The Pirate Queen (14 page)

Hawkins was intelligent, ambitious, and above all a lateral thinker. The Englishman knew full well that, if he did not plan his voyage diligently, he, like so many others before him, would fail, and possibly die. His greatest strength was that he was a meticulous
planner, and he knew that the unhealthy conditions and long voyage would require “buying” the loyalty of his men and commanding them with a steely will. With this uppermost in mind, he willingly offered higher wages to his sailors and the promise of supplementing their pay with pillage and private trade. To further their mutual good health, Hawkins ensured that there would be adequate water, biscuit, beer, salt beef, fresh beef, Newfoundland salt fish, stockfish, herrings, salt, butter, pease,
⁷
cheese, and live pets that could later serve as food.

And there was cloth—broadcloth stored in packs of ten for trade in cooler climates as well as wool “cotton” and kerseys from the south of England to trade in the tropics. The ship’s equipment of buckets, scoops, grinding stones, compasses, ballast, pulleys, ropes, and rat poison was stuffed into the hold prior to setting off.
⁸
There were carpenters to repair the ships, cooks, a barber-surgeon, and men who could make and repair ropes and sails. The last essentials of the voyage loaded would be the captain’s gold and silver plate, then his company of musicians. Once all were aboard, Hawkins was ready to cast off. No one would accuse him of failing in his slaving mission due to a lack of planning.

It was precisely this planning that attracted his investors at home. Gonson, Winter, Duckett, and Lodge paid to equip the 140-ton
Salomon
, the 40-ton
Jonas
, and the 30-ton
Swallow
, with Hawkins as the
Swallow
’s captain. A young, unknown relation of his on board—Francis Drake—sailed with them on this, the first of his long voyages.
⁹

While John Hawkins and his crew began their human harvest in the African waters off the coast of Portuguese-“held” Guinea in the winter of 1562–63, they remained blissfully unaware of the changing political climate at home. Communications between the coast of Africa and England were nonexistent. As Hawkins “hunted” slaves—whether stealing them from Portuguese slave traders who had an established business with Spanish America or by “gathering” slaves in the interior aided and abetted by rival tribes
¹⁰
—the Flemish regent, Margaret of Parma, and her chief minister, Cardinal de Granvelle, had written to Philip pleading for him to pay attention to the growing unrest in the Low Countries. The English depredations
against their shipping in the Channel was a cause of great concern, they noted gloomily. Then there was the not insubstantial matter of the English occupation of Newhaven that worried Margaret, particularly as Philip hadn’t responded to any of her letters with his action orders in over four months.
¹¹

Yet before Philip received the plea, “as if by the hand of God” the English garrison was struck down with a virulent outbreak of plague. The French Huguenots turned against their English allies perhaps for the loss of Rouen to Charles IX, or perhaps because they felt that as Frenchmen, their interests would always remain with other Frenchmen. Whatever the precise reason, Warwick’s men, both those in France and those who had already returned to England, were dying the most painful and agonizing deaths while infecting thousands of others.

And all the while, Hawkins plied his loathsome trade for over four months in Africa. Guinea (which meant in Berber “the land of the black men”)
¹²
was a huge expanse of land extending over two thousand miles, from Cape Verde in the north, around Cape Palmas to the south, and bordered by the Niger River Delta and the Bight of Benin in the east. Hawkins’s slave “harvest” most likely consisted of a twofold plan of attack. The first, and less successful one, was to hunt down slaves in the interior themselves. It didn’t take much reflection for a man of Hawkins’s resourcefulness to devise a more fruitful means for this vile trade. It would be far easier to identify other Europeans in the vastness of Guinea and take whatever cargo they had already loaded aboard. After all English ships carried far more artillery and ammunition than their Portuguese or Spanish counterparts, and Englishmen were reputed to be fabulous archers as well. So Hawkins changed tack and set about capturing a number of Portuguese vessels and transferring their slaves and other valuable cargo to his English ships. As Hakluyt wrote, Hawkins “stayed some good time, and got into his possession, partly by the sword and partly by other means, to the number of 300 Negroes at the least, besides other merchandise, which that country yields.”
¹³

