Yet I have no quarrel with the
poor Portugal; for I doubt not but friend Lopez Vaz had
looking over his shoulder as he wrote some mighty black
velvet Don, with a name as long as that Don Bernaldino
Delgadillo de Avellaneda who set forth lately his
vainglorious libel of lies concerning the last and fatal
voyage of my dear friends Sir F. Drake and Sir John Hawkins,
who rest in peace, having finished their labors, as would
God I rested. To whose shameless and unspeakable lying my
good friend Mr. Henry Savile of this county did most pithily
and wittily reply, stripping the ass out of his lion's skin;
and Sir Thomas Baskerville, general of the fleet, by my
advice, send him a cartel of defiance, offering to meet him
with choice of weapons, in any indifferent kingdom of equal
distance from this realm; which challenge he hath prudently
put in his pipe, or rather rolled it up for one of his
Spanish cigarros, and smoked it, and I doubt not, found it
foul in the mouth."
"But the next day, gentlemen, in came some five-and-twenty more, being
the wreck of the other party, and with them a few negroes; and these
last proved themselves no honester men than they were brave, for there
being great misery among us English, and every one of us straggling
where he could to get food, every day one or more who went out never
came back, and that caused a suspicion that the negroes had betrayed
them to the Spaniards, or, maybe, slain and eaten them.
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