The Elizabethans (33 page)

Drake had studied maps of Nombre de Dios and, although he had never been there in his life, by the time he had crossed the Atlantic he knew the whole layout of it; he knew the depths of the harbour, he knew every street and battery. As they entered the Spanish Main they captured and plundered a number of Spanish vessels, and Drake pumped captured Spaniards and their African slaves for information. The one vital piece of information which he had not gleaned was that the town was empty of treasure. It had sailed some time before. The hope that Drake might simply lift the Peruvian gold – or silver ingots – from Nombre de Dios was dashed upon arrival.
²
Drake, moreover, was shot during his unsuccessful raid upon the port. With great resourcefulness, he decided to sail down to Cartagena, let his wounds heal and wait for the next treasure train to arrive at Panama in January 1573. With a party of Cimarrones, Drake made his way across the isthmus with the intention of intercepting a fourteen-mule load of gold. The plot was uncovered and he was compelled to return to base camp, where he joined forces with a French pirate, one Guillaume Le Testu. The next raid was luckier, and they were able to intercept the mule train and overpower the Spanish guards. Le Testu was killed. Drake was able to sail home a rich man, with booty of £20,000. They reached Plymouth harbour at sermon time on Sunday, 9 August 1573. The parson watched his church empty as word spread through the pews and the people ran down to the quay to praise ‘the evidence of God’s love and blessing towards our gracious Queen and country, by the fruit of our captain’s labour and success’. There stood Drake on his quarterdeck, sturdy,
³
of slightly stocky build, with red hair, beard and curly moustaches, a high colour, bright, intelligent green eyes. The crowds cheered him as a hero. Modern prudery can denounce what he did as an act of simple piracy, but the next great maritime achievement cannot be so lightly dismissed.

After a spell in Ireland, in which Drake fought for the Earl of Essex, he made friends with Essex’s retainer Thomas Doughty. Through Doughty, or possibly through Essex himself, Drake met Sir Francis Walsingham, who was by now the Queen’s Secretary. (Cecil, no less close to her, had become officially her Lord Treasurer.) Between them, they hatched a scheme for Drake to sail with a small fleet into the Pacific and raid Spanish settlements there. The whole plan was to be kept secret, but the joint aim of the enterprise was to weaken the Spanish Empire and collect further loot by acts of piracy. Investors backing the scheme included Walsingham himself, Christopher Hatton, John Hawkins, William and George Wynter and the Queen herself. Perhaps the vital clue to the vibrancy of the Elizabethan Age is to be seen in this episode. The population of this archipelago was tiny, and the majority of that population were engaged in the busyness of life – ploughing, begetting, making, selling, eating. A few, a very few, were making the dynamic decisions that made Elizabethan England so distinctive. Politics was carried on not by a huge cumbrous parliament and an even huger and more cumbrous civil service, but by a small Council. Parliament was only summoned when the Queen needed money. The Church, the entire settlement of the religious future of England, was not settled by a great synod. After the initial debates in Parliament and Westminster Hall about such matters as the nature of the Sacrament, the Church of England, its structure, hierarchy, rites and doctrines, was defined by the Queen herself with a few pet Cambridge dons. And here in the matter of Drake and his great voyage, which turned out to be the circumnavigation of the Earth, the Queen was personally involved, and with piratical boldness, having a flutter on the success of his enterprise. Back in the early 1570s when Drake had sailed to Panama, the Queen had been reluctant to annoy Philip II. By 1577 Philip had begun to extricate himself from his Mediterranean war against the Turks and concentrate his fire on the Protestants in the Netherlands. Elizabeth was now much more ready to listen to the ‘hawks’ in her Council – Leicester and Walsingham – and to realise that fighting the Spanish overtly would eventually become unavoidable. They appear to have kept the much more cautious Burghley (William Cecil) in the dark about the expedition. The outline of the scheme is contained in a document that was partly burned in the Cotton fire and is therefore charred round the edges (BL Cotton MS, Otho, E.viii). It has had to be reconstructed by modern scholars. It appears that the plan required Drake to enter the Straits of Magellan, lying 52 degrees north of the Pole, and having passed therefrom into the South Sea, ‘then he is to sail northwards seeking along the coast aforenamed . . . to find our places meet to have traffic for the renting of commodities of these her Majesty’s realms’. They anticipated ‘great hope of gold, silver, spices, drugs, cochineal and divers other special commodities, such as may enrich her Majesty’s dominions and also put shipping a-work greatly’.
⁴

Before he left, the Queen summoned Drake for a private interview. The two redheads at last met and instantaneously liked one another. ‘Drake,’ she said, ‘I would gladly be revenged on the King of Spain for divers injuries that I have received.’ There were just three of them present: Walsingham, Elizabeth, Drake.

