THE DEFEAT OF JOHN HAWKINS

By an English writer, this excellent book is ""the biography of the third slaving voyage"" of John Hawkins, ""the most original, patient and self-effacing seaman of Elizabethan times"", the brilliant navigator who established the British slave trade between Africa and the Spanish settlements in South and Central America and Mexico. Although the slave trade, a lucrative one, was forbidden by Spain, who held the trading monopoly with her colonies, Hawkins had already made two successful slaving voyages to New Spain when, in September, 1567, he again sailed with a small fleet from Plymouth; with him went Francis Drake, a boy on his first sea adventure. Plagued with troubles from the first, Hawkins, slave-decks filled, managed to reach New Spain and to sell most of his slaves, but at San Juan de Ulua, near the present Vera Cruz, was attacked and defeated by the Spanish and most of his men captured, to be later sold as galley-slaves or turned over to the Inquisition as heretics. Hawkins and Drake and a few others reached England; three other men were picked up eleven months later by a fishing vessel on the Nova Scotian coast; how they got there is today unknown. Not for casual readers, this scholarly book will appeal to students and historians of Elizabethan navigation and history, and to those addicts of historical biography who enjoy well-written and unadorned tales of true adventure.