Sir Francis Drake E-Book

E.F. Benson

• Herausgeber: Alien Ebooks
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 525

Beschreibung

Sir Francis Drake

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

WORLD MAP 1

WORLD MAP 2

PORTRAIT OF SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

DEDICATION

ILLUSTRATIONS

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

CHAPTER I DRAKE’S BIRTH AND BOYHOOD

CHAPTER II DRAKE’S FIRST SIGHT OF THE INDIES

CHAPTER III THE SORROWFUL VOYAGE TO SAN JUAN D’ULUA

CHAPTER IV DRAKE’S DRUM IS HEARD ON THE SPANISH MAIN

CHAPTER V THE CAPTURE OF THE TREASURE TRAINS

CHAPTER VI THE START OF THE VOYAGE OF CIRCUMNAVIGATION

CHAPTER VII THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF DOUGHTY

CHAPTER VIII THE “GOLDEN HIND” IN THE PACIFIC

CHAPTER IX COMPLETION OF THE VOYAGE OF CIRCUMNAVIGATION

CHAPTER X DRAKE ON SHORE (1580-1585)

CHAPTER XI[114] A VOYAGE TO THE INDIES, 1585

CHAPTER XII THE CADIZ EXPEDITION

CHAPTER XIII THE COMING OF THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA

CHAPTER XIV[170] THE PASSING OF THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA

CHAPTER XV THE PORTUGAL EXPEDITION

CHAPTER XVI DRAKE’S FALL AND RECOVERY

CHAPTER XVII DRAKE GOES WEST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PORTRAIT OF SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

J. Hondius (?)

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

E. F. BENSON

DEDICATION

THIS BOOK

CONCERNING THE DAYS AND DEEDS

OF

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE, THE KING OF SAILORS

IS

BY HIS MAJESTY’S MOST GRACIOUS PERMISSION

DEDICATED TO

GEORGE V, OUR SAILOR KING

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD

Front and back endpapers

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE—THE HONDIUS PORTRAIT

Frontispiece

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE—THE HILLIARD MINIATURE

Facing page

16

CARTAGENA

Facing”page”

58

THE GOLDEN HIND

Facing”page”

112

SAINT IAGO

Facing”page”

146

SAN DOMINGO

Facing”page”

194

SAINT AUGUSTINE

Facing”page”

218

THE ARMADA OFF GRAVELINES

Facing”page”

260

NOTE.—The Milliard Miniature is reproduced by the kind permission of the Earl of Derby. The four charts of the Spanish Main towns raided by Drake in 1585 are taken from the Expeditio Francisci Draki, Leyden, 1588. The Armada picture is contained in a German version of Franciscus Dracus Redivivus, entitled Kurze Beschreibung, Amsterdam, 1596.

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

CHAPTER IDRAKE’S BIRTH AND BOYHOOD

It is a melancholy thing for any biographer to be obliged to confess at the outset that he has no absolutely certain announcement to make as to when his hero was born. But such is here the case: for while there is no record whatever of the day of the month or even the month itself when Francis Drake came into the world, there are, most embarrassingly, several records, none of which can be set aside without examination, which assign different dates for the year in which one of the most auspicious events in English history took place.

The first of these records is a miniature of Francis Drake by Hilliard: it was at one time at Strawberry Hill, and is now in the possession of the Earl of Derby, who has very kindly allowed me to describe and reproduce this most interesting picture. It is painted on cardboard cut out of a playing-card, and on the back of it appears the ace of hearts and the inscription, “Franciscus Drake Miles.” In front round the head of the portrait is the painter’s inscription, stating that it was executed in 1581, and that Drake was then forty-two years of age. According to this, therefore, he was born, if the date of the painting was previous to his birthday, in 1538, if later, in 1539. Were there no evidence to conflict with this, we should take it as being perfectly satisfactory, since the authenticity of the miniature is quite beyond question. But there is such evidence, both direct and inferential, which makes it difficult not to suppose that Hilliard made a mistake about Drake’s age.

The second of these records is a statement by the chronicler Stow, that Drake was twenty-two years old when he was in command of the “Judith” at San Juan d’Ulua.[1] This, we know, was in 1568, and therefore Drake was born in 1546. Sir Julian Corbett, in his book, Drake and the Tudor Navy,[2] accepts this date as the correct one, on the ground of Stow’s “general accuracy.” But it has escaped his notice (it escaped Stow’s notice also) that this chronicler also tells us that Drake was fifty-five years old when he died. The day, month, and year of his death are known and undisputed: he died on January 28th, 1596. This is inconsistent with Stow’s first statement, and, if correct, makes the year of Drake’s birth 1541.

The third of these records is a portrait. Francis Drake, when fame and fortune had come to him, purchased from Sir Richard Grenville a place called Buckland Abbey, near Plymouth. While living there, this full-length portrait of him was painted, and it still hangs there. It bears the inscription aetatis suae 53, with the date of the year in which it was painted, 1594. According to the portrait, therefore, Drake was born in 1541.

Now this date is at variance with that on the miniature, but since we have to choose between their validities, we must surely adhere to that of the portrait. Drake sat for it, and ate his dinner under it when it was finished, and it seems only reasonable to suppose that he would have noticed the error with regard to his age, had there been one. A copy of it also was made for Plymouth in the year 1616, which bears the same inscription, and we may in fact regard it as being the “official” portrait. The miniature, on the other hand, though no doubt painted from life, cannot have the authority of the full-length portrait painted for the sitter. He was, at the time the miniature was painted, just back from his circumnavigation of the world; there was no more famous figure in Europe than he, and, as Stow tells us, “many princes of Italy, Germany, and others, as well as enemies and friends in his lifetime, desired his picture.”[3] Pictures of him, in fact, must have been as ubiquitous as those of the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, or (with due allowance made for the facilities of modern reproduction) of Carpentier or Mlle. Lenglen.