It was essential to keep the expedition a secret. ‘Of all men my Lord Treasurer [Burghley] is not to know it,’ Elizabeth said. And it was of even greater importance that the Spanish should not know of it. They sailed from Plymouth, with Drake in the
Pelican
, which was later to become one of the most famous ships in the history of the world when it changed its name to the
Golden Hind
(in deference to his patron, Sir Christopher Hatton, whose coat of arms included a hind); the
Elizabeth
, commanded by John Winter; a pinnacle named the
Benedict
and a store-ship named the
Swan
. There was a setback almost immediately when the little squadron sailed into a gale, which forced it back into Falmouth harbour with loss of masts and spars. They had to return to Plymouth for repairs. Meanwhile John Oxenham, Drake’s old comrade from the Panama expedition, had sailed back to the isthmus with the aim of intercepting more treasure ships coming from Peru. This expedition had come to grief.

It was publicly announced that Drake was to sail to the Mediterranean to open a spice trade at Alexandria. Meanwhile he set off across the Atlantic. Part of the plan was piratical. It was also hoped, however, that they might find a new continent. Sir Richard Grenville and friends maintained that somewhere in the South Pacific there was a great continent –
Terra Australis Incognita
they called it – that could become an English colony.

In the South Atlantic the squadron captured a Portuguese vessel, and Drake put Thomas Doughty in charge of it. But things were not going well. Thomas Drake – one of the three brothers Drake took on the voyage – warned Francis that Doughty was disloyal. They began to suspect that he was somehow in touch with Burghley or that he had come on the voyage as Burghley’s spy. By the summer of 1578 Drake had Doughty taken prisoner and bound to the mast. When untied, Doughty was forbidden pen or paper or any books that were not in English (for Doughty was a learned man). One of the many curious facts about the two men is that Doughty and Drake remained friends, even after Drake had put Doughty on ‘trial’ for treason. At the end of the trial, they dined and received the Sacrament together. Perhaps there were no hard feelings, even the next morning, when Drake had Doughty beheaded.

By now the crews of the various ships were demoralised and restless. What was the purpose of this arduous journey? They had begun it with the hope of gold. Now there was talk merely of discovering some fantasy Australia, and their commanders had fallen out among themselves. Conditions on a sixteenth-century sailing ship were cramped. Food was rationed, as was water. It was safer to drink beer than water, and each crew member was entitled to a gallon a day. Not surprisingly, there was much drunkenness. With no fresh fruit or vegetables available on the voyage, disease was rife, both among the human population of the ships and among the rats that travelled with them in great numbers.

A month or so after Doughty’s beheading, Drake ordered all hands on shore for the Sunday service. He told the ship’s chaplain, Fletcher, that he himself would deliver the sermon. The sailors were by now half-mutinous, drunken, unruly, insolent and refusing to do their share of the work.

‘My masters!’ exclaimed Drake in his resonant voice as he surveyed the boozy, piratical, unshaven rabble on the Argentinian sands, ‘I must have it left. I must have the gentlemen to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman. I would know him that would refuse to set his hand to a rope.’ He had grabbed their attention, and made them frightened. Was he going to name the idlers? Keel-haul them after the Prayer-Book Matins? Finish reading the Collect for the Day and administer the cat? His men knew that Drake was a captain who was capable of worse harshness than this. But, no. With a rhetorical flourish, having said he ‘would know’ such an idler, he added, ‘I know there is not any such here.’

Next, he turned to the captains and masters of the ships and dismissed every one from his post. He said that when he thought of the overwhelming difficulty of the task he had undertaken, it ‘bereaved him of his wits’. But he must have loyal obedience. No man from now on was obliged to stay with him. If any wished to leave now, they were to declare it.

