The Pirate Queen (26 page)

It is generally assumed that the amount stolen was exaggerated. Yet, this account brings us tantalizingly close to Drake, almost as if we are reading about his daring escapades in a dispassionate newspaper article. Here we see a glimpse of Drake, not as yet in full possession of the cunning that would make him “world famous.” Though he was greatly admired by his friends—and even his enemies—he was nonetheless little more than a pirate hell-bent on revenge.

And no man was better suited to the task. Drake had an uncanny genius for sensing his enemy’s weakness and, without the need for huge numbers of men and artillery, was able to achieve his nefarious aims. What’s more amazing, as with any real genius, he made it all look so easy. San Juan de Ulúa had been etched into his soul and the resultant hatred for Philip, the ignominy of the encounter, and the fire against Catholic injustice in his belly would be stoked by further perceived wrongs until the day he died.

Still, Drake hardly needed excuses or popish threats against England to fulfill his personal quest. The flota had been within his grasp at San Juan de Ulúa, but in following a defensive rather than offensive course—due only in part to circumstances—the English fleet had been well and truly trounced. That flota had belonged to Philip of Spain. Ergo, Philip had humiliated him and his fellow mariners. What’s more, Philip had made, in Drake’s eyes, a call to arms through the pope against his queen, Elizabeth, by virtue of the excommunication bull. So Drake went to war to protect her, enrich himself, and spread the glory for the realm of England.

While Hawkins, Winter, and Drake’s fellow West Countrymen under Devon’s Vice Admiral Sir Arthur Champernowne scoured the Narrow Seas in the company of Orange’s Sea Beggars, preying on Spanish shipping, Drake headed back to Spanish America. He had seen at firsthand the fabulous wealth there, and his mouth
watered at the prospect of Spain’s vulnerability. Yet the clear answer to one simple question seemed to elude him. How had the Spanish succeeded in bringing the wealth of its empire back to Seville for over fifty years virtually unscathed?

The reply was obvious. No one had dared to attack the treasure trains or
trajín
. Where San Juan de Ulúa provided a safe haven for the Mexican flota, the treasures of the Spanish Main were brought to Nombre de Díos for transshipment to Seville in a series of complex maneuvers. To reach Nombre de Díos, the gold, silver, pearls, and precious gemstones from Peru, Chile, and Bolivia (all called “Peru” at the time) were first brought to the Pacific by mule train, loaded onto frigates, and shipped northward to Panama City.

From there, another mule train of up to six hundred animals threaded its way through the dense jungle to the isolated settlement of Venta Cruces. In this humid, remote outpost—no more than a wharf and a warehouse rather than a settlement or colony—the bulk of the treasure train was loaded onto shallow draft barks and brought down the Chagres River to Nombre de Díos. The Spanish bullion continued overland from Venta Cruces by mule train to Nombre de Díos. Once there, all the king’s riches would be locked up securely in his treasure house, where it awaited the arrival of the flota, which would carry it back to Spain. Without this shipment of gold and silver each and every year, Philip’s credibility with his European bankers would evaporate, and so would his funds to keep his empire in a virtual state of perpetual warfare.
⁴

Yet, despite its incredible importance, Nombre de Díos was at significant risk of attack. There was no regular garrison stationed there; there were no fortifications to speak of either. It sat a mere twenty-three leagues—around eight miles—across rugged jungle terrain from the Pacific Ocean, and hundreds of miles from anywhere in the Caribbean. It seemed to languish in the stifling equatorial heat, coming to life only when the flota docked. “The treasure house of the world,” as Drake called Nombre de Díos in
Sir Francis Drake Revived
, was a ramshackle collection of wooden buildings, a warehouse, a wharf, and the king’s treasure house. Its only true defense was its utter isolation.

And so, in late February 1571, Drake had returned. This time, as captain of the tiny forty-ton
Swan
, he anchored off the clear blue coast at Nombre de Díos, timing his arrival to give himself as long as possible for raiding before the hurricane season brewed up again. The information available to Drake prior to these voyages was at best incomplete, and mostly inaccurate. But through studious observation of Panama’s coastline and harbors, interrogation of any Spanish prisoners—whom he appeared to have released unharmed—and, most important, the friendship of the
Cimarrones
, or escaped black slaves, Drake garnered an entirely different picture.