There remains, then, the discrepancy between Stow’s first statement and the Buckland Abbey portrait. If, with Sir Julian Corbett, we accept 1546 as Drake’s correct birth-year, he died at the age of fifty, and we are thus faced with the astonishing conclusion that he sat for the Buckland Abbey portrait three years after he was dead. But Stow also says that he was fifty-five when he died; this gives us 1541 as his birth-year, and thus confirms, instead of contradicting, the evidence of the portrait.

The correctness of his age as inscribed on the portrait is further strengthened by several small corroborations. Nuño da Silva, for instance, the Portuguese pilot who accompanied Drake for part of his voyage of circumnavigation, tells us that Thomas Drake, the youngest of the twelve brothers, of whom Francis was the eldest, was twenty-one years old in 1577,[4] and must therefore have been born in 1556. As there is no mention of any of the intervening ten brothers being twins, it is difficult to imagine that the eldest was not born before 1546. He also says that in 1579 Drake himself was thirty-eight. On the whole, then, the date on the Buckland Abbey portrait, in itself the most authoritative, and thus supported, may be taken to be almost certainly correct, and we may accept Drake’s birth-year as being 1541. Not even the name of his mother is known, but, in any case, both her identity and the actual year in which she brought forth her first-born are of infinitely small importance compared with what happened after Francis Drake was born. The event seems to have taken place in 1541, and on one night in that year I think there must have been portents in the heavens clearly visible from Madrid.

Very little unfortunately (and here we feel a loss far greater than any want of certainty about his birthday) is known concerning his early years, and we must still figure ourselves as jumping from tussock to tussock in a quagmire of conjecture, before we reach regions of stability where we can step out without fear of being bogged. His family was settled, as we know from his nephew, Sir Francis Drake, Bart., at South Tavistock, near Plymouth, and it is to this nephew (the son of Drake’s youngest brother Thomas) and to the historian Camden, that we owe practically all the meagre materials with which to build up the structure of his childhood, and they require reinforcing with a little critical cement, for fear our building should totter. Drake was the eldest of the twelve sons of his father Edmund, and at the time of his birth, when his father occupied a labourer’s cottage on the farm of Crowndale, the farm itself was leased from Lord Russell by his grandfather, John Drake. Crowndale had originally been part of the monastic lands of the Abbey of Tavistock, and at the dissolution of the monasteries had been presented by Henry VIII to the then Sir John Russell. We learn from Camden (who had such facts as he relates about Drake’s early life from Drake himself) that Francis Russell, eldest son of Lord Russell, the owner of Crowndale, stood godfather at his christening. Though Francis Russell was then only a boy of fourteen, there is ample precedent for so youthful a sponsor.

So much seems certain. The cottage on the Crowndale estate where Drake was born was still standing a hundred years ago, though no trace of it now remains, and its traditional identification is established by a map of the Bedford estate, on which is an asterisked note, “Here was born the great and celebrated Admiral Francis Drake,” and here, while his grandfather held the Crowndale farm, Drake’s early years were passed. He told Camden that his family were “in a small way,” and his nephew, Sir Francis Drake, in his address to the reader in Sir Francis Drake Revived, calls attention to the power of God in exalting “so mean a person in low condition.” The attempt, therefore, that has been made to elevate the family, as it then was, into “county gentry” is quite inconsistent with these first-hand data, and the appreciator of real romance will delight in the fact that so amazing a career was self-made. It is true that in some undetermined degree he was kinsman to the family of Hawkins at Plymouth, merchants and shipowners, and that he held one of his earliest commands at sea under John Hawkins, who was destined to be one of the great sailors of the day. But this was a most disastrous adventure, while the last on which the two sailed together was more disastrous yet. Throughout Drake’s life it was his own genius that built his fortunes: his association with John Hawkins was always more a handicap than a help. For the present, as far as Drake’s very early years are concerned, his father was the younger son of a tenant farmer, and lived in a labourer’s cottage on his farm.

But terra firma, in these annals of Drake’s boyhood, is still some distance off; we are still playing blind-man’s-buff in boggy places, and catching what we can. Camden, again on information received from Drake tells us that Edmund Drake was a staunch Protestant, and had to leave Tavistock, flying for his life, for fear of the Six Articles Act of Henry VIII. That is reasonable enough, for the Six Articles Act was in favour of Catholics, but we find to our dismay that it was passed in the year 1539. If, then, Drake’s father had to fly from Tavistock in the year 1539, taking with him, as Camden also tells us, his first-born son, Francis Drake, who was then “of tender years,” Francis must have been born before 1539, and every other record regarding the year of his birth, including that sheet-anchor of the Buckland Abbey portrait, must be rejected. But that tragic sacrifice is not, we find, demanded, for Edmund Drake’s name remains on the subsidy rolls of Tavistock for ten years yet, and disappears only in the year 1549.[5] It is clear, therefore, that Edmund Drake did not leave Tavistock for ten years after the date we infer from Camden’s statement.

Now the fact of Edmund Drake having to leave Tavistock owing to some religious persecution is testified to, not by Camden alone, but by Sir Francis Drake, nephew and eventually heir of the Admiral. He, however, says nothing about the Six Articles Act, but only that Edmund Drake “suffered from persecution,” and was forced to fly from Tavistock into Kent. On the flight from Tavistock, then, owing to religious persecution the two are agreed: they agree also that he fled into Kent. Camden furthermore tells us that after his flight he read prayers to the seamen of the King’s Navy, and Nephew Francis adds that he lived in the “hull of a ship wherein many of his younger sons were born. He had twelve in all.” But it is clear that he did not leave Tavistock in 1539, since he remains on the roll till 1549, and, very conveniently, we find that in 1549 there occurred an event which would perfectly account for his flying from Tavistock in that year under stress (as both Camden and Nephew Francis testify) of religious persecution. For on Whitsunday 1549 the first Prayer Book of Edward VI, which was a counterblast against the “idolatrous rite” of the Mass, was ordered to be read in all churches.[6] The effect of this was that wherever in England the old religion was still clung to, there was strong protest, amounting in some localities to an insurrectionary outburst against the innovation. The “idolatrous rite” of the Mass, abhorred by the New Protestants, was still deeply enshrined in the faith of the country, and in the prohibition to adore the Body of the Lord as exhibited in the consecrated wafer, the central tenet of the old faith was denounced. At Tavistock, where the country folk had grown up in the shadow and protection of the Abbey, feeling ran so high that Lord Russell, the new owner of the lands of the monastery, though sent down by the King to restore order, could get no further, owing to the flaming hostility of the countryside, than Honiton, fifty miles away. A sort of crusade in favour of the old religion was proclaimed, and from all the country round Protestant refugees flocked into Plymouth, pursued by the crusading rebels.

