492 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
1633-4 Itm paied Pascow Rooe for his Charges & 
horse hier vnto Shatstor to view water by m* 
maior’s appointmente . onypo kDa 
1634-5 Itm pay4 M’ Nicholls and aha that went 
to view the Towne Leate ; .  vijé iiij4 
The Annual Register of 1761 shows that the Feast was then an 
annual custom; and a bill for the dinner of 1703 has been pre- 
served.* The later Sir Francis was then Recorder. On the other 
hand, Yonge in his Plimouth Memoirs gives a full list of all the 
business engagements of the Mayor and Corporation, as they re- 
curred annually ; and also a list of the Corporate full dress days, 
“‘ Mayor’s Feasts, and other Treatments.” + ‘‘The Fishynge Feaste ” 
finds place in neither, and as Yonge wrote these lists before May, 
1695, we get with the aid of the dinner bill aforesaid within 
some half-dozen years of its modern origin under direct Drake 
auspices. 
It is indeed about this time that we find the first really sub- 
stantial departure from the Drake story as embodied in the Official 
Records, and more or less confirmed by the contemporary evidence. 
Unquestionably the Drake of history had been for some time 
gradually passing into the Drake of popular sentiment; and the 
respect and admiration which were rightly entertained for his un- 
daunted heroism, indomitable pluck, and untiring energy, had merged 
into a growing hero-worship, which later days has carried almost 
to apotheosis. To the ordinary Plymothians even of his own day, 
ignorant of what transpired within the Corporate conclave, not 
then a public body, he would have been the most prominent figure 
connected with “bringing in the water,” and his memory was 
kept alive in connection with it through the long retention of the 
Leat Mills by his family. We should have been surprised if, when 
the Corporation of 1617 were commemorating Hawkins and Hele 
in their new Guildhall, Drake had been omitted. We are little 
surprised to find in the map which accompanies one of the siege 
tracts, printed in London in 1643, the leat set forth as “Sir 
Francis Drake’s water ;” we are not surprised to see his name for 
the first time publicly recognized in direct association with the 
water works when, in 1671, the Old Town Conduit was rebuilt, 
since the Corporation had at last come to their own, and in the 
* In Jewitt’s History of Plymouth, pp. 209-10, it is quoted in full. 
t Plym. Inst. Trans., vol. v. pp. 554-560. 
