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then prayed to God for the happy success of the voyage
and to turn it to the profit of his country. He remembered
also there divers of his friends and especially Sir William
Wynter, praying Master John Wynter to commend him
to that good knight; all which he did with so cheerful a
countenance, as if he had gone to some great prepared
banquet.'

With Sir Thomas More's grim jest upon his lips he
then declared himself ready, and after begging Drake to
forgive those who were suspected of being his accomplices
he embraced him, 'naming him his good captain and bid-
ding him farewell, and so bidding the whole company fare-
well laid his head on the block.' The axe fell; and Drake,
ordering, the head to be held aloft, cried out 'Lo! this is
the end of traitors.' 1

____________________
1 This romantic scene, in which the fantastic chivalry of the age seems
to touch its highest elevation, was rejected by Southey in his Life of Drake
as apocryphal. He was of opinion that the person who invented it could
have no expectation of obtaining belief from anyone 'except by a reflex sup-
position in the reader's mind that a circumstance so incredible never would
have been invented.' Unfortunately he did not know of Cooke's narrative,
and so was ignorant that the story told in the Authorised Narrative is cor-
roborated and even amplified in every detail and in entirely different words
by an actual eye-witness hostile to Drake. Amongst the many marks of
Cook's genuineness is his version of Doughty's last words. Had he been
inventing he certainly would have got the jest right. This he did not do.
He gives Doughty's words thus: 'Now truly I may say, as did Sir Thomas
More, that he that cuts off my head shall have little honesty, my neck is so
short.' What More said was, 'My neck is very short. Take heed, therefore,
that thou strike not awry, for saving of thine honesty.'

-260-

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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: 260.
    
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