Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  For six days a pinnace went back and forth between the two ships “to do John de Anton a kindness, in freeing him of the care of those things with which his ship was loaden.” The rocks carried as ballast in the hold of the Golden Hind were thrown out to make way for the precious loot; Drake gave San Juan de Antón six hundredweight of iron and some tar, presumably for the same reason. At last “we bade farewell and parted, he hastening somewhat lighter than before to Panama, we plying off to sea.” Their voyage was made.

  Drake had traveled further from home than any of his countrymen before him. Among the tales Southey found being told about him in the early nineteenth century was a scrap of dialogue in which he asks his men, when the Golden Hind is in the South Pacific, whether they know where they are and a boy nonplusses Drake and proves his own quickness by replying that yes, he knows very well he is “just under London Bridge.”

  In this topsy-turvy underworld, home’s antithesis, Drake had got himself a fortune. Now he had to find a way of bringing it back. After careening his ship on an island off the coast of Nicaragua, then taking and looting two more Spanish ships, he proceeded northwards. He raided the little settlement of Guatulco. As soon as they heard his guns most of the inhabitants ran for the woods, leaving their homes to be ransacked, their church to be desecrated and their food stores stolen. Thus provisioned, Drake sailed out of the Spaniards’ ken.

  He left behind him a colonial government in uproar and the making of a tremendous legend. The English Dragon, arriving suddenly, his eighteen guns blazing, where no European enemy of Spain had ever ventured before, was an apparition so terrifying neither his victims nor their posterity could ever get over it. Over four centuries later in Peru and Chile children are still being warned that if they don’t behave themselves El Draque will come and carry them off.

  Traveling northward Drake assumed a new character, no longer the piratical tormentor of the king of Spain and avenger of the private insult inflicted on him at San Juan de Ulúa, but empire-building discoverer. According to The World Encompassed and to the account in Hakluyt’s Voyages (also largely based on Francis Fletcher’s notes), he sailed as far north as the latitude where Seattle now stands searching for the elusive Gulf of Anian, the northwest passage, until the unexpected configuration of the coastline exploded his faith in the gulf’s existence and the cold became too extreme to endure. The ropes were stiff with ice, meat froze solid as soon as it was removed from the fire, and the men, famished though they were, preferred to go hungry rather than take their hands out from under their clothes to eat. Drake turned south, and anchored somewhere in the region of what is now San Francisco. There he and his men became the objects of worship to the local people, who showered them with gifts and begged Drake “that he would take the province and kingdom into his hand, and become their king and patron.” Drake graciously agreed (on behalf of Queen Elizabeth), named the country Nova Albion, and in token of its annexation he set up a post to which he nailed an inscribed brass plate and a silver sixpence engraved with the queen’s head before sailing off, ever westward-ho, to the “excessive sorrow” of his new subjects.

  This part of the voyage has been much disputed. The observations—meteorological, zoological, topographical, and anthropological—of The World Encompassed are so wildly inaccurate that they have persuaded some critics that Drake never visited northern California at all. But the tales of Renaissance travelers are generally a mixture of fact with fiction. Magellan’s men reported that the Patagonians were giants. Drake’s men used to mock this exaggeration. “This people which they call Giants … indeed be not at all,” testified John Winter. But as they sailed up the Pacific coast Drake was entertaining his Spanish prisoners with tall tales of preternaturally tall savages. Travelers tell the lies expected of them; their travels may be genuine nonetheless.

