This homecoming is the pivot on which his life’s story swings round. Before the voyage began Sir Thomas Doughty had allegedly said that “if we brought home gold we should be the better welcome,” a remark which was interpreted at his summary trial as a slur on the integrity of the queen and her councillors, and became one of the pretexts for his execution. But it was precisely on the hope that gold could procure him a welcome, and on the monarch’s corruptibility, that Drake was now gambling for his fortune, his glory, and his life.
In September 1580 a fishing boat in the waters off Plymouth was hailed by a returning ship with the question “How was the Queen?” The ship was the Golden Hind, and Drake’s motive for asking the question was more pressing than any sentimental concern he might feel about Elizabeth’s health. It was over a year since he had last heard news (false, as it happened) from Europe. His ship was crammed full of plunder stolen either from Spanish citizens or from Spain itself, a country with whom England was not at war. If the queen were dead and had been succeeded by the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, England would not be safe for him. Even if Elizabeth was still on the throne his position was uncertain. The crimes he had committed—the theft of property, the abduction of persons, the hijacking of ships—he had committed, or so he claimed, with the queen’s connivance, but he could produce no written orders to prove it and, as he very well knew, the queen, if it suited her, would lie without scruple and without mercy to disassociate herself and her government from his offenses. When he embarked on his voyage Elizabeth’s policy had been hostile to Spain and her position strong enough to risk exasperating Philip II by encouraging Drake’s terrorist attacks on Spanish colonies. If now she felt weaker or more placatory she might decide to appease her powerful enemy and return Drake’s plunder to its rightful owners. She might charge him with the piracy of which he was incontrovertibly guilty. She might do what international and local law alike required her to do, and have him put to death.
Someone who had offended as outrageously as Drake had done had to be either wholly repudiated or wholeheartedly endorsed, to be accorded either death or glory. Elizabeth chose the latter, for a mixture of motives of which the paramount one was undoubtedly that which poor Doughty had so rashly made explicit. She wanted Drake’s loot, and she could only lay her hands on it by claiming it had been acquired in her service. She allowed Drake to become a national hero, but she didn’t let him forget that he did so at her sufferance; hence the lethally jocular business with the gilded sword at the celebratory banquet at Deptford. But having issued her warning the queen was indulgent. That day, having ordered the French envoy to knight her new hero, she watched smilingly while Drake’s crew, dressed as “red Indians,” danced for her. Then Drake himself regaled her with his traveler’s tales for four hours while the jealous courtiers yawned and muttered and the crowd on shore of the “vulgar sort”—a crowd so numerous that earlier in the day a bridge had collapsed under their weight, tumbling a hundred of them into the river—raucously celebrated the honoring of the public favorite, the new-made “golden knight.”
Drake’s celebrity was immediate and enormous. “The commons … applauded him with all praise and admiration,” wrote Camden. He was compared to Jason, to Hercules, to the Sun itself. “His name and fame became admirable in all places,” wrote another contemporary, John Stow, “the people swarming daily in the streets to behold him…. Books, pictures and ballads were published in his praise.”
The story of his voyage was satisfying on many levels. The mismatch of that small solitary ship with the immensity of the oceans over which it had sailed was fabulous, and so was the booty Drake had brought home. The quantity of his loot was thrilling. A year before his return some Spanish merchants had brought the news of his captures in the Pacific to London. “The adventurers who provided money and ships for the voyage are beside themselves with joy,” reported Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in England. Drake was a worthy successor to the archetypal heroes of epic literature, the great individualists who leave home to go to the ends of the earth and come back bringing untold riches. Rodrigo Díaz, banished from Castile, rode off into the badlands with a band of followers loyal to him and him alone and won fortunes for them and himself. Drake, shooting the gulf to the other side of the world and returning laden with gold and silver, was a hero after the same exhilarating pattern.
No one ever knew for certain how much Drake’s haul amounted to. All the accounts are deliberate underestimates. The Spaniards habitually undervalued their cargoes by as much as half in order to evade customs duties. Drake and his queen consistently lied about how much he had got so that if he were ever obliged to make restitution he would be able to hold most of his booty back. But even if he had taken only what he owned up to, his success would have been sensational. The treasure taken off the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción alone was equivalent to half the queen of England’s total annual revenue.
Elizabeth hung on to it. She authorized a report (which nobody believed) that Drake had brought home next to nothing. She publicly ordered Drake to lodge all of his treasure in the Tower of London while its ultimate fate remained undecided, but she gave secret permission for him to remove £10,000 worth (a huge fortune) for himself before any of it was registered. Other even larger amounts somehow escaped the notice of the tactfully negligent official receiver, who referred in a later report to “the portion that was landed secretly” and confirmed that he had only “taken notice of so much as he [Drake] has revealed.” Later Mendoza complained that Drake had given Elizabeth at least £100,000 more than had ever reached the Tower. None of the loot, whether secret or declared, was ever returned to its Spanish owners. For years Elizabeth quibbled and temporized about it, refusing to discuss the matter until the Spanish had justified their intervention in Ireland, suggesting (preposterously) that the Spanish crews of the ships Drake captured might have stolen the treasure themselves, demanding that Drake’s victims—the owners of the ships he had seized, robbed, and set adrift—should come to London to present their case. Meanwhile the treasure was allowed to seep discreetly away. The queen retained enough to pay off the national debt and invest £42,000 in the Levant Company. The other investors all received, according to a seventeenth-century source, a staggering 4,700 percent return on their stakes.
