Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  By the time Drake returned from the Caribbean in 1572 Queen Elizabeth was in the process of coming to terms with Spain, and had undertaken to prohibit English seamen’s raids on Spanish targets. Drake does not appear to have been censured for his robberies, but he was not praised either.

  Three years later he went to Ireland as a member of an English invasion force under the Earl of Essex. In Ireland Drake was for the first time serving his country. Not that he was a salaried public servant. In Elizabethan England the defense of the realm was performed by private investors. According to Edmund Howes, Drake equipped three frigates at his own expense, and another contemporary source records that he lost all his money by doing so. He may have felt he had no option: it was later alleged that he had gone to Ireland “for fear of my lord admiral and the rest of the Council, because of his Indies voyages.” Those three frigates may have been the price of his pardon for his past piracies.

  The Irish expedition offered little opportunity to get rich but Drake was ambitious for more than mere property. He wanted social position, something which, as a horse thief’s son who had made a fortune from piracy, he still lacked. In Ireland he formed what may have been the closest friendship of his life, one which as a self-avowed social climber he would have found most gratifying. Sir Thomas Doughty was a gentleman with important connections at court, “a sweet orator, a pregnant philosopher,” an educated man with a knowledge of the ancient languages and the law, and “an approved soldier.” We know very little of Drake’s emotional life, beyond the bare facts that he was twice married, had no children, and loyally gave employment to his brothers. But by all accounts, including one sanctioned by Drake himself, he and Doughty loved each other with “great goodwill and inward affection, more than brotherly.”

  In Ireland Drake also made some powerful contacts. According to his own account, Essex subsequently recommended him to Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster and primary leader of the prowar party, as “a fit man to serve against the Spaniards.” Or maybe it was Doughty who mentioned Drake to the influential courtier Christopher Hatton, and Hatton who introduced him to Walsingham. Either way Walsingham recommended him to the queen, and so was conceived the voyage that became Drake’s circumnavigation of the world.

  In 1572, crossing the isthmus of Panama, Drake had been taken by his cimarron guides to a tall tree growing on a ridge, from the top of which it was possible to see both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. The cimarrones, who used it as a lookout, had cut footholds all the way up, and had constructed a “bower” near the top where a dozen men could comfortably sit. Drake ascended, and had his first glimpse of the “Southern sea,” the Pacific. He was greatly moved. Camden elaborates: Drake “became so inflamed with affectations of glory and wealth, and burnt with so vehement a desire to navigate that sea, that falling down there upon his knee” he prayed that he might do so “and thereunto he bound himself by a vow.” Though it clearly displays the remodeling of hindsight, the story could be essentially true. As Drake prepared to intercept the flow of treasure from South America’s Pacific coast, he may well have conceived a desire to follow it to its source.

  When the Pelican, subsequently to be renamed the Golden Hind, and four other ships under Drake’s overall command set sail from Plymouth in November 1577, no one, probably including Drake himself, knew quite how far it was going. The sailors, some 160 of them, had signed on for a cotton-buying trip to Alexandria, and continued to believe that that was where they were bound until the fleet was well out to sea. The “gentlemen” on board, who included Drake’s beloved friend Thomas Doughty and John Winter, whose father William was the surveyor to the queen’s ships, were probably all aware of the plan which had been first formulated by Walsingham and which had attracted a distinguished list of investors, including the queen herself. This ordained that Drake was to lead his fleet across the Atlantic, southward down the coast of South America and through the Magellan Strait to the Pacific. There he was to investigate the possibilities of trade with those of the natives “not under the obedience of princes” (in other words, those independent of Spain) and attempt to buy spices, drugs, and cochineal, before returning “the same way … homewards, as he went out.”

  This was a confidential plan, secret from Spain (or so it was hoped) and secret in England from all but those most closely involved. Drake believed that it had been kept even from Lord Burghley, the queen’s chief minister, who would have thought it recklessly provocative given that in Spanish eyes the Americas in their entirety were “under the obedience” of Spain. But even this secret was a blind, a decent veil covering the nakedness of the outrageous plan which many must have guessed at—if peaceful trade was intended, why were there no trade goods on board?—but perhaps only the queen, Walsingham, and Drake himself had discussed. That plan, the secret within the secret, was that Drake’s expedition was an aggressive one, its object plunder, and that it was sanctioned by the queen.

  In midvoyage, at a time when he badly needed to reinforce his authority, Drake told his men that Walsingham had taken him late one night to the queen’s apartments. It was a momentous meeting, the first between two canny and unscrupulous people who were to come to understand each other well. Elizabeth told Drake, or so he later claimed, that she wished to avenge herself upon the king of Spain for “diverse injuries” and asked his advice. Drake told her Philip could most easily and effectively be hurt by a voyage to “annoy him by his Indies,” to prey upon his settlements in South America. This plan, to raid the colonies of a nation with which England was not at war, was too brazenly criminal to be set down in writing. The queen gave Drake a silk scarf on which she had embroidered the words “The Lord Guide and preserve thee,” but she gave him no letter of commission for his projected terrorism. She was later to say of him that “the gentleman careth not if I should disavow him,” and, as Drake well knew, she would have done so if necessary without compunction. He was as cautious as his monarch. When Walsingham asked him to write a proposal detailing where and how he hoped to “annoy” the Spaniards, he refused, “affirming that her Majesty was mortal, and that if it should please God to take her Majesty away, it might be that some prince might reign that might be in league with the Kings of Spain, and then will mine own hand be a witness against myself.” But the nature of the voyage, and the source of its projected profits, are abundantly clear. Drake claimed that the queen had chosen him for “my practice and experience I had in that trade.” The only “trade” in which he could boast much experience, as both Walsingham and Elizabeth knew well, was that of piracy.