  Drake’s original orders from Walsingham and the queen were to make contact with any native Americans he might come across who were still independent of Spain and open trading relations with them. His attempts to do so while still south of the equator had been perfunctory and markedly unsuccessful. Near Lima he and his men had been attacked by a troop of some five hundred Indians and several men had been wounded, Drake—who got an arrow in his face just below his right eye—among them. For the most part, though, his relations with native Americans had been distant but friendly. He paid, if only in trinkets, for the supplies with which the Indians provided him. It was an Indian who acted as pilot and led him to Valparaíso, and Drake recompensed him honorably, putting him ashore again “bountifully rewarded and enriched with many good things.” Just as he had been ready to make common cause with the cimarrones in Panama, so in South America he was ready to profit by the Indians’ hostility to the Spanish, and to treat them decently as potential helpers. He showed no sign, though, of wishing to establish more enduring relationships with them, whether as overlord or trading partner. In the Strait of Magellan he declared that he had annexed a group of islands and named them the Elizabethides, but there is no record of his having informed the inhabitants of their change of status. In Nova Albion, though, he played a new role.

  In his lifetime a novel idea had become current, one so far viewed as marginal, eccentric, and tinged with suspect spiritual fervor, the idea of a “British Empire.” It was first promulgated by John Dee, the astronomer, mathematician, and magician whose book The Perfect Art of Navigation Drake would have known, and whose acquaintance he made soon after his return in 1580. Both terms of the phrase were studiedly arcane. The word “British” was an obsolete one which Dee used because it conjured up associations with King Arthur (defender of ancient Britain against the Saxon invasions), and it embraced the Welshness of the Tudor dynasty. The concept of empire, in the sixteenth century, was essentially religious. The Roman Empire had been sanctified in its last phases as the vehicle of the Christian faith; its successor, the loose association of central European states fancifully named the Holy Roman Empire, owed its numinous authority to the same idea. To Dee and to his friend Edmund Spenser, who drew extensively on Dee’s occult theories in evolving the allegory of The Faerie Queene, the “British Empire” was not only a dreamed-of geopolitical entity, it was also a new Golden Age characterized by freedom, purity, and the union of all nations in the radiance of true (Protestant) faith. In its original form it was, like all the concepts of the occult philosophy in which Dee was an adept, extremely complex and probably untranslatable into actual worldly experience. But to Dee himself as well as to simpler minds it was also a realizable project. Dee was an enthusiastic advocate for the expansion of the navy, on the grounds that an empire whose influence was to be felt all around the world needed its ships and its brave admirals. Drake’s journey about the earth, and especially his annexation of Nova Albion, could happily be fitted into Dee’s vision. Nailing his sixpence to a wooden post in California he was making (or was understood by others to have been making) a modest beginning towards realizing that tremendous dream.

  How the people whose king he claimed to have become understood the action can only be guessed at. According to The World Encompassed, they received Drake and his men with wonder “as men ravished in their minds with the sight of such things as they never had seen or heard of.” They made long speeches, which the Englishmen found totally incomprehensible. They brought gifts of feathers and tobacco. They “began among themselves a kind of most lamentable weeping and crying out which they continued a great while together.” The women shrieked and clawed at their cheeks until the blood ran, and flung themselves violently and repeatedly to the ground, dashing themselves on “hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood and pricking bushes.” The Englishmen supposed that this was some kind of “bloody sacrifice” and that it indicated that they all, and Drake in particular, had been taken for gods. Five days after their landing—by which time Drake’s men had built for themselves a walled camp—the entire population of the surrounding country descended upon them, led by their “king.” There foll
owed much parading and singing and dancing, more incomprehensible orations and more frenzied acts of self-mutilation. At last Drake bravely invited the king and his entourage, which included an honor guard of one hundred “tall and warlike men,” to enter the English camp. There “the king and divers other made several orations, or rather, if we had understood them, supplications, that he [Drake] would take the province and kingdom into his hand, and become their king and patron: making signs that they would resign unto him their right and title in the whole land, and become his vassals in themselves and their posterities.”