The
Cimarrones
, called Cimaroons in sixteenth-century English, were a crucial factor in Drake’s ultimate success in the Americas. Only a year earlier, the bishop of Panama had complained that they represented a real threat to Spanish settlements in the area when he wrote to the king that “the human tongue cannot relate the ignominies which both the French and the
cimarrones
[sic] have this year inflicted here on all sorts of persons; and of a thousand Negroes who arrive annually, three hundred or more escape to the wilds.”
⁵
They had the inside knowledge of how the Spanish settlements worked. They knew Spanish habits and ways. They were the ones who confirmed to Drake that the settlements were weakly garrisoned, and frequently fell victim to the depredations of French rovers.

So when Drake’s men attacked a vessel from Cartagena traveling to Nombre de Díos in late February at the small port of Pontoons, it is hardly surprising that the Spaniards aboard should have resisted capture. Drake had left the
Swan
safely tucked away in a nearby harbor with “a fine bay…safe…for all winds,”
⁶
while he and fifteen or so of his men approached in a pinnace and hailed the Spanish frigate for a “parlay.” The English had two small culverins threatening the Spaniards from its bow, and the men were armed to the teeth with swords, crossbows, and harquebuses. According to Spanish accounts, two of the men had their faces powdered with “war paint”—one black, the other red.

The Spaniards never stood a chance. Four were killed, including one African slave, before they cut their own cables and tried to outrun Drake and his men. The frigate inevitably ran aground, and the
Spanish—desperate to escape—waded ashore waist-deep through a mangrove swamp to safety. The frenzied plundering of the first ship was interrupted by the delightfully unexpected capture of a second Spanish frigate. Again its crew fled through the mangrove swamp to shore and watched helplessly. When the Spaniards finally regained the vessel the next day, the English had left a note: “…Done by English, who are well disposed if there be no cause to the contrary: if there be cause, we will be devils rather then [sic] men.”
⁷

While the Spanish were counting their losses, Drake and his men headed up the Chagres River and the fabled route of Spanish gold. Unlike all previous rovers, Drake reached Venta Cruces, and seized 100,000 pesos ($10.55 million or £5.7 million today) worth of clothing and other goods from the wharf as well as three barks. They sank the ships so that the news of their exploits couldn’t overtake them. For the next three months, Drake and his men operated between Nombre de Díos and Puerto Bello along the coast, intercepting vessels to and from the mouth of the Chagres, gaining more and more information about the flota each time. In all, around twelve vessels were captured laden with valuables estimated at 150,000 pesos ($17.59 million or £9.51 million today), not including the two prize vessels, slaves, and clothing. These were estimated at another 80,000 pesos ($9.38 million or £5.07 million today).

Drake’s next prey was a royal dispatch frigate out of Cartagena, carrying the king’s correspondence for the colonies of Panama and Peru. This time, Drake’s pinnace was armed with twenty-three men, and the capture took place around May 8, 1571. The ship’s owner and another seaman were killed before the prisoners were put ashore on an uninhabited island nearby. Philip’s correspondence was tossed irreverently into the sea, and the ship set adrift. When the hapless Spaniards were rescued, tales of “stripping and abusing a friar” identified the new corsair as an unknown
Luterano
pirate from England.

Three expeditions had been sent out to capture the daring Englishman at a cost of 4,000 pesos ($469,110 or £253,573 today) without success. Officials in Panama wrote to Philip on May 25 that this Drake was “so fully in possession of the whole coast of Nombre
de Díos, Cartagena, Tolu, Santa Marta and Cabo de la Vela, that traffic dares not sail from Santo Domingo thither, and trade and commerce are diminishing between the windward islands and this Main.”
⁸

Drake’s private war had raked in officially £66,000 ($23.22 million or £12.55 million today) in three months.
⁹
While the legality of Drake’s venture cannot be sustained remotely either morally or in law, it heralded the end of the age of Hawkins’s aggressive commercial and illicit trade in the Caribbean. It also meant that Philip II and Sebastian of Portugal would need to redouble their efforts in defending the monopolies they claimed in Africa and the Americas if they were to keep their empires safe from Drake and the new breed of Elizabethan seamen.