All along the African coast, those merchants who survived the English onslaught naturally wrote furious complaints back to their respective courts about the outrages perpetrated by Hawkins and his
men—letters that would take months, if not years, to arrive. Cargoes of ivory, cloves, wax, and nearly four hundred slaves were forcibly obtained, and all merchandise that was deemed unsatisfactory for the Caribbean leg of the journey was returned aboard the smallest ship to England. Among the crew of that ship was a disappointed Drake.
¹⁴

Hawkins, his crew, and his human cargo made the crossing to the Indies in April 1563—the same time that the English occupying force was decimated by plague at Newhaven in France. But the English captain was ignorant of these events, and concerned himself solely with keeping the ship “sweet smelling,” his men healthy, and limiting the deaths among his slaves in stinking holds of his ships. But only half the slaves survived the mental anguish and inhumane treatment on their meager diet of beans and water into Caribbean waters. And yet Hawkins had little trouble, at first, in selling the poor wretched souls to the Spaniards to be misused on the Spanish American plantations and in the mines.
¹⁵

Throughout Spanish America the market in slaves at bargain prices was attractive to the Spanish planters. So Hawkins’s arrival with his human cargo created a seller’s market with brisk trading at Española’s ports Puerto de Plata, Monte Christi, and Isabela.
¹⁶
Not the first interloper to arrive in the Spanish waters of the Caribbean, Hawkins found a savvy and ready market for his bargain-basement-priced slaves. After all, he had arrived without having been taxed by the Spanish authorities, and his wares represented a significant savings to the colonists. If trading went well there, then Hawkins intended to spread his net wider on future voyages to the Greater Antilles—to Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico—and beyond to the Spanish Main.
¹⁷

At the region’s administrative headquarters, Santo Domingo, rumors and complaints about Hawkins and his methods poured in to the Spanish authorities. It had been claimed that Hawkins had tricked the local governors into trading by a series of plausible lies, coercion, and out-and-out threats. A young and relatively inexperienced officer, Lorenzo Bernáldez, was dispatched to confront Hawkins and halt the Englishman’s trading in all Spanish territory—by force, if necessary.

While there had been interlopers for as long as there had been a Spanish empire, it is doubtful that any Spaniard had seen ships bristling with the long and short-range artillery and munitions that Hawkins carried aboard in plain sight. After some bizarre horse-trading, Bernáldez found himself hornswoggled by Hawkins. Violence was avoided when the Spaniard accepted the Englishman’s offer of a truce with the receipt of three-quarters of the remaining one hundred forty old or sick slaves, and one of his caravels in exchange for a license to sell the remaining thirty-five slaves and the release of captive Englishmen. An import tax of 7.5 percent was also agreed. The only problem was that Bernáldez hadn’t been authorized to grant any license at all.
¹⁸

In spite of all the losses of slaves to death, sickness, and finally ransom, the profits for Hawkins and his backers were phenomenal. His own three ships were so heavily laden with pearls, gold, silver, ginger, hides, sugar, and other trades made with the Spanish colonists in exchange for the unfortunate lives of the West African slaves that he had too much merchandise for the return journey to England. Hawkins, seemingly ever resourceful, chartered two Spanish hulks that were in port and struck a deal for the vessels to take well over fifteen hundred hides and chests of sugar back to Seville. He also gave the captains clear instructions to deliver the goods to the English factor there, Hugh Tipton. While the charter of Spanish ships was depicted as “a bit of luck” by Hawkins, chances are that it had all been prearranged by Pedro de Ponte in the Canaries before Hawkins had left there.
¹⁹

Shipping goods to Spain that the Spaniards classed by virtue of the edict of Inquisition as contraband seems strange, but Hawkins had no choice. The ships (owned by the Seville merchant trading family Martínez) were the only ones available, and Hawkins truly believed that the Spanish authorities would not question the well-established trade of the Martínez family as two of their ships came into port. But Hawkins’s luck didn’t hold out. A local Basque
licenciado
, Echegoyan, wrote to the Casa de Contractacíon in Seville about Hawkins’s scandalous behavior, finishing with the eye-popping threat, “Tomorrow all this land could become part of England if steps are not taken.”
²⁰

