The Pirate Queen (37 page)

Their main source of fresh food was penguins, described as having a “body less than a goose and bigger than a mallard.” An estimated three thousand inhabited the islands before the arrival of the Englishmen, when several hundred were bludgeoned and stored aboard ship. After reprovisioning, Drake ordered them to sail on while the weather and wind remained with them. “From these islands to the entrance into the South Sea,” Drake later remarked, “the fret is very crooked, having many turnings, and so it were shuttings up, as if there were no passage at all, by means whereof we were often troubled with contrary winds, so that some of our
ships recovering a cape of land, entering another reach, the rest were forced to alter their course and come to anchor where they might.”
⁵

As they progressed, the land to both sides soared again to dizzying heights, like gray basalt columns of glass covered in snow. Drake remarked that to the northerly side of the straits lay the continent of America, and to the south and east “nothing but islands, among which lie innumerable frets or passages into the South Seas.”
⁶
Until now, the current had by and large been with them, but when the winds varied, the sea was whipped up into eddies and whirlpools and it became impossible for Drake to sound for depth or too dangerous or deep to anchor. When they found anchorage, the rock face was so jagged that it frayed the hemp cables. The landscape was foreign and difficult to describe. Drake later called it a land of “congealed cloud” and “frozen meteors.”

Then, about 150 miles into the channel, as they wended their way to the northwest, through the myriad islands scattered in the straits, the wind swung around to a strong gusting westerly. It funneled between the mountains, howling a gale and churning up the sea. For the next 150 miles, they battled the weather emerging, in only fourteen days, on September 6, 1578, into the South Seas. It had taken Magellan thirty-seven.
⁷

But Drake had no time to rest on his laurels. His instructions ordered him to head along the Chilean coast to Peru. Consulting the charts again, they turned northwesterly, but after two or more days of good progress, all they could see from every horizon was the stunning blue sea. The charts, he reasoned, had to be wrong. And so, with heavy hearts, they luffed around and headed back to where they had been disgorged into the Pacific. The Chilean coast had to lie to the north, not to the northwest. This, too, was a significant geographical discovery, though not the purpose of the voyage.

Terrible weeks ensued. Instead of finding the Chilean coast where they expected to, they mistakenly reentered the Strait of Magellan. Screaming winds and torrential rain remorselessly pummeled the ships, threatening hourly to crash them upon the rocks. When it wasn’t raining, it was so foggy they could barely see the bow of the ship, much less between ships, and all they could hear was the eerie roar of the waves echoing as they broke on the rocks. At times they beat southwesterly toward the open sea between South America and
Antarctica; at other times they simply clawed their way along the northern shore of the straits. Finally, at some time toward the end of September, the
Marigold
was lost with all twenty-nine hands on board. Drake pretended for a time that they had merely lost sight of her, but he couldn’t deny the “fearful cries” they had all heard the night she vanished.

They were most likely within reach of Cape Horn when Captain Winter, aboard the
Elizabeth
, had had enough and turned his ship back to England. He later claimed that he had no choice in the “fog and outrageous winter” if he were to avoid shipwreck. The fact remains that Winter and his men reentered the Magellan Strait, found shelter for a few weeks to recover from their ordeal, then knowingly, willingly sailed for England. Winter disclaimed authorship of the idea, but his men insisted that the decision had been his and his alone.
⁸
When the
Elizabeth
anchored in Ilfracombe, Devon, in June 1579, it was the first news that Plymouth and the court had had of Drake and his successful passage into the South Seas. The important question that Winter was unable to answer though was if Drake had survived the storms that had made them turn back.

Of course, Drake had survived. He had also made his second great geographic discovery. The Strait of Magellan was not the tip of South America. And he was the first European commander to sail around the southernmost tip of South America from the Atlantic into the Pacific.
⁹
But Drake was not an explorer. His mission was to plunder the western coast of Spanish America, and to bring the treasure back to England.

