More tempests, more vast waves heaving through the icy murk, more hunger, sickness, fear, and confusion. Then, at last “our troubles did make an end, the storm ceased, and all our calamities (only the absence of our friends excepted) were removed.” Drake had penetrated the strait, a passage narrow, intricate, and as fraught with danger as the mythical vagina dentata, and having passed through it into the great ocean of pleasure he attained a marvelous consummation. That this part of his story constituted a potent sexual image was not lost on Renaissance commentators. A contemporary poet, writing after Drake’s return, specifically likened the Strait of Magellan to a woman’s genitals:
That world-dividing gulf where he that venters
With swelling sails and ravished senses enters
To a new world of bliss.
It was late October, the southern spring. The weather brightened. The days lengthened. Drake turned northward again, and like the heroes of folklore who have been tried by fantastic ordeals and come through unscathed, he was rewarded with his heart’s desire.
The whole vast Pacific Ocean was the Spaniards’, by papal decree and therefore, in Catholic eyes, by divine appointment. Before the arrival of the Golden Hind there were no pirates there, no alien craft larger than the Indians’ bark canoes, no human predators to be feared and therefore no need for any but the most rudimentary defenses. As the viceroy was later to explain to King Philip in an attempt to excuse his failure to halt Drake’s depredations: “In many places there are no more than four Spaniards…. the ports are all without artillery … there is no mode of defence.” Drake and his men, making their way up the coast of Chile and Peru, ransacking unarmed ships and pillaging unguarded townships, came perhaps as close as anyone ever would to discovering El Dorado, that fabulous realm where precious metal was left lying around for the taking, where a man could, almost without effort, grow rich.
In 1628 Drake’s nephew, another Francis, published an account of this voyage, The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, claiming to have written it himself. In fact the book was probably written to Drake’s order by Philip Nichols (using Fletcher’s narrative) in the 1590s, around the same time as Sir Francis Drake Revived, but suppressed by order of Queen Elizabeth: she was most unwilling, even so long after the event, that the rival powers should know in detail exactly where Drake had been. The two books share a shamelessly evident purpose, being written, as the epigraph to The World Encompassed candidly states, “for the honour of the actor,” and they have in common the tone of laconic but swaggering glee which is the hallmark of Drake’s perceived character and which is what distinguishes his amazing journey from all the other fabled Renaissance voyages into the unknown. Columbus’s expedition was piously undertaken and fraught with sacred significance and imperialist ambitions. Magellan’s was desperately brave and ultimately tragic. Raleigh’s ventures were shaped by intellectual ambition and undermined by a privileging of poetic vision over practical preparation. Drake’s, by contrast, were (or at least were so presented by him and imagined by the public) the adventures of a scallywag, a wonderful sequence of tricks which, by a combination of cool audacity and inspired mischief, he was able to play. His approved version of his adventures on the western coast of South America is jocular throughout. This run of luck is just too good to be serious.
At Valparaíso an unsuspecting crew of Spanish sailors, assuming Drake’s men to be compatriots, welcomed them aboard with the beating of a drum and the offer of wine. They responded by punching the pilot in the face before abducting him, putting the rest of the crew ashore, and making off with the ship and its cargo of Chilean wine and four hundred pounds of gold. At Tarapacá they went ashore to take on water and found a man asleep with thirteen bars of silver beside him. They didn’t like to interrupt his nap, or so Nichol’s chortlingly triumphant account runs, but since they had inadvertently done so they relieved him of the silver, a responsibility “which otherwise perhaps would have kept him waking.” On another occasion they encountered a Spaniard and an Indian boy driving eight llamas, each carrying some hundred pounds of silver. “We could not endure to see a gentleman Spaniard turned carrier,” so they “became drovers, only his directions were not so perfect that we could keep the way which he intended.” They stopped ship after ship and “made somewhat bold to bid ourselves welcome,” boarding them, stripping them of their fabulous cargoes of bullion and jewels, and sending them on their way “somewhat lighter than before.” The jokes express a rising elation. On one ship which they captured without opposition they found eighty pounds of gold, a great gold crucifix, and “certain emeralds near as long as a man’s finger.” The ancients believed that west of the sunset lay the fabulous realm of the Hesperides, where a dragon guarded trees bearing apples of pure gold. Drake, sailing westward, seemed to have reached it. The dragon, dozy and fangless, did nothing while bars of silver as numerous as the apples of legend fell into the Englishman’s outstretched hand.