In view, then, of the fact that Edmund Drake certainly did not leave Tavistock in 1539, but remained there till 1549, when he did leave, it appears highly probable that he left in this year (as we otherwise know) under stress of religious persecution, which is exactly what we want. This supposition also allows us to accept the information that he took with him his eldest son Francis, then a child of eight, instead of rejecting it for the weighty reason that his eldest son was not yet born. There was, too, in this year a widespread clamour for the restoration of the Six Articles Act, and thus Camden’s assertion that Edmund Drake had to fly from Tavistock in consequence of a religious persecution concerning the Six Articles would be a very mild misunderstanding on his part, and the fact would be substantially correct, for the flight from Tavistock was certainly connected with the Six Articles.

But into Plymouth itself the trouble followed. Already there was a large population there of farmers and factors dispossessed from monastic lands, and as the tide of pursuers and refugees surged up, the Mayor opened the gates of the town. The Protestants seem to have been in a minority, for the rioting got serious, and a squadron of ships was sent to establish order. Plymouth was certainly no tranquil home for a hot Protestant with a growing family of small children, ranging from eight years old downwards, and Edmund Drake migrated into Kent, where we find him next living in the hull of a ship, and saying prayers to the sailors of His Majesty’s ships on the Medway.

* * * *

The mists begin to lift and disclose firm and picturesque substantialities instead of the shadows among which we have been groping. No fitter setting can be imagined for the child to whom English sea-power was to owe more than to any other of its immortal admirals, than these early years in some dismantled ship in the roadstead of the fleet on the Medway. We may picture it drawn up high and dry on the beach, or, perhaps more probably, anchored by some quay-side, afloat at high water, and stranded by the ebb. All Drake’s life through, ships were to be his home, and already a ship’s deck was the roof of the house of his young boyhood. Playing there he could wonder at the spiked tiller, where now the family washing hung to dry, but which once had majestically steered a way round stormy headlands and through the breakers of the menacing seas. Perhaps the bowsprit would be left, and he climbed precariously out along it, and in the theatre of childish imagination saw himself busy with the sheets of the foresail while it dipped into the crest of a wave and rose again with a spent whiff of spray. According to one tradition, his father, in earlier life, had been a sailor, and for the purposes of our picture we may accept this highly improbable legend, and imagine him showing the boy how the rigging was woven from ship’s side to mast, and how the grim mouths of guns once yawned through the ports. Sea and ships, with his father reading prayers to the sailors, was the immediate environment of his early boyhood, and for dimmer background, the story of the flight from the remembered farm at Tavistock. He would not be old enough to attach any definite meaning to religious persecution, but there would be a vague impression that it had something to do with going to church, and a more substantial one that those monstrous Catholics had been his father’s enemies. But the stronger colouring would be tides and waters and ships, and those that go down to the sea in ships.

There remains only one more difficulty to tackle, one more knot to unravel, before we get the very thin thread of the family history of Drake’s early life to run smooth. Camden states that his father was subsequently ordained deacon and appointed vicar of Upnor. The difficulty is that there never was a church at Upnor, and it seems quite certain that Camden’s “Upnor” is a clerical error for Upchurch, which is on the Medway, and “the road,” as he himself says, “where the fleet usually anchored.” To support this, we have the narrative in which John Cooke described the first part of Drake’s circumnavigation of the world, which was dictated to the chronicler Stow, and is in his handwriting. At the end of it is a note, also in Stow’s handwriting, “For Francis Drake knight sone to Sir . . . Drake, vickar of Upchurch in Kent.” This is confirmed by an entry in the Lambeth Registers, which records the induction of Edmund Drake as vicar of Upchurch in 1560, and by Edmund Drake’s will made in December 1566, in which he describes himself as Vicar of Upchurch.[7] With such evidence before us, the emendation of Upchurch for Upnor seems certain. One of Edmund Drake’s sons, Edward, was buried there, and he himself died early in 1567.

It is improbable, however, that Francis Drake ever lived in the vicarage at Upchurch, for, as he told Camden, his father by reason of his poverty apprenticed him to the master of a bark which coasted along English shores, and occasionally carried merchandise to Zeeland and France. Since Francis would have been nineteen when his father became vicar of Upchurch, his apprenticeship must almost certainly have taken place before that, and he passed from the house of his early boyhood on the family ship to the sea, which henceforth was far more truly his home than the land. There, no doubt in a rough and severe school, full of hardship and privation, he learned the business of his life, and, so Camden tells us, “the youth being painful and diligent, so pleased the old man by his industry, that being a bachelor, at his death he bequeathed his bark unto him by will and testament.”

Such was Francis Drake’s first command.

* * * *

[1]

Stow, Annals, ed. 1615, p. 807.

[2]

Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy, vol. i. p. 412.

[3]

Stow, Annals, p. 808.

[4]

Hakluyt Society, New Light on Drake, p. 301.

[5]

Lady Eliott Drake, Family and Heirs of Sir Francis Drake, vol. i. p. 20.

[6]

Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy, vol. i. p. 63.

[7]

Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy, vol. i. p. 413.

