fallen a prey to the wreckers; the drugs and "potecary stuff" of 6000 ducats' value were spoiled by water. Of the

1 See Froude, Elizabeth, v, 408, or, more in detail, The Spanish Story of the Armada (1892), 43, and Motley, United Netherlands, ii, 540. The galleon is called Capitana in the despatches, but this simply means flag-ship. Drake claimed the prize as his own (to the disgust of Frobisher and Hawkins, who believed they had contributed to her capture), and sent Valdez to Walsingham to be delivered to the queen.

2 Cal. State Papers, ccxviii, 4.

crew of 30 sailors, 100 soldiers, and 50 other persons who had sailed from Spain, 140 succeeded in reaching the land in safety. Separating twenty officers from the rest, Cary left eight with Sir William Courtenay at Ilton Castle and himself took charge of the others at his own cost. Then, leaving the further care of the situation to Anthony Ashley, who took up his quarters with Sir William Courtenay, Cary returned to Cockington to report his proceedings to the privy council.

These Spanish prisoners were lodged, with those from Valdez's captured flag-ship, in the great barn of Tor Abbey, which ever since has been known as the Spanish Barn. Their plight was pitiful and was aggravated by a quarrel which then arose between Cary and his neighbor and colleague Sir John Gilbert of Compton,1 near Dartmouth. The magistrates were in difficulty because they dared not use the captured supplies for the relief of the prisoners until their prize value had been duly adjudged. Cary re

It was his younger brother and heir, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who, after planting the first English colony in America, was last seen in a storm at sea "sitting," as Hakluyt records, "abaft with a booke in his hand, crying out unto us in the Hind (so oft as we did approach within hearing), We are as neere to heaven by sea as by land." The story has recently been put into noble verse by a twentieth-century poet, a ballad worthy of an Elizabethan subject, Alfred Noyes' A Knight of the Ocean-Sea, with its unforgetable refrain:

"Ever the more, ever the more

He heard the winds and the waves roar."

ports to the council the distress of the Spaniards: "their fish savors so it cannot be eaten, and their bread is full of worms." To Walsingham Cary writes personally that their plight is due largely to Gilbert's obstinacy: he has himself, he says, given each of the prisoners 11⁄2d out of his own purse, but Gilbert "will take no pains where no gain is." The bitterness thus engendered persisted. Four years later, when England was preparing for another attack from Spain, six Devon gentlemen were appointed colonels, each with a regiment of 866 men. Cary and Gilbert were two of these colonels. On September 6, 1592, the privy council wrote to Cary that

1 George Cary protests his own disinterestedness. The salvaged wine was distributed among the neighboring gentry. George Cary himself appropriated two pipes, but he reported it to the council and offered to pay for it. (Cal. State Papers, ccxv, 67, 68.) As to the prisoners he reports on another occasion, "two of them, the one being the pothecary, the other the sergeant, I took to myself. . . I would humbly desire the gift of those two Spaniards, whom I have, not for any profit, but I make trial what skill is in them." (Cal. State Papers, ccxviii, 4.)

It does not appear what became of the Spanish prisoners. There is a Devon tradition (Baring-Gould, A Book of the West, i, 20) that they settled in the country and took English wives, from which it is attempted to argue an explanation of the dark hair and fine profiles so common among Devon and Cornish peasants on the south coast, but it is more probable that these have an earlier origin, perhaps with "the dark haired Iberian."

In Fauquier County, Virginia, there is a similar explanation of German names and characteristics in the same class, as due to the marriage with the native stock of the mercenary Hessian soldiers who became prisoners after the battle of Saratoga in the American Revolution, were held for the remainder of the war in the Valley of Virginia, and ultimately were turned loose to shift for themselves because neither England nor their own sovereign would repatriate them.