The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  As they set out, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves of how little equipment Drake had at his disposal to assist his prodigious navigational skill. He possessed, obviously, a compass. It was probably in the twelfth century that Europeans discovered that a lodestone – that is, a mineral composed of an iron oxide – aligns itself in a north–south direction, as will a piece of iron that has been magnetised by contact with a lodestone. By the sixteenth century compasses were quite sophisticated. At London’s National Maritime Museum is exhibited Drake’s Dial, a brass instrument made by Humphrey Cole in 1569 (it was once believed to belong to Drake, but now they are not so sure). It consists of a compass along with lunar and solar dials, which enable the user to calculate the time. Engraved on the casing are the latitudes of many of the important ports in the world.

  The other instrument Drake had at his disposal would have been a cross-staff. This was used to calculate a ship’s latitude (north–south position) at night by observing the angle between the horizon and the North (or Pole) Star, and by taking a reading off the scale. This could then be coupled with a compass reading. (It was not until the eighteenth century that an English clock-maker named John Harrison devised an instrument for calculating longitude, or the east–west position.)

  So, with the stars to guide them, and instruments that most modern navigators would deem inadequate for an afternoon’s recreational sailing, Drake and his mariners set off from the coast of California to cross the Pacific Ocean.

  His first stop would seem to have been one of the Palau Islands, where his attempts to trade with the natives led to a fracas. Twenty islanders were killed, when Drake realised that they wanted to steal his merchandise. It was brutal treatment, but no one has ever pretended Drake was other than brutal. Next, he made for the Spice Islands, which came into sight in early November. His negotiations with the Sultan of Ternate, lasting less than a week, enabled Drake to build up a prodigious cargo: six tons of cloves. Drake began negotiations with the Sultan for the establishment of a trading post in the Spice Islands; certainly the East India Company regarded the verbal agreement between Drake and the Sultan as one to be taken seriously, and Drake’s week in Ternate was seen by imperialist historians from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries as ‘an example once again of Drake being wished into the role of a founding father of the British Empire’.9 Equally, post-imperialist historians have dwelt on Drake’s moral shortcomings and shown remarkably little admiration for this man’s achievement: namely, the circumnavigation of the globe in a small wooden sailing ship with a drunken, semi-mutinous crew and next to no navigational instruments.

  Examples of Drake’s cruelty are again rehearsed as he is called to the bar of modern liberal-minded history for having been the hero of old-fashioned history of a different tradition. When they reached Crab Island, they marooned a black woman who was heavily pregnant, with two black male slaves. No doubt William Camden, the semi-official national historian, was right to say that Drake behaved ‘most inhumanly’ in this matter. How the woman became pregnant – she was ‘gotten with child between the captain and his men pirates’ – does not indeed reflect well upon Drake, if you choose to judge a sixteenth-century privateer who was at sea for nearly three years by the enlightened standards of a land-bound modern historian. And Drake’s treatment of his chaplain, which is seen as quasi-comic by Victorian and early twentieth-century writers, is (perhaps understandably) offensive to modern sensibilities. The Golden Hind, the first English ship in the Pacific Ocean, was also the first in the Indian Ocean. When, during gales of 9 January 1580 she struck a submerged rock, it looked for a while as if all was lost.10 It was necessary to ditch precious cargo – three tons of the cloves, two cannon, some precious metal, and beans. Fletcher, the hapless chaplain, preached a sermon to the terrified men suggesting that they were being punished for the judicial murder of Thomas Doughty.

  Drake was not a captain to take such talk on his ship. Morale was low, nerves were taut and he was determined to get back to England with his treasure ship. He simply could not afford at this stage of his voyage to allow the Reverend Francis Fletcher to upset the men even more than they were already disturbed. He needed to make an example of him. The chaplain was clapped in irons and nailed fast to one of the
hatches, while Drake, his judge, sat opposite him, cross-legged on a sea-chair. The clergyman had claimed to speak for God. Drake would match this by establishing that he, and not the priest, had the ultimate authority on his ship. No one questioned Drake’s physical or legal authority over his men. He now, in a sort of maritime parody of Henry VIII claiming to himself supreme governorship of the English Church, asserted his spiritual authority too. There was no trial, and no preamble. He merely bellowed at the chaplain, making sure that every man aboard heard the words: ‘Francis Fletcher, I do here excommunicate thee out of the church of God and from all benefits and graces thereof and I denounce thee to the devil and all his angels.’11