Beowulf tackled monsters. Rodrigo Díaz took on the might of the Almoravid armies who seemed to their Christian opponents as alien and terrifying, with their drums and rhinoceros-hide shields, as any fabulous beast. So Drake, who to the Spanish was the dragon, was to his fellow Englishmen the dragon slayer, the brave little man who stands up to a gigantic foe. This was an image of himself that he liked. He boasted that he would make war single-handed against the king of Spain and all his forces, and he approved the preamble to Sir Francis Drake Revived in which his defiance, that of “a mean subject of Her Majesty’s” who dared to take on “the mightiest monarch of all the world,” is likened to that of the ant who in a popular fable contrives to revenge himself upon an eagle. Drake was physically small, politically impotent, a social outsider with no army at his command and no constitutional authority. Like Jack the Giant-Killer, like David who slew the giant Goliath with a pebble and sling, he entered legend as one of those vulnerable individuals who take on stupendous opponents and, by virtue of their cheek and cunning and the righteousness of their cause, triumph over impossible odds.
His struggle with the might of Spain was understood by his contemporaries to be the core of his story. And so it has remained. To reach one of the Spice Islands and establish a trading agreement with its potentate was, potentially at least, as substantial an achievement as any of Drake’s hit-and-run American piracies. But this part of his great adventure has been all but forgotten. To the English and Spanish alike, Drake’s story is essentially a story about Spain, and Spain in the sixteenth century was an opponent fit for a hero.
It was an empire set on world domination, and one which in Drake’s lifetime looked near
to achieving that aim. In 1526 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo addressed the king of Spain as “universal and sole monarch of the world.” He was speaking figuratively, but also prescriptively. The “discovery” and colonization of Central and South America had not only made Spain rich, it had also made the Spanish king the overall ruler of an empire commensurate with Rome’s, one on which, in Ariosto’s line (later impudently annexed by British propagandists), “the sun never sets.” And as the Spanish in general and King Philip II in particular considered themselves to be the arm of the church, they had a sacred mission, as well as a secular ambition, to extend that empire to include all the nations of the earth.
To the English Protestants, that growing empire was the enemy of true religion and the oppressor of all free peoples. Pride, luxury, and horrific cruelty were its characteristics. Wrote the Victorian poet W. H. Smith:
How brilliant with delusive glow
Glamour above and death below
Spain’s glories past have been
Smith was drawing on a vision first elaborated by the sixteenth-century Protestant propagandists who drew a picture of Spanish power in which the torture chambers of the Inquisition, immense galleys rowed by wretched slaves, and South American gold mines worked by Indians whipped on until they dropped dead at their tasks (images drawn from reality) all featured prominently. The Spanish missionary Las Casas’s devastating indictment of his compatriots’ behavior in the new world, A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, was read avidly, diffusing a horrifying vision of the Spanish colonists as rapaciously cruel conquerors. The story of a plucky sea captain in one little ship, daring to “annoy” a power so titanic and so darkly dreadful and getting away with it, was to the English mind exhilarating in its promise that the evil empire could be outfaced and even outdone.
The giant-killer was also a kind of crusader, for in sixteenth-century Europe the enemies of true religion were not infidels, but fellow Christians. Drake’s piety has been questioned, but only by those simple-minded enough to imagine a sincerely held religious faith to be incompatible with violent or immoral behavior. There is no reason to doubt that he really believed, along with most of his Protestant contemporaries, that in robbing Catholic Spain to enrich Protestant England, he was engaged on a holy mission. Drake lived in an age when doctrinal difference led swiftly to violence. There is no reliable account of his having personally desecrated any place of Catholic worship, but he did not restrain his men from doing so. In South America they sacked Spanish churches. They stamped on communion wafers and smashed crucifixes and other images. They used altar cloths to wipe the sweat from their faces. They made off with chalices and monstrances and embroidered vestments. Back on board ship they taunted their prisoners with being “idolators,” grabbed their rosaries and holy medals and crucifixes and broke them or threw them into the sea.