  “If we had understood them” indeed. When Christopher Columbus met a young chieftain and his entourage on what is now Haiti, they attempted to communicate but, by Columbus’s own account, “they did not understand me nor I them.” Yet only a few lines down from that admission Columbus writes “he told me the whole island was at my command.” In a situation where real communication is impossible the hearer can place any words he wishes in the speaker’s mouth. The Californian Indians, having finished their orations, gave Drake a headdress and some bone necklaces. What they meant these gifts to signify we will never know, but The World Encompassed describes them as a crown and chains of office, and goes on: “he took the sceptre, crown and dignity of the said country into his hand.” In Port San Julian he had abolished all considerations of social rank or extraneous loyalty, making himself sole ruler of his ship’s company. In California he extended his sovereignty. Briefly he appeared in the role of one who, like the Cid, leaves his homeland behind and founds a new realm in which he can reign supreme. But his sojourn in his new land was brief. Three weeks later he left Nova Albion forever, while the subjects he had claimed for himself and Queen Elizabeth moaned and wrung their hands and lit fires (perhaps in token of mourning, perhaps in celebratory relief) along the white cliffs which had reminded their visitors of home. In his little, storm-battered, silver-ballasted ship, Drake sailed westward across the Pacific.

  He had no other option. The Spanish were on the watch for him all down the South American coast, and it was generally accepted at the time (wrongly, as Winter, unbeknown to Drake, had just proved) that the prevailing winds and currents make the Strait of Magellan impassable west to east. He could have tried to carry his treasure overland across the isthmus of Panama and capture a Spanish ship on the Atlantic side for his voyage home, but the risks would have been enormous. Vast as the Pacific was, and totally unknown to English seamen, it was no longer the mare incognita Magellan had traversed half a century before: the Spanish crossed regularly to the Philippines, bringing back silk and porcelain. Drake had stolen Spanish charts, perhaps including one which could have shown him his way. He resolved to go home by going on.

  For sixty-eight days he and his men saw nothing but air and water. When they finally made a landfall it was an unhappy one. The inhabitants of the Micronesian island where they had anchored swarmed out in canoes to meet the strangers, but attempts to barter with them collapsed when the islanders began to grab at the Englishmen’s clothes and knives, refusing to return or pay for what they seized. (Magellan’s men had had an almost identical experience.) Drake fired off one of his big guns. In his authorized account this was done “not to hurt them, but to affright them,” but according to John Drake twenty of the islanders were killed.

  They landed again in the Philippines, after which the Spanish charts were no use to them. Recruiting (or abducting) two fishermen as pilots Drake threaded his way southward through the Celebes until at last he reached the Moluccas, the fabled Spice Islands, those pinpricks on the map which were the object of so much fantasy, covetousness, and courageous endeavor in Renaissance Europe. It was to reach these islands that Prince Henry the Navigator had sent his adventurers south and east, that Frobisher had gone north, that Magellan had sailed west. Long before Europeans even knew that America existed, before El Dorado was so much as a rumor, the Spice Islands had featured in the European imagination as the ultimate goal for the bold adventurer, a place were fortunes grew literally on trees.

  Drake anchored off the island of Ternate, where the sultan, whose father had been murdered by the Portuguese, gave him a splendid welcome. For the first time Drake and his men were encountering a highly developed non-European culture. The court was cosmopolitan: among the people Drake’s men met there were two Turks and an Italian, all merchants with official positions at court, a gentleman in exile from China who begged Drake to return there with him, and a Spaniard employed as a military officer. The sultan, a Muslim, received them with “royal and kingly state … very strange and marvellous.” He was delighted with Drake’s musicians but in every other form of display he outshone and dazzled his visitors. His great galleys, each rowed by eighty men, were splendid. His robes of cloth of gold, his large and numerous jewels, his ranks of solemn, gorgeously dressed courtiers, his gold-embossed canopies, his carpets, his great fans set with sapphires, his council chamber all hung about with embroideries were awe-inspiring. Drake himself, suspicious of the sultan’s intentions, did not go ashore, but those of his men who did were sharp-eyed and potentially aggressive enough to notice that the palace was guarded with only two cannon “and those at present untraversable because unmounted,” but the country’s recent history—the Sultan had successfully expelled the Portuguese from all of his dominions (said to extend to a hundred islands)—was not such as to encourage any presumptuous ideas of conquest. Instead Drake entered into a treaty with him, whereby the sultan promised to trade exclusively with England on condition that the English should undertake, so soon as was practicable, “to decorate that sea” with English ships and help him drive out the Portuguese.