No human voice was heard; only the cry of gulls, the crash of the waves on the sand, the movement of the winds. Drake had his men in the palm of his hand.

‘You come then,’ he said, ‘of your own free will: on you it depends to make the voyage renowned or to end as a reproach to our country and a laughing-stock to the enemy.’

There was no further dissension after that. Drake now reduced the squadron to three ships: the
Pelican
, which was at this juncture renamed the
Golden Hind
, the
Elizabeth
and the
Marigold
. The auxiliary ships were emptied of their stores and destroyed. On 21 August 1678 these three English fighting ships entered the Straits of Magellan. The Portuguese explorer and navigator Ferdinand Magellan (
c
.1480–1521), after whom the Straits are named, was the first man to circumnavigate the world, but although he rounded the Cape from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, Magellan never made it home, being killed in the Philippines having accomplished about half the journey. Some of Magellan’s crew made the journey home in his ship the
Victoria
, but Francis Drake was the first commander to sail round the world. To sail through the Straits of Magellan is a hazardous undertaking. Most sailing ships since then have gone round Cape Horn to the southward, but Drake – in common with all his contemporaries who had thought about it – supposed that Tierra del Fuego, to the south of the straits, was part of a great continent stretching all the way to the South Pole and that the Straits were the only way through. The normal time for navigating the Straits was seven weeks, during which it was necessary to brave powerful currents, jagged rocks and gale-force winds. Drake broke all records and sailed through the Straits in sixteen days.

But once he was in the Pacific his luck did not last, and a gale drove him southwards. He found open water. Thus it was discovered that there was no need to have sailed through the Straits in the first place, and the world map could be redrawn. (But not yet: Drake kept the secret of the meeting place of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from the Spaniards.) The other two ships were blown far apart. John Winter, commanding the
Elizabeth
, went back to the Straits and sailed home to England; His men simply refused to go on. The
Marigold
was lost. John Oxenham, in his ship, landed at Panama. So the
Golden Hind
alone of the three was in the Pacific Ocean. Drake sailed up the coast of Chile, making sporadic raids, which were to make his fortune. There was still no news of Oxenham in Panama, but when he had captured some Spanish prisoners, Drake began to piece together a narrative of the disaster: Oxenham and three of his officers were prisoners in Lima; the Spanish troops were ruthlessly subduing Drake’s old comrades in arms, the Cimarrones. The Spaniards expected Drake to return to Panama, but with only one ship he would have had no hope of success. Besides, he had another aim, which was to continue his voyage across the Pacific Ocean to the East Indies and open up English trade for the spices which were at that date the richest merchandise in the world.
⁵
Drake meanwhile sailed on northwards, up the western coast of South America. Not one Spanish ship on this coast had a gun on board.
⁶
Why should they need one? The idea of enemy vessels entering the Pacific did not enter their calculations. When he captured a Spanish ship that he nicknamed the
Cacafuego
, Drake knew his fortune was made. It was laden with eighty pounds of gold, twenty-six tons of silver, thirteen chests of money and ‘a certain quantity of jewels and precious stones’, valued in all at £150,000–200,000. There was so much treasure that they ‘believed that they took out of her twelve score tons of plate; insomuch that they were forced to heave much of it overboard because their ship could not carry it all’.
⁷

Drake realised that if he told his aim to the Spaniards on this vessel – whom he released when he had robbed them – they would take his words back to their military, naval and political leaders. So he told them the truth, gambling correctly that they would not believe him capable of his intention: sailing the
Golden Hind
across the Pacific Ocean.

By now the ship was quite literally groaning with silver and gold, and it was leaking badly. The north-west winds prevailed as he sailed far out to the ocean, but when he reached a point between 42º and 48ºN he coasted southwards and found a haven. It is said that he set up a metal plate claiming the territory for the Queen. In 1936 a motorist near San Francisco found a brass plate inscribed in Elizabethan English. Recent scientific tests dated it ‘sometime between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, most probably the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
⁸
In any event, the sunny Californian coast was a good place for Drake and his men to pull in to shore and overhaul the
Golden Hind
before the next stage of the adventure.