26. The Famous Voyage

You will say that this man who steals by day and prays by night in public is a devil…. I would not wish to take anything except what belongs to King Philip and Don Martín Enríquez…. I am not going to stop until I collect two millions which my cousin, John Hawkins, lost at San Juan d’Ulúa.

—FRANCIS DRAKE, NOVEMBER
1578

W
hile Drake was turning north toward the Chilean coast into the vast unknown, Elizabeth was facing a greater enemy at home. Men like Drake were rare, and while most of her courtiers and other adventurers rallied round to the greater threat imposed by an ever-stronger Spain, few had the daring and bravado to get under Philip’s skin in the way
El Draco
did. And none other than Drake understood the element of surprise. The queen had come to the realization that her adventurers were her only defensive and offensive weapons of any importance, and there were precious few of them. England’s merchant navy was small, with fewer than twenty ships above 200 tons. “Officially” between 1578 and 1581, they would snaffle no more than ten Spanish ships in the entire world. And Drake alone took at least twelve of them.
¹

Europe teetered once again on the brink. In the Low Countries, Alexander Farnese, the Duke of Parma and Philip’s nephew, had been appointed to execute the King of Spain’s will with intolerable brutality and cruelty against the Dutch. While the Spanish Fury raged in the Low Countries, Henry of Guise, uncle to Mary, Queen of Scots, had become Philip’s puppet and had the ear of the French king. As if the neutralization of France wasn’t bad enough, Walsingham’s and Burghley’s spies reported that something was afoot in Munster again, this time backed by the pope. And while King Sebastian of Portugal had been killed along with the ubiquitous Thomas
Stucley in the Battle of the Three Kings at Alcazar in Morocco, his uncle Henry d’Evora, the sickly, elderly cardinal and head of the Inquisition in Portugal, was crowned Portugal’s new king. Worse still, Philip of Spain, according to Henry, had the next best claim to the Portuguese throne on his death. If Spain united with Portugal, all hope of checking Philip’s pernicious anti-Protestant influence against Elizabeth would be lost forever.
²

This was the queen’s view of the tempests brewing in Europe. Of the Pacific and Drake, she could only wonder how they were faring, if she thought of them at all. Still God hadn’t abandoned them, in Drake’s words. After fifty days of a raging storm that had cost him his tiny fleet, the commander headed toward the rendezvous at 30
^o
south and anchored twelve fathoms off the island of Mocha. But Drake had misjudged the animosity of the natives against the Spanish. As they rowed ashore, they were met with a shower of darts and arrows whistling directly at them, forcing them to retreat, while the natives splashed through the waves in pursuit. Drake was struck twice in the head, with one arrow narrowly missing his right eye. Their barber-surgeon was dead. Two of his best masters had been captured and butchered by the time Drake reached the
Hind
. They had been mistaken for Spaniards, clearly, and it was a salutary lesson to Drake for the future.
³
They were left with little choice but to weigh anchor, and abandon all further hope of meeting up with the
Elizabeth
.

Four days later, on November 30, they came across an Indian in a canoe and cajoled him into becoming their pilot along the coast of Chile in exchange for trinkets. He led them to Valparaiso, where the
Captain of Moriall
, admiral of the fleet of the Solomon Islands, was moored in harbor. They certainly saw the windswept, barnacled ship pulling alongside, for they drummed her in as a sign of welcome. Despite the fact that they didn’t recognize the ship or her colors, it didn’t matter—there were no strangers in the South Seas—also affectionately called the Spanish Lake. It was only when the
Captain of Moriall
was boarded that the truth finally became apparent.

The Spanish were herded into the hold, barring one who jumped overboard and swam toward shore to raise the alarm. He needn’t have bothered. Drake loaded two boats with his men armed to the
teeth and captured the town without a shot being fired. All the inhabitants had abandoned it, fearing for their lives. In their first encounter against Spain’s “forces,” the English had been triumphant. As their reward, they ransacked the port of Valparaiso in an orgy of looting.