CHAPTER IIDRAKE’S FIRST SIGHT OF THE INDIES

It has always been the laudable fashion of the biographer to be not biographer only, but a sort of cursory national historian concerning the years of his hero’s childhood and youth. He dilates on the social, the political, the religious ideas that were then determining the evolution of the country, and traces to their influence certain characteristics in the mental and moral equipment of his hero. More particularly, he insists on the force of early environment: if his hero has been brought up in the darkened day of coal-mining districts, and eventually becomes a philanthropist, we are asked to believe that his childish heart was wrung with pity for white faces and sooty hands, and that he formed a subconscious resolve to ameliorate these atrocious conditions. Or if his aunt recorded that at the age of six he killed a sparrow with a catapult, this bloody incident is apt to be held responsible for his subsequent career as a shooter of big game. . . . Childish complexes and phobias (or something to that effect in Freudian language), carefully unearthed, are held to be the sole determining factors of a life’s work, and the child to be gripped, as in a vice, by the mandibles of his early impressions.

Now there is a great deal to be said for the moulding force of a child’s early impressions. In many cases they can be shown or reasonably conjectured to have had a profound influence on the tastes, if not the character, of a grown man, but they are influences the force of which may easily be exaggerated. More particularly is this the case when character, not tastes, is involved, for character is a very adamantine thing, and is developed by repeated shocks of internal compulsion, rather than by the persuasive breeze of suggestion and environment. And the hardest and least malleable of all characters is that possessed by the strange force called genius. Genius has nothing to do with cleverness (as we account cleverness); it has nothing to do with stupidity (as we account stupidity). We have not the slightest idea what it is, for it is part of its nature to transcend explanation. All we know of it is that no agglomeration of talents will evolve it, and that it is almost impervious to the influence of its surroundings. Hundreds of trite instances of this will occur to anybody. There was a carpenter’s shop in the first century, and a chemist’s shop in the last. Out of one came Christ, and out of the other Keats.

Now Francis Drake was that mysterious being which we call a genius; childish surroundings and movements in national life no doubt whispered in his ear and caused him to make notes of what they suggested, but it would be a great mistake to suppose, as his biographers have been rather apt to do, that the events and environments of his childhood determined his career. He mistily knew, as we have seen, with the comprehension of his eight years, that unpleasant people called Catholics were the cause of his father’s leaving Tavistock, but he did not for that reason determine to be the life-long foe of Catholicism, nor can we, without a blush for our cheap psychology, suppose that, as he trudged into Plymouth holding his father’s hand, his grey eyes (which the wanton enthusiast insists were blue) flashed into a resolve that he never subsequently forgot. Indeed, if he ever in those years gave a thought to the reason of the family migration, he must have blessed the cause, whatever it was, which led to his living in a ship instead of among the monotonous meadows of a farm. Had the cause of Protestantism burned in his blood, making it boil with hatred against the Catholics, he would surely have gone winging home when his father was made vicar of Upchurch, and been a preacher too, and have taken Anglican orders, and perhaps have become a bishop. But again, this marine environment, so far more attractive than the farm at Crowndale, with its novelty of lodging and its hourly surprises of ebb and flow, was not that which determined him to be a sailor. He was pitchforked into a bleak apprenticeship on the little coasting bark, because his father was too poor to support a boy who at the age of fourteen or so might be earning his own living. That he met his destiny there is undeniable; his genius found on the sea the theatre of stupendous adventure for which it thirsted; but it was his father’s poverty, not his own imperious demand, that was the determining factor.

Similarly, it would be a mistake to believe that the father’s preachings and pieties, or the zeal of that “hot Gospeller” forged in the son that faith in God which, without the slightest doubt, was the mainspring which gave drive to those desperate and successful hazardings against immense odds which he was always ready to undertake. Not once, not a dozen times, but always with the utmost consistence and sincerity, he knew and declared himself to be the instrument of the Divine Will, and in that assurance brought to a triumphant close adventures which no other kind of man would have attempted. But it was not the pious father nor readings of the Bible in the hull at Upchurch which gave him that untarnishable conviction: indeed, such influences are usually found to produce a very dissimilar effect. If ever a man believed in God, not from precept or Bible reading, but from some internal necessity, that man was Francis Drake.

Let us not then imagine him as a boy of fourteen seizing the opportunity of becoming a prentice lad on a small trading bark, as the first step towards being an English admiral and sweeping the sea clean of the oceanic castles of the Spaniards, through whose cursed Catholicism his father had been driven from his sweet home at Tavistock. Nothing could be more false to actual fact, or, which is worse, to the psychology of Drake. He went to sea because his father could not afford to keep him at home, and he no more hated Catholicism than he hated cannibalism. But then, without doubt, the life of the sea began to beat in his blood, and because he was a strong handy lad and stuck to his work, and because also his master was a seafaring bachelor who took a great fancy to the boy, he became, at the old man’s death, the owner of this little vessel. He had, so both Stow and Fuller tell us, an amazing memory, and, without calling on the misleading guidance of imagination, we may picture him as having acquired and retained from these adolescent years a considerable knowledge of the shifting winds, the treacherous shoals and the snake-like currents and tides of the English Channel. But, in the name of psychological sobriety, let us not imagine him as indulging in blue-eyed daydreams of driving a Spanish Armada to its doom with the fire-ships that caused the great galleons to cut their cables and drift like impotent whales on to the shoals where they stranded. His hatred of Spain was of later birth, and it so happens that we know precisely what the origin of it was.