There is no sign Drake felt any compunction about his piracies. He had persuaded himself that the Spaniards, because of their treacherous treatment of him at San Juan de Ulúa, owed him a fortune. Besides, to a Protestant Englishman the Spaniards had no more right to their property in America than he did: they were unprincipled conquerors who had enslaved the native Americans and stolen their gold. Drake’s men, sailing up the coast of Chile, were indignant but not surprised to see mounted Spaniards with Indians “running as dogs at their heels, all naked, and in most miserable bondage.” They heard stories of the Spanish torturing their Indian slaves, spattering them with hot bacon fat or whipping them for their own sadistic pleasure. Ali Baba helped himself freely to the treasure he found and nobody blamed him because the victims of his theft were themselves thieves. So Drake robbed the Spaniards and because they were, in his eyes anyway, robbers themselves he did so without scruple.
To take what was theirs was not only permissible, it might even be an act of piety. The dispossession of the English monasteries formed the background to Drake’s childhood. He grew up in a society where the seizing of property from Catholic institutions was something condoned and enthusiastically perpetrated by established authority. By the standards of his time, he was not a bigot: he once told a Welsh Catholic seaman that “God would receive the good work that he might perform in either law, that of Rome or that of England.” But his Protestantism was an essential part of his identity. The Spaniards called him “el Luterano.” He was the Lutheran (a word the Spaniards used as a catch-all term for Protestants) just as he was the corsair. When at sea he would spend two to three hours of every day praying or leading his men in prayer, and when he had Spanish prisoners on board he made a point of making them attend the services, at which he himself sometimes preached; of demonstrating his freedom from “superstition” by eating meat on Fridays; and of displaying his copy of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Drake corresponded on friendly terms with Foxe, whose book, a gruesome and savagely anti-Catholic account of the executions of Protestants under Queen Mary, was hugely influential. It probably helped persuade Drake that those he stripped of their possessions were fully deserving of any punishment he might mete out to them. So, as he cruised northwards through the Pacific enriching himself he was avenging the wronged native Americans, serving his country, and doing the work of the Protestant God. He had entered a kind of moral limbo, a never-never land in which theft was no longer a crime, so long as its victims were Spanish, and where an Englishman could do no wrong.
There were setbacks. On one occasion Drake’s men were surprised ashore by a party of around a hundred Spaniards and their Indian auxiliaries. One Englishman was killed, and while his fellows watched from their boat the Spaniards mutilated his corpse, hacking off his head and right hand and cutting out his heart. But this was an isolated incident. In Drake’s legend, as it subsequently took shape, the Golden Hind is poignantly small and vulnerably isolated, all alone and unsupported on the wrong side of the world, but to those defending the little ports in
to which she sailed she was fearsome. Unlike the Spanish ships in the region, which carried no heavy artillery, she had eighteen cannon, three of bronze and the rest of cast iron: there wasn’t a warship to match her in all the Pacific. When Drake sailed into port Spanish officials took to the woods. When he boarded a ship its crew would stand meekly by while his men searched for valuables. In Mormorena he terrorized the only two Spanish officials into allowing him to obtain provisions from the natives. In Callao he found a large number (somewhere between nine and thirty—contemporary sources disagree) of undefended Spanish ships at anchor. He searched each vessel in turn, cut their cables, and in some cases chopped down their masts before the alarm was raised. When word of his depredations reached Lima, the viceroy sent out two hundred horsemen to repel his attack but Drake was already back at sea. Three hundred men in two ships gave chase but the Golden Hind easily outpaced them and the Spaniards turned back, discouraged and dreadfully seasick.