The result was that the Martínez ships and their cargo were impounded, and all Hawkins’s men were imprisoned and often tortured under the cruel regime of the Inquisition. Only Thomas Hampton, captain of the first ship to arrive in Seville, managed to escape. The losses—estimated later by Hawkins to be £2,000 ($701,372 or £379,120 today)—were not great when compared with the pearls, other jewels, and luxury goods that had reached England.
²¹
In fact, though the precise profit was never advertised, shortly after Hawkins arrived back in Plymouth in late summer 1563, he and his backers were already planning their next voyage. William Garrard signed up immediately as a new joint stock backer for the second. He was followed by Sir William Chester, who like Garrard was also a former lord mayor and important merchant in the Canaries. Flattering as their attentions and money were to Hawkins, the big prize came in the form of his powerful new court backers: William Cecil, Lord Admiral Clinton, the Earl of Pembroke, and Robert Dudley.

But they weren’t the only ones interested in what John Hawkins had experienced. The queen herself ordered that her quarantine against the plague be broken, and that Hawkins be allowed to join her at Windsor to discuss his journey. It is likely that the queen promised Hawkins the use of the 700-ton
Jesus of Lubeck
for the next Guinea voyage at this time. This was her symbolic gesture that the claim of illegality of English trade “beyond the line” by the Portuguese and Spanish was absurd. The merchant from Plymouth would be able to sail under the queen’s colors and reap the benefits that such an honor would entail. But Hawkins was to learn soon that the offer of the
Jesus
was a mixed blessing initially. While the
Jesus
had been deemed as “much worn and of no continuance and not worth repair” in the 1559
Book of Sea Causes
—it was a public sign of royal approval for both Hawkins and his slaving expeditions.
²²

As if the
Jesus
were not enough, Elizabeth’s support for Hawkins was also confirmed by an equally unexpected result of their interview. On September 8, 1563, she wrote to Philip II “in favour of this bearer, John Hawkins…our will and pleasure is that your understanding thoroughly the cause, and well-informing yourself of
the equity thereof, do take opportunity to communicate the same in our name…and to help and assist our said subject in setting forth his said suit.”
²³

Hawkins had been tormented by the imprisonment of his men and the merchants who had helped him to so great a success. So, armed in the knowledge that the Queen of England had implored the King of Spain to hear reason and release his crew, Hawkins traveled to Spain. Yet despite his best efforts to have his crew released and to recover his impounded goods, the Spanish would not relent against the
Luteranos
. In fact, Hawkins’s own freedom remained in jeopardy so long as he was in Spain. As to his merchandise, he was informed that it had been sold, and the money sequestered under triple lock and key in the king’s personal chest.
²⁴

By English law, Hawkins’s attempt to recover the confiscated merchandise in Spain, as well as lodging an official complaint with the High Court of the Admiralty, would most assuredly result in his being granted a letter of reprisal against Spanish and Portuguese shipping to the value of the goods lost. He was now favored by Her Majesty, and knew that he was at last a man of consequence. On the one hand dejected by his failure in Spain, and on the other emboldened by the queen’s support and investment, Hawkins returned to England and prepared to embark on his second voyage, secure in the knowledge that in spite of the Spanish seizures, fortune smiled upon him.

Hawkins’s interview with the queen would have alerted him in no uncertain terms to the changing tide of English politics, and the favor with which he was viewed as a new protecting force for the realm. Mary, Queen of Scots, the enchanting widow, was seeking a second and powerful husband. She remained poised for action to claim the English throne and seemingly was, at last, in possession of her own country. Elizabeth was determined that Mary should have that husband, but one who would remain loyal to England. And so she ennobled Robert Dudley to the title of Earl of Leicester, granting him vast swathes of land to make him more attractive to the Scottish queen. Only after Hawkins set sail on his second voyage would Mary announce that she would not have the Queen of England’s “master of the horse.”