  Drake led his fleet southwards to the coast of Morocco, where one of the men was carried off by hostile Moors, and where they captured three Spanish fishing boats and three Portuguese ships. Later Drake’s deputy John Winter was to say in court, “I did never give my consent or allowance any way to the taking of any ship or goods unlawfully.” His conception of lawfulness seems to have been hazy: he was in the pinnace which captured the fishing boats. Before they had even crossed the Atlantic it was clear how this voyage was to be provisioned and how its investors were to make their profit: not by trade but by the seizure of others’ goods.

  The little fleet turned west. Off the Cape Verde Islands they encountered and captured a Portuguese ship. They set her crew and passengers adrift in a small pinnace but kept the ship, her cargo of wine and linen, and, most importantly, her pilot, Nuño de Silva, “a man well travelled both in Brasilia and most parts of India [i.e., South America] on this side of the land.” Prodigious navigator as Drake was generally acknowledged to be, he knew his own limitations. In the absence of accurate maps and of any way of calculating longitude and therefore of fixing an exact position, a sixteenth-century seaman who knew his way was at a huge advantage over one with no firsthand knowledge. Throughout the next two years Drake was to seize, wherever he could, Spanish charts and Spanish pilots with almost as much avidity as he seized Spanish gold. Nuño de Silva, under what duress we do not know, led them ac
ross the Atlantic.

  “And so we take our farewell from the ancient known parts of the world or earth to travel into the new discovered parts.” So wrote Drake’s chaplain, Francis Fletcher, in his journal of the voyage. Drake and many of his crew had seen the New World already, but for those back home who were to read accounts of his voyage it seemed that as his fleet turned westward they entered a world of marvels. On the Cape Verde Islands they saw and tasted strange and wonderful fruit—coconuts and bananas. They saw trees bearing blossoms and fruit together in what in England was the dead of winter. In the open ocean dolphins played around them. Flying fish landed on their decks, as though by the generosity of Providence, providing them with fresh food. Their expedition was taking on the character of a fabulous voyage.

  When Christopher Columbus sailed westward he carried with him a fantastic portfolio of illusions as to what he was going to find. Cuba to him was Cathay, an outlying region of the realms of the great khan. Hispaniola was Ophir, the fabulous land where King Solomon’s emissaries used to buy pearls, precious stones, and gold mined by griffons. Jamaica was Sheba, whose queen was legendary and from “whence departed the three Kings who went to worship Christ,” and Venezuela was, quite literally, Paradise. The Europeans who followed Columbus to America did not have to strive so feverishly to fill its great and unknown mass with images drawn from their own cultural store but still they expected, and frequently found, marvels. Some were real, strange beasts like llamas and armadillos, strange substances like tobacco and cocaine. Some were exaggerations of reality: Magellan and his men encountered giants in Patagonia where subsequent travelers found the people barely above ordinary height. Some, like the tantalizing myth of El Dorado, were almost entirely fantastic. But anyone going on such an expedition went in the tremulous expectation of being amazed.

  For all the strange and frightening novelties they were to encounter, though, the problem which was to preoccupy Drake and all his party as they crossed the Atlantic and made their way southward along the South American seaboard was one they had brought along with them. Before he passed through the Strait of Magellan and into the Great Southern Sea, Drake quarreled with Sir Thomas Doughty and put him to death.

  Long after the event Drake let it be known that he had been informed, even before they left Plymouth, that Doughty was plotting treachery. The relationship between the two men whose mutual affection was compared by one observer to that of Damon and Pythias, the exemplary friends of classical mythology, festered rapidly. The first recorded sign of trouble came just before they began the Atlantic crossing. According to one account Doughty accused Drake’s brother Thomas of pilfering. Drake defended Thomas furiously, accusing Doughty of trying to undermine his authority by casting slurs on his kin. Another account suggests it was Doughty whom some of the sailors suspected of theft. Drake confronted him and he explained indignantly that the trifles found on him—gloves, a ring, a few coins—had been given him by the Portuguese prisoners. According to one of the seamen, “From this time forth grudges did seem to grow between them from day to day.”