  In Ternate Drake traded some linen for several tons of cloves, a commodity not much less precious than gold, then sailed on to an uninhabited island where he stopped to careen and reprovision his ship. When he moved on he left three Africans, two men and one woman, behind. According to John Drake they were to “found a settlement,” and Drake gave them “rice and seeds and means of making fire.” What they felt about this is unrecorded. Whether they had stayed voluntarily to make their own paradise or whether they experienced their marooning as the fearful fate most European seamen would have considered it we will never know: none of Drake’s compatriots cared enough to record their feelings. It is the sexual dimension of this story which interested contemporaries: the woman, Maria, was pregnant, and according to an anonymous contemporary account she was “a proper … wench” and had been “gotten with child between the captain and his men pirates.” This was to arouse much disapproval. William Camden includes “a fair negress given unto him for a present by a Spaniard whose ship he had spared” among those things he “purposely omits” from his account of Drake’s voyage (a weaselly way of saying and unsaying at one and the same time). The Elizabethans’ prurient interest in Maria contrasts with their total indifference to the two men abandoned with her, and indeed to all the other black people Drake captured from Spanish ships, and whose ultimate fate is unrecorded.

  Drake picked his way gingerly on southward through the islands of the East Indies with no charts to guide him. Abruptly, just as darkness fell one night, the ship drove with all sails spread onto a submerged reef. Captain and crew alike abandoned hope, “there being no probability how anything could be saved, or any person escape alive.” As the wind wedged them ever more inextricably onto the reef and the waves thudded against the damaged timbers, Drake led the terrified crew in prayer and preached them an extempore sermon on the “joys of that other life.” Against all likelihood, the ship stayed above water. Drake had himself let down in a boat to take soundings, hoping to be able to drop anchor and haul the ship off by its cable, but the reef rose sheer from a great depth. Nowhere could he touch bottom. The whole night was passed in “prayers and tears.” With first light Drake tried again to find an anchor hold and was again unsuccessful. He gave orders that some of the artillery and three tons of cloves be thrown overboard to lighten the ship—to no av
ail. The Golden Hind, pounded by surf, could not hold together much longer. “Every thief reconciled himself to his fellow thief and so yielded themselves to death.” In this moment of despair Francis Fletcher preached a sermon and administered the sacrament. Then, wonderfully, the wind dropped. The ship heeled over and fell back into deep water. They were saved.

  Afterwards, presumably in a mood of nearly hysterical euphoria, Drake conducted a curious and unpleasant charade. Francis Fletcher was chained to a hatch and forced to wear a label declaring him “the falsest knave that liveth” while Drake, sitting cross-legged on a chest and waving his slippers in his hand, “excommunicated” him and sent him to the Devil. It’s a bizarre and opaque episode, but there is a plausible explanation. Fletcher had liked and admired Doughty. In his sermon preached at a moment when he expected shortly to be facing not Drake’s judgment but God’s he must surely have suggested that the shipwreck was a just punishment for Doughty’s unlawful killing.

  The remaining two months of Drake’s sojourn in the East Indies were happier. He stopped at two more islands at each of which his men were impressed by the prosperity and sophistication of their hosts. They rounded the south coast of Java, becoming the first Europeans to realize that it was an island, not a part of the imaginary Terra Australis. Then, from Java, apparently without maps, Drake sailed nonstop across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and northward through the Atlantic, not touching land until he reached Sierra Leone over four months later, by which time the water supplies were down to the last half pint per man. In September 1580, with just one of his original five ships, with 58 men of the 160 with whom he had set sail two years and ten months previously, and with enough stolen goods in his hold to restore his country’s fortunes and make him one of the richest men in it, Francis Drake came home.