SIR FRANCIS DRAKE REHABILITATED AND MEMORIALISED. 87 
do so, and the new facts which they had been able to bring to 
light from indentures and ancient documents were quite sufficient 
to warrant them in accepting the Corporation's own statement 
"that the whole undertaking cost Sir Francis Drake and the 
Corporation a great sum." 1 ' 
Such then were Sir Francis Drake's claims to a national 
memorial to stand on the Plymouth Hoe, near the site of the old 
Compass Beacon, so conspicuous in its elevation and dimensions as 
to be seen from afar by seafaring ships passing down Channel along 
the track once taken of old by the luckless Armada. Then when 
the winds of heaven blew, his far-seen memorial might be the 
means of preventing the argosies of nations from being scattered, 
and might rather gather them safe from the dispersing winds, 
within the protecting bosom of the Plymouth Haven. The sons 
of the English race, north, south, east, and west, would hail the 
day of its completion, and many a Drake, not only in England, 
but in far America and more distant Australia, and in the still 
more distant islands of the Pacific Ocean, over which Drake 
himself once led the way, would rejoice when he heard of, or as a 
pilgrim came to see, the group of the statues of Elizabethan heroes 
on the Hoe, which would testify beyond a question that there at 
least Sir Francis Drake had been in very deed " Eehabilitated and 
fitly memorialised." 
1 This conclusion is further confirmed from the letters recently brought to 
light, in the Cecil Papers already referred to. Drake is, in the letter to 
the Earl of Nottingham, spoken of as having brought the watercourse into 
Plymouth ; and in the letter to Cecil we find the Mayor, Parker (1601-2), 
speaking of "the great charge" of the introduction of the water to the 
Corporation. See Appendix. 
F 2 
