and sacked Cartagena; how with Sir John Hawkins he wiped out the memory of San Juan de Ulloa in the great Armada fight; how he won knighthood and "singed the King of Spain's beard," are all parts of another noble story for which there is no room here.
The dream of Drake's life was to capture the city of Panama. In 1595, he brought a fleet to the Isthmus with Sir John Hawkins, captured and burned Nombre de Dios, and landed seven hundred and fifty soldiers to march across to Panama. But the Spaniards had barricaded the Royal Road too strongly, and, besides, a great deal of sickness broke out on the fleet. So the English gave it up, and set sail for Columbus's old port of Porto Bello, but before they reached this harbor their admiral was dead.
They buried him a league from shore, and as the leaden coffin sank beneath the waves, the guns of the fleet roared a farewell broadside, and a fort that the Spaniards had built to defend their new town of Porto Bello was given to the flames. This was on the twenty-eighth of January, 1596. Some people declare that "Francis Drake lies buried in Nombre Dios bay"; but those who did the burying say Porto Bello. And Captain William Parker, who captured that town only six years later,—in spite of its fine new forts,—marks on his chart a spot not far outside the harbor as "the Place where my Shippes roade, being the rock where Sir Francis Drake his Coffin was throwne overboorde."