  The crossing was arduous. For over two months they traveled out of sight of land, reliant on rain to supplement their dangerously inadequate water supply. For three weeks they were becalmed near the equator. Sweltering in their increasingly noisome little ships (the Pelican, by far the biggest, was barely seventy feet long), they were tormented by “the effects of sultring heat, not without the affrights of flashing lightnings, and terrifyings of often claps of thunder.” They were going into unknown regions full of terrors both real and imaginary. It was not only in order to baffle the Spaniards that a false destination for the voyage had been advertised. Crossing the Atlantic for the first time, Columbus had falsified his log, deliberately underestimating the distance his ships had traveled lest his seamen, terrified at the idea of the vast expanse of ocean separating them from their homes, might refuse to go on. The master of one of Drake’s ships was to say later that if he had known he was bound for the Pacific he “would have been hanged in England rather than have come on this voyage.”

  The distance they were traveling was in itself giddying. Even more daunting was the idea of what they might encounter along the way. Fletcher, an educated man, approached the equator with trepidation, recollecting the opinions of “Aristotle, Pythagoras, Thales, and many others” that the sun burned so fiercely there that nothing could live beneath it. They were headed for an alien continent inhabited by giants and cannibals. And even without these extravagant causes for anxieties they had others, all too well attested. Many of them must have remembered that of the men who embarked on Drake’s previous, far less ambitious voyage, less than half had returned.

  Fear and fatigue may have stoked Drake’s quarrel with Doughty. Robert Mansell, who knew and admired Drake, was to number among his imperfections “aptness to anger, and bitterness in disgracing.” His quarrel with Doughty bears out the description. Drake and those around him came to believe, perhaps correctly, that Doughty was trying to foment mutiny. There was an incident involving Drake’s trumpeter which ended with Drake summarily removing Doughty from his command on the Pelican and sending him, without even giving him a hearing, to the small supply boat, the Swan, where he complained he was in effect a prisoner. Not long afterwards Doughty confronted Drake himself, apparently accusing him of breaking his oath, an unforgivable insult. Drake struck him, and had him lashed to the mast.

  When the fleet anchored at last on the coast of Argentina Drake destroyed the Swan and ordered Doughty and his brother John aboard another ship. When Doughty refused to go Drake had him lifted aboard with the ship’s tackle, a brutal humiliation. Before they moved on, a seaman waded out into waist-deep water and shouted out that he would rather give himself up to the cannibals (whom they believed to be all around them) than make false accusations against a gentleman, a suggestion that Drake was trying to fabricate a case against Doughty. Not long afterward Drake warned his crew that the Doughtys were a “very bad couple of men” and that their presence jeopardized the outcome of the voyage.

  They sailed southwards, keeping together with difficulty as their ships were repeatedly swept apart by storms. Magellan’s men had called the South Atlantic the “sea of graves.” For Drake and his men it was scarcely less fearsome. At last, some two months after they had first sighted South America, they reached Port San Julian in southern Patagonia, the last safe anchorage before the Magellan Strait, where Drake intended to wait out the worst of the southern winter. It was an ominous place, walled with towering black rock, and it had a dismal history. It was there that Magellan, fifty-eight years before, had suppressed a mutiny and had two of his officers hung, drawn, and quartered. One of the gibbets on which the remains had been displayed was still standing. With a kind of ghoulish piety Drake’s men cut it down and used the timber to make tankards.

  It was bitterly cold, with long hours of darkness. Magellan’s ships, at the same latitude and in a milder season, became weighed down with ice. Food was scarce, and the men were growing weak. Drake ordered some of them to sleep ashore, a necessary measure because the ships needed to be cleaned after their months at sea, but those who did so had no shelter as they lay on the ground, wrapped only in their cloaks. To add to the party’s unease, two days after their arrival, they had their first fight with the natives. Earlier encounters with native Americans further up the coast had been peaceable. They had exchanged knives and bells and bugles for feather headdresses, ornaments of carved bone, and plumed birds. On one occasion the English had played their trumpets and viols for a group of curious Indians and the Indians, delighted, had danced so merrily that Captain Winter joined them. One had snatched a red cap with a gold band off Drake’s head, but he had smiled and “would suffer no man to hurt any of them.”

  In Port San Julian things did not go so well. Magellan, in the same place, had antagonized the initially friendly “giants” by abducting two of their number. Half a century later they had not forgotten that Eu
ropeans were not to be trusted. Drake, on shore with six men, was attacked by a group of natives with bows and arrows. Two Englishmen were shot dead. Drake then shot one of the natives at point-blank range with an arquebus. The man died horribly with “so hideous and horrible a roar as if ten bulls had joined together in roaring” and the rest of the natives, of whom a number had appeared out of the woods on all sides, retreated. They were not seen again during the weeks Drake remained in the anchorage, but, as the Englishmen must have been uneasily aware, they were presumably there, watching their unwelcome visitors from the cover of the cliffs and woods.

  It was in that hostile and frightening place that Drake put Thomas Doughty on trial and had him killed. The proceedings took place on the beach. A detailed report has survived, that of a mariner named John Cooke. Drake appointed a jury, which included several men known to be Doughty’s friends, and witnesses were called. Doughty demanded to see the queen’s commission which would have given Drake the authority to conduct such a trial. Drake, who had no such commission, responded brutally. He ordered that Doughty’s arms should be bound “for I will be safe of my life.”