Later, back in England, a nobleman who evidently saw Drake as a braggart and a bore, as many courtiers did, was to remark acidly that it was no great accomplishment to capture a defenseless vessel with a well-armed ship. The sneer is largely justified, but it is precisely the dreamlike ease with which Drake achieved his ends which gives this expedition and its commander their mystique. Only upon the exceptional, the divinely favored, does fortune smile so broadly. The Red Sea parted before the people of Israel because they were God’s chosen ones. Achilles was able to slaughter so many of his opponents because he had god-given invulnerability, god-given armor, god-given status as a supreme warrior. The Cid, “born in a happy hour,” took cities and kings’ ransoms with ease, and his apparently effortless success was itself a demonstration of his greatness. Insouciance is the mark of the natural-born winner, easy victory the prerogative of the superman. So Drake, laughingly disabling the Spaniards’ ships, robbing their towns, and stealing their treasure, has the magical irresistibility which is the sure sign, in myth, fairy tale, and popular history, of the happy hero.
Between October and the following April he sailed easily northward, becoming ever more confident, more audacious, and more rich. He was to boast to one of his prisoners that during that time “he took forty vessels, large and small, and that only four of those he met have escaped him.” His investors and his queen were on the other side of the world. Doughty was dead, Winter had turned for home. He was answerable to no one. He was having the time of his life.
He lived in style, insofar as it was possible on his cramped little ship.
His own quarters were fitted up for “ornament and delight.” Like Alcibiades he acted on the principle that his own ostentation redounded to his country’s credit: he had taken with him from England “rich furniture … whereby the civility and magnificence of his native country might, amongst all nations whithersoever he should come, be the more admired.” Musicians played to him while he dined off gold and silver dishes, eating, as one of his Spanish prisoners observed, “all possible dainties” and enjoying the fragrance of “perfumed waters” that he claimed had been given to him by the queen.
His authority was absolute. The “gentlemen” dined with him, and according to Don Francisco de Zárate, who was held prisoner on the Golden Hind for two days, he treated them as a council “which he calls together for even the most trivial matter.” This council existed rather to provide Drake with company than to aid him in decision making. “He takes advice from no one … but he enjoys hearing what they say.” As for the rest of the men, Zárate reported that “he treats them with affection and they treat him with respect” and “all said that they adored him.” But that adoration was tempered with awe. The men were kept on a tight rein. Zárate was impressed by the pirates’ discipline: “When our ship was sacked, no man dared take anything without his orders.” Another witness, a pilot whom Drake captured and kept in chains, reported that “all his men trembled before him, bowing to the ground.”
As his run of luck lengthened, and his success came to amaze even him, he boasted of it with naked glee. He showed off his booty to his captives “like a shameless robber who fears neither God nor man.” He was the terror of his enemies, the undisputed ruler of his own people, the owner of a growing hoard of treasure, and he was high on the wonder of his own cleverness and courage and cheek.
He preferred robbery with menaces to robbery with violence. He was a frightening man. When he suspected the steward of a captured ship of concealing gold from him, he subjected the man to a false hanging, putting the noose around his neck and dropping him from a makeshift gallows over the side of the ship, but with a rope long enough to allow him to fall into the sea and survive. He used the same terrifying trick on a Spanish pilot, Alonso Sánchez Colchero, who courageously refused to work for him, and when Colchero still held out shut him in an iron cage at the bottom of the ship. Other captives were terrorized into collaborating, acting as his pilots, guides, or informers; he threatened to have their heads cut off if they didn’t do so, and even boasted to them of how he had had Doughty killed for disobeying him. He talked of throwing two thousand Spanish heads into the harbor at Callao. But though his words were murderous his actions were not.