But we may allow ourselves to conjure up some idea of what his physical appearance was when first as master of his small craft he slipped about the English coast, or took a cargo across to Calais. Stow gives a sketch of him when come to man’s estate, from which we gather the general set of him: “lowe of stature, of strong limbe, broad-breasted, round-headed, brown hayre, full-bearded, his eyes round, large and clear, well-favoured fayce, and of a cheerful countenance.”[8] This accords very well with the impression we get from the much later Buckland Abbey portrait, and from Lord Derby’s miniature, and in particular from the miniature by Isaak Oliver, in possession of the Drake family. There he is, beardless as yet, and with only a thin line of moustache. Very noticeable points in this and other portraits are the humorous and whimsical mouth, and a dancing vitality in the eyes which might break out at any moment into merriment, or equally into a tantrum of hot temper. In them all, too, we have a high-arched eyebrow: a look of alertness and surprise, as if he had just learned something of high and rather gleeful interest, and was eager without delay to act on it, and prepare, perhaps, a surprise for somebody else. In the portrait where his hands appear, they are large and long-fingered, good to grasp and to hold, and in all these representations of him, there is, as Stow remarked, a great breadth of chest, and the build is that of a heavy man, but of one active and well set up. No doubt his bulk increased with years, but even on his first boyish command of a vessel of his own, he must have been sturdy and stout-limbed, and of that hardiness and strength and untiring endurance which he so constantly showed in his adventures by land and sea. The brown hair, as we see from the early miniature, grew low on his forehead, and we can figure him tossing it back as some idea bubbled beneath it and his mouth rapped out an order which must instantly be obeyed, and in the performance of which he was always ready to give a hand. Drake had always to be doing something: he hated idleness, as one of his contemporary biographers tells us, like the devil, and we may be sure that the apprentice boy he took on his boat had to spring to his bidding with considerable liveliness. His temper was quick, and his tongue extraordinarily sharp, with a jest at the end when his impatience had vented itself. Everything round him, himself included, must be smart, for rust of any sort, mental or material, was to him intolerable. And when on shore there must be no dangling about pot-house or brothel: never had he any use for loose women, or for bawdy talk, though when it came to oaths, as friends and enemies have alike testified, there was no tongue so accomplished. No sea-captain was more strict than he, and none so quick to punish, but he was just, and as quick to recognize merit and industry, and there was a pat on the back for a willing boy as often as he did not deserve a clout on the head.

And assuredly he “had a way with him”: that indefinable quality called charm was certainly his, and those who served under him adored him[9] in spite of the iron discipline. None could help trusting a man who had so complete a confidence in himself, and who by that quality so often emerged triumphant out of the most desperate situations. But the root of his self-confidence was the conviction that he was in God’s hands, and was doing God’s work. Sincere all through, that was the very flower and felicity of his nature. He was not one to rest on his oars; no sooner was one task achieved than he found another awaiting accomplishment. In this unceasing pursuit, though he never spared others, he never spared himself, but worked harder than any one at the meanest drudgery, and that is the kind of man whom men love to serve. Faults he had in plenty: he was overbearing and imperious with his equals, he was hopelessly impatient of restraint, and incapable of co-operation, and if he never forgot a loyal friend, he never forgave an injury, nor ceased to pray God to help him to avenge it. He had the most violent temper, his thirst for honour was insatiable, he bragged and bawled, and he delighted in flattery. But behind it all was that spirit of indomitable pluck and gaiety, which seems to have frankly intoxicated those who came in contact with it.

In the possession of the Earl of Derby

The Hilliard Miniature of Sir Francis Drake

Such in brief were the most outstanding of his qualities, and all these must have been there when first he commanded his little coasting bark, for they were the essential and abiding ingredients of his character, qualities that were not acquired by experience, but were the tingling sap of his nature. They grew and matured, no doubt, as he developed, but like his power of instantaneous decision, which often pulled him out of the tightest places, they were not the fruit of adventure, but the origin and cause of it. Already his ambition was chafing for a larger sphere of expansion than this pottering about the coasts of the Channel; he knew those narrows now, and in that prodigious memory of his there was stored, for a future use that he surely never suspected, the riddles of its currents and its shoals and shifting winds.

The first opportunity for arriving on a larger stage came in 1564 or 1565. A certain Captain John Lovell, possibly a captain in the Hawkins firm of merchant vessels, was sailing for the West Indies, that new and fabulous El Dorado, and Drake either laid up his boat or sold it, and went with him as second in command. Next to nothing is known about the voyage; Drake himself appears never to have given any account of it to historian or biographer, except that at Rio de la Hacha, a port on the Spanish Main, he suffered some wrong at the hands of the Spanish. What that precisely was is a matter of conjecture, but since ship and sailors returned safely, it seems fairly certain that the wrong in question was that the Spanish authorities, acting on the prohibition then in force that the West Indian colonies should trade only with Spain, confiscated the cargo. The sole significance of the voyage, as far as we are concerned, is that it gave Drake his first sight of the West Indies, and that this incident first kindled in him that fire of hostility against the Spanish which till the end of his life was never quenched. But while he disappears for the time on this unchronicled voyage, it will be convenient to give some short general survey of the situation just then beginning to develop, which led, so largely through him, to the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the foundation of English sea-power by a logic as ruthless and inevitable as that which, out of Germany’s delirious military dreams of a World Empire, deduced the war of 1914 and the downfall of the Central European states.

