Ratings2
Average rating2.5
I think what surprised me more than anything in this short excerpt from Richard Hakluyt's Voyages and Discoveries, is how much Drake and his entourage were bloodthirsty pirates!
In the first three pages they have forcibly taken, robbed eight boats. These occupants (mostly fishermen in this case) yielded, and as there is no mention of their slaughter, so we will give Drake the benefit of the doubt and consider they were left alive.
Others were much less lucky, and were slaughtered, their ships, boats or villages torched.
To be fair, I have no doubt the Spanish were equally aggressive, but the repeated scenarios are documented in such a way that they are as eventful as sailing up a coastline for a week, or massacring 300 flightless birds on an island to store for food!
I couldn't tell with this book whether the excerpts selected were consistent with the rest of the book, but these weren't gripping in the way other of these Little Black Classics are.