In 1572 in the Caribbean he had restrained his cimarron allies when they wanted to cut Spanish throats. After he returned from his circumnavigation, when the Spaniards were alleging all sorts of atrocities against him, his entire crew signed a document testifying that during the whole voyage he had been responsible for the death of only one Spanish sailor, and had never sunk a ship with men on board. What seemed to his contemporaries the cruelest act perpetrated in the course of the voyage was his abandoning the kidnapped pilot Nuño de Silva on Spanish territory. De Silva had guided him and his fleet across the Atlantic and had been on board the Golden Hind, by all accounts cooperating freely, for fifteen months. Drake put him ashore in Guatulco where, predictably, he fell into the hands of the Inquisition and was hideously punished for his collaboration. It was ruthless of Drake—shockingly so—but it was an act of callous negligence rather than of violent aggression.
With his prisoners on the Golden Hind he was mockingly polite. Don San Juan de Antón, from whom he stole a shipload of bullion, was given breakfast at his own table and eventually dismissed with presents, a German musket and a basin of gilded silver with Drake’s name engraved on it. He fed Don Francisco de Zárate with tidbits from his own platter while they dined together to the sound of trumpets and viols. He allowed the hidalgo to keep his rich clothes, a favor for which Zárate was pitifully grateful, on condition he handed over a gold falcon with an emerald set in its breast. Some black captives remained on the Golden Hind (perhaps by their own choice), but all of his Spanish prisoners were eventually released, either put ashore or set adrift in their own vessels. He was punctiliously gracious with his victims. After robbing San Juan de Antón of a fortune, he gave him a letter of safe conduct in case he should meet John Winter, ordering Winter not to do him any injury and to pay him for any of his stores he felt obliged to grab. He was playing the tease, the joker, the cat who suddenly lifts its paw and lets the mouse run, demonstrating his power not by exercising it but by refraining from doing so.
At Callao he boarded a ship which he had been informed was carrying a great load of silver. He was disappointed: the bullion had been unloaded. But his disappointment was mitigated by the news of another ship, the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, which had sailed northward for Panama only a few days earlier laden with silver and gold. For the next two weeks he chased her, offering a gold chain to the first man to sight her sail.
He encountered and robbed four other ships, taking wine and more gold. At last, at noon on March 1, John Drake, the admiral’s nephew, won the chain. Drake slowed down so as not to alarm his prey. Some nine hours later, when darkness was beginning to fall, the two ships finally met. Before the Spanish captain, San Juan de Antón, could work out what was happening, the Englishmen had grappled his ship and someone was shouting “Engl
ishmen! Strike sail!” By his own account de Antón yelled back, “Come on board to strike the sails yourselves!” It was a foolhardy challenge. A shrill whistle and then a trumpet sounded on the Golden Hind. The English opened fire with arquebuses, bows and arrows, and cannon. A piece of chain shot carried away one of the Spaniard’s masts. There was no answering fire: the Spanish ship carried no big guns. The Englishmen swarmed aboard. De Antón surrendered and was taken to Drake, whom he found insouciantly removing his helmet and coat of mail. His glee translated into genial magnanimity, Drake embraced his captive saying, “Have patience, for such is the usage of war,” before locking him in his own cabin.
In happier days the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción had been nicknamed the Cacafuego (shit-fire). This time she hadn’t fired at all. As Drake’s men methodically removed her entire cargo and restowed it in their own hold, one of her men ruefully suggested she should be rechristened the Cacaplata (shit-silver). The takings were fantastic. As the narrator of the The World Encompassed puts it, with the jubilantly affected nonchalance of one who knows his news is so astounding that he can be sure it will have its effect even if he throws it away, “We found in her some fruit, conserves, sugar, meal and other victuals, and (that which was the especiallest cause of her heavy and slow sailing) a certain quantity of jewels and precious stones, thirteen chest of rials of plate, eighty pound weight in gold, twenty-six tons of uncoined silver, two very fair gilt silver drinking bowls, and the like trifles.”
Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship Page 29