Spain was then at the height of her power, which overshadowed Europe to an extent unknown since the Roman Empire towered over it. She did not maintain her grip on the world by the mere material strength of her army, never yet seriously tested, or of her hitherto unchallenged Navy, for at her back was the whole power of the Papacy. Spain was easily the most valuable of the Pope’s spiritual kingdoms, and though the church of the Vicar of Christ was in Rome, the vicarage, so to speak, was in Madrid. Voyages and annexations had lately brought under the Spanish sceptre new territories of wealth actually fabulous and multiplied by fable into the treasure houses of fairyland, and Papal bulls and Briefs had partitioned between Spain and Portugal the whole of the New World already discovered, with inalienable rights over its gold and its spices, its coasts and continents, and by way of bonus had assigned jointly to these two nations the seas of the entire world. The Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian Oceans were all private lakes on the estates of these fortunate countries. On land they had their separate spheres; a fine big map was spread before Holy Father, and to Portugal he devised the East Indies, Brazil, and the whole of Africa south of the Canaries: the rest of the new world and the sovereignty of any future extension of it was declared to be the property of good King Philip and his heirs for ever. So also was the crown and kingdom of England when he had conquered it by the great invincible Armada, whose object, as the Lord General of the King’s fleet, the Duke of Medina Sidonia declared, was “to serve God, and to return into his church a great many of contrite souls that are oppressed by the heretics.”[10] God’s glory was to be served by the death under the lash and the torture of all those heretics over the age of seven. Those younger were to be branded with an L (Lutheran) on their foreheads and kept as slaves,[11] and King Philip should sit on his English throne. Truly the Vicar of Christ had fine presents to bestow upon the faithful, and he bestowed them “on the authority of God and the fullness of Apostolic power.” To us now such assumption of terrestrial omnipotence on the part of “the first clergyman in Europe” appears only a sad lack of humour, but to the sixteenth century there was nothing humorous about it: such bulls were solemnly read to the Consistory Court, and henceforth had the validity of law in the great parish. With equal solemnity of fulmination did Pius V confirm these dealings with the naughty little island in the North Sea, which had declared that it belonged no more to the parish. In 1570 he promulgated the stupendous “Regnans in Excelsis,” in which he excommunicated Elizabeth, declared her to be a usurper without right of sovereignty, and very kindly absolved her subjects from obedience. Sixtus V, who was Pope at the time of the Armada, endorsed his predecessor’s decrees with remarkable gusto.[12]

Now in England just then room and opportunity for the expansion of her trade had become an essential of national growth, and there was bubbling in her veins that spirit of adventure of which Drake was destined to be the chief and most typical incarnation. As if with the intention of corking and wiring down that effervescent force, Spain and Portugal had forbidden all other nations to trade with the ports of their western dominions, and thus the new outlet for the spirit of adventurous commerce was closed. The very sea, too, had been declared by the Pope to be the private road of his favourite children, and something had to be done. Something indeed was being done already: the foundations of commercial expansion and of the larger expansion of English sea-power were already laid, and engineers and builders were at work. Chief among them was the firm of Hawkins, a family related in some way to Drake, for the chroniclers allude to them as kinsmen, though the degree of the kinship is only a matter of conjecture. They were merchants and shipowners of Plymouth, whose business was to send out ships on commercial and trading ventures, financing them by forming syndicates of shareholders, who partook in the profits of the voyage in proportion to their investments. William Hawkins the elder, who died in 1555, was, though not the founder, the first member of the firm of whose operations we know anything. He had sat on a naval commission in the time of Henry VIII, and before this embargo was put on foreign trading in the Spanish and Portuguese ports had made successful voyages to the coasts of Guinea and Brazil. After his death the firm was carried on by his two sons, William and John, the latter and most famous of whom made immense profits for his shareholders in two voyages. Then came the embargo, which, coupled with the Pope’s pronouncement, was not only a violation of the trading treaties between Spain and England, but of the doctrine, hitherto invariably accepted, of the freedom of the high seas.

Philip took up an utterly illogical position over this, when, in one breath, he laid the embargo on English trading with the West Indies and Spanish Main, and also denied that he had broken the existing commercial treaties. For these gave free right of trade to the Spanish on English territories, and to the English on Spanish, and thus if he had not violated (as he maintained) these commercial treaties, it was clear that the shores and ports of his new Western Empire were not Spanish territory. But to suppose that for this reason Elizabeth sanctioned the series of raids which Drake was to deliver on Spanish soil in America, on the grounds that they were not Spanish soil, is to misunderstand her methods altogether. Legal subtleties were quite alien to her: her only principle was to pilfer and pillage as much as she could without provoking Philip into making war. She was perfectly ready, when strong enough at sea, to sanction raids on ports in Spain, which were a definite act of war. But then she hoped that such success would attend Drake’s raids on the Spanish coasts as to prevent Philip retaliating.

On this side of the Atlantic English ships had for some time been carrying on a trade in gold dust on the Gold Coast and the shores of Guinea. The Hawkins firm had already made several successful voyages there, and the natives in adjoining districts cared as little for the embargo as the English, whom they found to be reliable and honest in their dealings. To this trade in gold dust John Hawkins now added a further branch of enterprise, namely, the extremely lucrative business of trading in slaves. Labour was badly wanted in the new Spanish dominions in America, where native labour was insufficient, and slaves fetched a very high price there. So lucrative indeed was the industry that, in addition to the embargo on foreign trade of all kinds, Spain did not even allow her own subjects free trading in this valuable merchandise, but a royal licence had to be purchased, and a high import duty was charged per head on the importations. Far from the slave trade being regarded as an accursed and inhuman traffic, it was universally considered as respectable as any other form of commerce, and when John Hawkins was granted a coat-of-arms by Elizabeth on his appointment as Paymaster of the Navy, his crest was “a demi-moor properly coloured, bound by a cord,” in order fitly to symbolize his creditable achievements in this line. Odder yet is the fact that Elizabeth herself was a shareholder in some of these monstrous expeditions, for, in 1564, she had provided the “Minion,” a ship of the Royal Navy, to take part in one of them. According to the invariable custom in these syndicates, a valuation was put on the “Minion,” and the Queen’s share thereby computed. Her habitual parsimony, however, in this instance was largely responsible for her subsequent chagrin, for the “Minion,” cheaply refitted at the Queen’s charges, proved to be very unseaworthy, and her captain, encountering bad weather, thought it more prudent to return without her dividends. All this seems very strange to our modern notions: the imagination boggles at the picture of Queen Victoria lending a man-of-war to take part in contraband trading, especially if we consider that the merchandise it was to carry was that of natives bought or kidnapped from the coasts of Africa (which belonged to a nation with whom she was at peace), and carried off to work in the mines of Mexico. Oddest perhaps of all was the view taken of the whole business by the Church, for we find the saintly missionary, Las Casas, strongly in favour of operations which took the poor benighted heathens of Africa from the darkness of their paganism, to find light and salvation under the lash and the loving care of the Holy Inquisition.

