For Mine Own Part I Could Never
Thoroughly Settle Myself To Marry In That Country, Although Many Fair
Offers Were
Made unto me of such as were of great ability and wealth;
but I could have no liking to live
In that place where I must
everywhere see and know such horrible idolatry committed, and durst not
once for my life speak against it; and therefore I had always a longing
and desire to this my native country; and to return and serve again in
the mines, where I might have gathered great riches and wealth, I very
well saw that at one time or another I should fall again into the
danger of that devilish Inquisition, and so be stripped of all, with
loss of life also, and therefore I made my choice rather to learn to
weave Groganes and Taffataes, and so compounding with a silk weaver, I
bound myself for three years to serve him, and gave him one hundred and
fifty pezoes to teach me the science, otherwise he would not have
taught me under seven years' prenticeship, and by this means I lived
the more quiet and free from suspicion.
Howbeit I should many times be charged by familiars of that devilish
house, that I had a meaning to run away into England, and be an heretic
Lutheran again; to whom I would answer that they had no need to suspect
any such thing in me, for that they knew all very well that it was
impossible for me to escape by any manner of means; yet notwithstanding
I was called before the Inquisitors and demanded why I did not marry.
I answered that I had bound myself at an occupation. "Well," said the
Inquisitor, "I know thou meanest to run away, and therefore I charge
thee here upon pain of burning as an heretic relapsed, that thou depart
not out of this city, nor come near to the port of St. John de Ullua,
nor to any other port;" to the which I answered that I would willingly
obey. "Yea," said he, "see thou do so, and thy fellows also; they
shall have the like charge."
So I remained at my science the full time and learned the art, at the
end whereof there came news to Mexico that there were certain
Englishmen landed with a great power at the port of Acapulco, upon the
South Sea, and that they were coming to Mexico to take the spoil
thereof, which wrought a marvellous great fear among them, and many of
those that were rich began to shift for themselves, their wives and
children; upon which hurly-burly the Viceroy caused a general muster to
be made of all the Spaniards in Mexico, and there were found to the
number of seven thousand and odd householders of Spaniards in the city
and suburbs, and of single men unmarried the number of three thousand,
and of Mestizies - which are counted to be the sons of Spaniards born of
Indian women - twenty thousand persons; and then was Paul Horsewell and
I, Miles Phillips, sent for before the Viceroy and were examined if we
did know an Englishman named Francis Drake, which was brother to
Captain Hawkins; to which we answered that Captain Hawkins had not any
brother but one, which was a man of the age of threescore years or
thereabouts, and was now governor of Plymouth in England.
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