Since Magellan's successful passage in 1520, though the greatest explorers had sought to repeat his exploit, almost every attempt had ended in failure and disaster. He was first followed by two Genoese ships, which reached the Straits, but did not enter them. In 1525 a knight of Malta called Garcia de Loyasa, who sailed with seven ships, got through and reached the Moluccas with only one and was there killed. Some fifteen or twenty years later, Vargas, Bishop of Placentia, passed with one of his ships, leaving another a wreck in the Straits. In 1528 Cortez sent an expedition; Sebastian Cabot tried and failed; Amerigo Vespucci did not even succeed in finding the Strait at all. Attempts from the West had met with no better success. Sailors began to have a horror of the place; mutinous conspiracies to force commanders to turn back became a common feature of the voyage, and Simon de Alcozova, the last who had made the attempt, had been murdered by his men on the way. 'The Straits,' says a contemporary, 'were counted so terrible in those days that the very thoughts of attempting it were accounted dreadful,' and he considers it the conspicuous merit of Drake's famous achievement that he was able to get his men there at all. 1 The force with which Drake undertook this hazardous enterprise was by no means small for the times, and was considerably larger than that with which Frobisher had already sailed for the North-West. It was composed as follows:
See Monson Naval Tracts, book iv.; Burney South Sea, vol. i.
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Publication Information: Book Title: Drake and the Tudor Navy: With a History of the Rise of England as a Maritime Power. Volume: 1. Contributors: Julian S. Corbett - author. Publisher: Longmans, Green. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1898. Page Number: 227.
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