Such, in any case, was the current view taken by honest merchants, by sovereigns, and by spiritual pastors with regard to the slave trade, and John Hawkins, with his Queen as a shareholder, was engaged in expeditions of this sort in the early sixties, when Drake was just come to man’s estate. One of these, in 1562, had promised huge success: his fleet sailed with English merchandise on board, he kidnapped three hundred negroes on the coast of Sierra Leone, and with a Portuguese pilot took them to the Spanish dominions across the Atlantic, and (having paid nothing for them) disposed of them at a colossal profit. He invested the proceeds in a cargo of precious spices, but most injudiciously sent it to be sold in Spain. The authorities, aware of the true origin of this cargo, instantly confiscated it, and the blaze of triumph with which Hawkins and his accounts had been hailed by his shareholders was abruptly extinguished. Diplomatic relations between Spain and England grew strained over such incidents, and a further expedition of Hawkins’s had to be abandoned, for de Silva, Spanish Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, made a personal complaint to the Queen. She, of course, vowed that she had had no idea that Hawkins was engaged in contraband trade, and would certainly speak very severely to him about it. The pearls she was wearing, which had been the pleasant fruit of one of his ventures, could not contradict her, neither could His Excellency, for, short of telling her that she lied, he had to accept her word, and this he appears to have done, though he subsequently wrote a more candid despatch to his royal master about the incident. And when that Cretan interview was over, she sent for Hawkins, as she had promised, and gave him a good talking to. After she had explained how shocked she was, I think she fingered the pearls, and a royal wink was vouchsafed him.

But wisdom—that timid, tortuous hole-and-corner wisdom of the Queen—dictated the abandonment of the expedition that would have started in 1566, for she had no mind as yet to risk any definite rupture with her Brother of Spain. She wanted more ships first, and she was building them; she wanted more money, and though the thought of King Philip’s fabulous treasures pouring into Spain from the golden West made her mouth water, it was more prudent just for the present, when the King seemed soberly to be entertaining those monstrous suspicions that she could possibly have anything to do with these contraband tradings, not to irritate him further. That was what she called diplomacy, namely, to tell lies that were not believed, and, while pilfering all that could safely be laid hands on, not to provoke King Philip too much. She had a great belief in this policy, and steadily pursued it.

Drake, during these years when the sort of broth we have indicated was beginning to bubble and to send forth those rich odours of the illimitable wealth of the new western kingdoms of Spain, had, as we have seen, gone on his first voyage to the Indies. It was an unfortunate venture; to the end of his life he nourished the sense of having been swindled, and scarcely a year passed without his amply repaying himself. He professionally consulted a chaplain on this point (those who identify this gentleman with Drake’s father must prove their attractive hypothesis), who told him that on strictly theological grounds he was justified in reimbursing himself at the expense of the nation which had cheated him, and thus Drake had any possible scruple laid to rest, and robbing Spaniards became not only a pleasure but a duty. He went on another small voyage, probably for gold dust, to the coast of Guinea, about which nothing is known, and in 1566 he was back in England again, and, coming up to London, went to see his kinsman, John Hawkins. Hawkins, of course, knew about the failure and fiasco of Captain Lovell’s expedition, and to his cost, for in all probability he had financed it. He found in his young cousin just what the bachelor owner of the little coasting bark had found, a sturdy seaman, with knowledge of his trade, industrious and steady and strong, and to those good qualities there was now added the fixed resolve to get upsides with the folk who had cheated him at Rio de la Hacha. They had a talk; they had many talks.

Now, since the Spanish Ambassador had made that remonstrance to the Queen which resulted in the abandonment of Hawkins’s expedition, there had been no sign of any questionable activity in English ports, but in May 1567 His Excellency’s suspicions were seemingly aroused again. There were merchant ships in Her Majesty’s harbour at Chatham making ready in a quiet unostentatious manner to go to sea, and there were ships of Her Majesty’s Navy doing the same. A little more investigation on his part revealed the presence of certain Portuguese pilots who had signed on for a voyage of unknown destination. His Excellency again sought audience of the Queen, who, in her most engaging manner, told him some wonderful cock-and-bull stories about the destination of this innocent little water-party. It was intended to explore African coasts, south—oh, ever so far south—of the Portuguese sphere, and when, a month or two later, the Ambassador received information that two of the ships of the Royal Navy, the “Jesus of Lubeck” and the “Minion,” had sailed round to the wharf by the Tower of London and were taking in arms, Elizabeth entertained him with more pleasant little histories. Simultaneously Hawkins, who was leaving London for Plymouth, paid a polite call on him, and desired his humble duty to be conveyed to His Majesty of Spain. But these little fibs and courtesies failed to establish any strong feeling of confidence in His Excellency’s mind, for quite suddenly the Portuguese pilots who had been engaged for this trip vanished altogether, which was a curious thing. Just as odd, on the counter-side of this game, was the disappearance from Chatham of the Navy ships which had been taking in arms at the Tower. During September they sailed up the Sound at Plymouth, where four other merchant ships happened to be getting ready to go to sea, and off they all went on October 2nd, 1567. Among these was a vessel of fifty tons called the “Judith,” and the captain of the “Judith” was Francis Drake.

* * * *

[8]

Stow, Annals, p. 807.

[9]

Hakluyt Society, New Light on Drake, pp. 200-1.

[10]

Harleian Miscellany, vol. i. p. 115.

[11]

Samuel Clark, The Spanish Invasion, p. 60.

[12]

Harleian Miscellany, vol. i. p. 144.