They had resolved to take along the Spanish ship’s pilot, naturally hoping that he would be useful in sailing farther north. The
Captain of Moriall
had also been laden with alcohol and “a certain quantity of fine gold of Baldinia, and a great cross of gold beset with emeralds,” the memoirs of the voyage tells us, and “we spent some time in refreshing ourselves, and easing [plundering] this ship of so heavy a burden on the 8th day of the same month [December] having in the meantime sufficiently stored ourselves with necessaries, as wine, bread, bacon, etc., for a long season.”
⁴

Drake and his men loaded four chests containing an estimated 25,000
pesos de oro
worth of gold ($3.46 million or £1.87 million today), as well as some fine Spanish wine.
⁵
The port’s warehouses and homes provided them with food, and its church with some silver. As they said their good-byes to Valparaiso, it was undoubtedly a grateful crew who bathed themselves in the glory of their first real prize in over a year at sea. All of Drake’s promises could be believed, and the hardships they had endured were worth it. They were already wealthy men.
⁶

But Drake knew that this was only the beginning, providing he could stay ahead of the news announcing his arrival in the South Seas. If word reached Lima before he did, then Spanish shipping would scatter at sea, and an offensive would be mounted against their lone ship. Still, the immediate problem he had to cope with was to see to the repairs the
Golden Hind
so desperately needed, mounting the full complement of her heavy guns, and building the pinnace they had brought along for their plundering and inshore work.

Drake still hoped against hope that he might find the
Elizabeth
and perhaps even the
Marigold
, and he decided to start work on the
Hind
near the appointed rendezvous at 30
^o
south. On December 19, 1578, a party of Spanish horse and foot attacked a dozen of his men who were working onshore collecting fresh water. One Englishman was killed before the rovers were rescued by boats launched hastily
from the
Hind
. The dead man, Richard Minivy, had his heart carved out and was beheaded in full view of the general and crew. The rewards of their labors might be high, but so were the risks.

They moved on to Salada Bay, near Coquimbo, where they completed their preparations to raid the treasure fleet from Peru, which had been Drake’s long-held dream since Darien. A pinnace large enough to take forty men and a culverin in its bow was built, while essential repairs for leaks and the full complement of the
Hind
’s heavy guns were mounted. As they headed north toward Lima, two more barks were taken with forty odd bars of silver “the bigness and fashion of a brick bat” and each weighing twenty pounds, not to mention the thirteen bars of silver from a Spaniard asleep on the beach valued at 4,000 ducats ($338,217 or £182,820 today). Fortunately for the Spaniard, he was a sound sleeper, though poorer when he awoke.
⁷

At Arica, on February 9, 1579, the English corsairs fell upon another bark in the middle of loading thirty-seven bars of silver and a chest of silver coin that they simply had to help themselves to, followed shortly after by another bark laden with fresh linen and wine. It was too tempting a prize for men who had been at sea for fifteen months to ignore.
⁸
Still, it was a rather disappointing haul, since Arica was the port for the legendary Potosi mines.

But worse was yet to come. After Arica, they headed to the small port of Chule, where they took on a little water. They soon learned that the news of their piracy had traveled fast—two hours before they had anchored, a bullion vessel had left fully loaded. The locals jeered at them from the quayside, hurling verbal abuse and laughing at them for being so slow. The element of surprise had been squandered on meager prizes, while overland messengers carried the word that
El Draco
—Drake, the dragon—had found his way into the South Seas. The time for pinpricks to Spain’s empire was at an end.

Drake set the prize ships adrift and released all his prisoners, save two Spanish pilots who set their course for Callao, the port for Lima. More prizes were taken en route, more with a view to intelligence than capturing gold, and at last Drake was rewarded for his diligence. There was a silver vessel bound for Panama at Callao and another
ship,
Nuestra Señora de la Concepcíon
—irreverently rebranded the
Cacafuego
or “Shitfire”
⁹
by her crew—that had just left Callao for Panama. The Spanish captain thought that the
Cacafuego
was richly laden with silver, and had overheard that she would be stopping at several ports to take on consignments of flour.