16. The Dread of Future Foes

The doubt
¹
of future foes

Exiles my present joy

And wit me warns to shun such snares

As threatens mine annoy.

For falsehood now doth flow

And subjects’ faith doth ebb,

Which should not be if reason ruled

Or wisdom weaved the web.

—POEM BY ELIZABETH I, C.
1571
²

T
he year 1572 was one of those turning points in history that was comprised not of one momentous event, but of many. The Ridolfi plot to kill Elizabeth and put Mary on England’s throne had been uncovered in time, thanks to the astute intelligence work of Sir Francis Walsingham. Implicated in the plot were not only the Duke of Norfolk and his men, but also Mary, Queen of Scots, the Pope, Philip II, Thomas Stucley, and, of course, its author, the Florentine merchant banker Roberto Ridolfi. If Walsingham hadn’t communicated the list of all “strangers” arriving from Rome to William Cecil (elevated to the position of lord treasurer and created Lord Burghley in 1571), the machinations of a well-oiled Catholic espionage network could have feasibly succeeded.
³
Elizabeth reacted with notable calm in the middle of the international maelstrom, but still fired off a stinging rebuke to Mary on February 1, 1572, “to consider that it is not the manner to obtain good things with evil speeches,” she admonishes her cousin, “nor benefits with injurious challenges, nor to get good to yourself with doing evil to another.”
⁴

The loss of the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, as an ally was devastating for Elizabeth in several ways. As her second cousin on the Boleyn side, he was one of her closest surviving family relatives. But more devastating was the fact that since the Northern Catholic
Rising in 1569, Norfolk was the senior noble of the realm. He was also an important Privy Councillor, and a gentleman adventurer whose wealth had been invested in a number of ventures from those of the Muscovy Company to the Hawkins slaving voyages. Yet the most crushing blow to the queen was that only a short time previously, key members of her own Privy Council, led by none other than her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, were behind a marriage negotiation between Norfolk and Mary of Scots. While the earlier negotiation had not, of course, included plans to supplant Elizabeth on the throne, it cast a long shadow of doubt over the motivations of such stalwarts as Leicester, Sir Henry Sidney, and the ever-trusty Earl of Pembroke in these dark days.
⁵
Pembroke had been implicated previously in the Northern Rising by the Catholic Earls. The possibility that these three most trusted and loyal servants could have been in league to promote the secret marriage plans of the Queen of Scots to Norfolk, which formed the basis for the future Ridolfi plot, was too grotesque for Elizabeth to contemplate. Only when Pembroke protested, “God forbid I should live the hour, now in my old age, to stain my former life with one spot of disloyalty,” was the queen’s mind put to rest. To prove her confidence in him, Pembroke was put in charge of the queen’s personal guard at Windsor.
⁶

Norfolk was speedily tried, convicted of treason, and sentenced to death. Meanwhile, his fellow plotters Ridolfi and Stucley had escaped the country. By the time Elizabeth had granted a temporary stay of execution in March 1572, Ridolfi had made good his escape to Rome. Stucley, the queen’s former gentleman adventurer in the 1560s, had become one of Philip’s heroes in the great battle of Lepanto in October 1571 where the Turkish navy was crushed by the united papal and Spanish forces. Already a resident at the Spanish court, and a great favorite of Jane, Duchess of Feria, former lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth’s sister Mary, Stucley remained a wild card in the pack of knaves. Neither the queen nor Lord Burghley knew where he would tip up next, or what forces he would bring to bear on the realm. Stucley’s claim on the seneschal [governorship] of Wexford had failed two years earlier, and he was forced to relinquish any claims to plantations in Ireland to his archenemy, Sir Peter Carew. Naturally, this “hand over” didn’t pass off smoothly, so Stucley was detained “at Her Majesty’s pleasure,” imprisoned in
Dublin Castle, until he saw the error of his ways. On the promise of an honorable return to England, Stucley was released, but he fled to Spain instead, much to the embarrassment of Elizabeth’s lord deputy, Sir Henry Sidney. Naturally, his escape counted as another black mark on Sidney’s record.