CHAPTER IIITHE SORROWFUL VOYAGE TO SAN JUAN D’ULUA

he Queen, of course, knew what the real objective of the modest little squadron was, so, too, did her Council, and the Spanish Ambassador strongly suspected it in spite of the specious Gloriana. It was just such a voyage as those on which Hawkins had set sail before, and the programme was to purchase (or, preferably kidnap) negroes on the Portuguese coast of West Africa, which was the cheapest market, and sell them in the ports of New Spain, which was the dearest. Elizabeth was clearly a shareholder in the venture, since she supplied two ships from the Royal Navy, but never a pennyworth of dividend reached her pocket, for once again, as in Drake’s voyage with Captain Lovell, the enterprise reaped a harvest of disaster, and Hawkins, who had put a pile of money into it, concludes his narrative concerning it in the most lugubrious vein. He wrote of it with a pessimism which was as characteristic of him as was optimism of his young kinsman:

“If all the miseries and troublesome affairs of this sorrowful voyage should be perfectly and thoroughly written, there should need a painful man with his pen and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths of the Martyrs.”[13]

This is language from the very marrow of melancholy, and indeed the voyage was disastrous for the English. But in its ultimate effects it was far more disastrous for the Spanish, for from that time forth, owing to their barbarous treachery, Drake consecrated his life to the destruction of Spanish sea-power. Already the incident at Rio de la Hacha had lit the fire of his hatred, and from now till the end it blazed unquenchably. This troublesome voyage proved to be the prologue to the drama that culminated twenty-one years later in the shattering of the Spanish Armada.

The flagship of the fleet that now set out from Plymouth was the “Jesus of Lubeck,” a vessel of 700 tons. She had been purchased from Lubeck by Henry VIII, and was classed among his “great ships”: high-prowed, high-sterned, four-masted, with a broadside of guns on each side, and further batteries at her stern. As she had been condemned as not worth repairing in 1558, and the syndicate had to pay for her being refitted, the valuation of the “Jesus” at £4000 seems to have been a cheap investment for the Queen, and one quite after her own heart. The rest of her stake was the “Minion,” also a “great ship” of 250 tons, which had already proved herself unseaworthy, and was also repaired at the cost of the syndicate. Thus the business-like Elizabeth stood to win a handsome profit if the adventure was successful, for she had got two ships repaired for nothing, while, if it was not, her loss would not be severe, for she had not put down a penny in cash, but only provided two obsolete and unseaworthy vessels. That ships of the Royal Navy should be used in commerce during times of peace was perfectly regular and usual: the only irregularity, which Elizabeth had certainly committed before, was that they should be used for contraband slave traffic. So she had assured de Silva that nothing of the sort was contemplated. . . . With these two Navy ships were four other vessels, all classed as barks, namely, the “William and John” 150 tons, the “Swallow” 100 tons, the “Judith” 50 tons, and the “Angel” 32 tons.

To our great regret there did not accompany Hawkins any naturalist of such keen powers of observation as the unnamed gentleman who went with him on his expedition of 1564, but as the fleet visited the same places they probably saw much the same curiosities.[14] There was a tree that they heard of in the Canary Islands, and saw in abundance on the coast of Guinea. This singular vegetable “raineth continually, by the dripping whereof the inhabitants and cattle are satisfied with water, for other water they have none in all the island. And it raineth in such abundance that it were incredible unto a man to believe such a venture to be in a tree, but it is known to be a divine matter and a thing ordained by God.” Similar trees on the Guinea coast did not rain so hard, because their leaves were narrower, but this was made up for by the unusual phenomenon of “flitting islands” that appeared and disappeared in a pleasing and mysterious manner. Then, at Cape Verde there were fish “with heads like conies, and of a jolly thickness,” and men “who jagg their flesh as workmanlike as a Jerkin-maker with us pinketh a Jerkin,” and in the rivers “crocodiles that sob and weep like a Christian body.” This was very cunning of them, for when a Christian body came to see what ailed them, they gobbled him up. In Florida there were unicorns which dipped their horn in the water before they drank, and serpents with three heads and four feet. These interesting objects, we may hope, were all observed again, and there was added to them the curious oyster-tree, which had no leaves on it, but multitudes of oysters.

The voyage that was to end so disastrously started badly. They ran into storms off Finisterre, and the “Jesus,” valued at £4000, suffered so much that Hawkins actually turned homewards, meaning to abandon the voyage. But the weather became “reasonable” again, and the fleet, scattered by the storm, regathered at Teneriffe (where under Nelson a more momentous gathering of English ships took place), to make its course for the African coast. On the way they fell in with a Portuguese caravel, and, soon after, with another which had already been captured by a French privateer, under the command of Captain Bland. Hawkins annexed both of these, and temporarily transferred Drake from the “Judith”[15] to one of them, a ship of 150 tons, which was piously rechristened “The Grace of God.” So poor Captain Bland had to go and look for another. . . .

Now the capture of these ships (unrelated by Hawkins, who consistently omits questionable incidents) was an act of pure piracy, and it is as well at once to recognize it as such if we do not want to be shocked at Drake’s subsequent career. Piracy for the next twenty years was not the peccadillo of the English sea-captains, but their policy, sanctioned and abetted by the Queen, who shared in the profits, and it was this policy that, when Spain could stand it no longer, precipitated the Spanish Armada. Attack on ships at sea sailing under another flag was not then a casus belli: every nation with a fleet indulged in it, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English alike, and such attacks came under the general head of “reprisals” for similar acts in this chronic maritime vendetta. England had no fleet at this time (nor indeed for fifteen years more) which could possibly compete with Spanish sea-power, and, as we shall presently see, Hawkins had been privily instructed by the Queen not to commit any outrageous provocation, which might lead to war, against her Brother of Spain. But this little act of appropriation against Portugal could not do any harm, especially since one of their appropriations had already been made by a French privateer. He was, of course, powerless against this considerable English squadron, and with the “Grace of God” conveniently augmenting the fleet, it went on its way, resuming the innocent though contraband rôle of slave-dealer.