The ugly reality of such acts of hooliganism could be veiled by graceful theory. Soon after Drake returned from his circumnavigation Edmund Spenser began work on The Faerie Queene, in which he elaborated a new Protestant and patriotic mythology. He conflated the two archaic idealisms of crusading Christianity and of chivalry, casting the Anglican church as a maiden, Una, in need of protection by gallant knights. Drake, for all his plebeian origins, fit neatly into this elegant schema. His reputation for chivalric courtoisie was already established. Entertaining his noble prisoners at his table, offering them good food and music and civil conversation and then sending them away with gifts, he was acting like a good knight and true, one who fought only within the rules of the tournament—which restricted violence but allowed the demanding of stupendous ransoms—and who didn’t hit a man when he was down. At large in the Pacific, he could be imagined as being both knight-errant in pursuit of adventure for the exercise of his own noble spirit, and also as the champion of Queen Elizabeth and of Una, the one true faith.
He could, more realistically, have been applauded for his discoveries. Drake’s voyage had taken him into many seas totally unknown to his compatriots, and some into which he was the first European to venture. In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, written half a century earlier, a prophetess foretells an imminent golden age when “New mariners and masters new shall rise … / To find new lands, new stars, new seas, new skies.” Ariosto intended the prophecy to refer to the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but his Elizabethan English translator, Sir John Harington, was able, by some judicious mistranslation, to make the whole vision applicable to Elizabethan England, and Harington’s own marginal notes make it plain he intended this passage to be read as a tribute to Francis Drake.
Drake’s discoveries mattered to him. He took pains to record them. As he sailed up the coast of South America, he and his nephew John spent a large part of their time drawing and painting pictures of the lands they were seeing, of their flora and fauna and topography. Nuño de Silva reports that both men were talented draftsmen, and as Don Franciso de Zárate divined, Drake’s pictures had a practical purpose: “No one who guides himself according to these paintings can possibly go astray.” On his return Drake gave the queen a map six feet long showing his route around the world and his logbook, probably illustrated with the paintings he had made.
Neither map nor logbook was ever seen again. Elizabeth wanted the Spanish to know as little as possible about where Drake had been and what he had been doing: all information about his voyage was to be suppressed. A few weeks after his return the great German geographer Gerardus Mercator complained that it was impossible to find out his route: the English authorities were either deliberately concealing it, or “putting out different accounts.” Wildly inaccurate rumors about his amazing journey proliferated. The scholars of Winchester School composed an ode on the occasion of his knighthood in which they congratulated him on having visited both the poles. But hard information was closely guarded. Nine years later, when Hakluyt began to publish his Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, the embargo was still in place. Hakluyt initially omitted Drake’s circumnavigation—surely the most obvious of all candidates for inclusion—and he subsequently revealed that he had been “seriously dealt withal” by those who wished to prevent publication of any account of it. Later still, in 1592, Drake wrote to the queen reminding her reproachfully that all reports of his journey “hitherto have been silenced.”
But though he never in his lifetime got due acknowledgment for his discoveries, his success was splendid. During the months after his return he was constantly at court, “squandering,” according to Mendoza, “more money than any man in England.” He was not much liked in the socially exalted circles in which he now found himself. He was a stocky little man with small eyes and sandy hair: he had no physical graces to mitigate his lack of courtly manners. He was brash, boastful, pugnacious, and a bit of a bore. He made himself insufferable to the snobbish and the fastidious. Lord Sussex snubbed him when he bragged of the ships he had taken, and when Drake responded angrily Lord Arundel told him he was impudent and shameless. With the insecurity of the newly risen he insisted too loudly on his claims to respect. “In Sir Francis,” wrote Robert Mansell, who knew him, “was an insatiable desire of honour indeed beyond reason.” He was also “too much pleased with open flattery.”
Others had more serious objections. The people fondly called him “the master thief of the unknown world.” There were those who didn’t care to associate with such a person, especially one so crassly eager to buy favor with his dirty money. Drake, like the Cid, was a throwback to an ancient type of robber-hero. As such he was an anomaly at a Renaissance court where new values prevailed and new ideals emphasized public responsibility and the protection of the commonwealth by means of the law. “Nothing angered worse Sir Francis Drake,” wrote Camden, “than to see the nobles and chiefest of the court refuse that gold and silver which he presented them withal, as if he had not lawfully come by it.” That “as if” is lenient. Two hundred years later George Anderson, whose tartly hostile biography
of Drake was published in 1784, wrote: “The actions which gave rise to Drake’s popularity are such as a courageous leader with a band of armed followers might easily perform by entering the cities or towns on the coast of Britain, cutting the throats of the watch and all who happen to be awake in the streets, breaking open and plundering houses and churches and making their escape with their booty … Would the man who should undertake and execute an enterprise of such a horrid nature, be justly entitled to the name of Hero?” There were plenty of people at the Elizabethan court, whether jealous, snobbish, or morally scrupulous, ready to ask the same question.
Aristocrats held aloof, but nothing could dent Drake’s fame. The “commons applauded him with all praise and admiration.” Better still, he had the queen’s favor. She wore the five enormous emeralds he had given her in a new crown and flaunted it before the Spanish ambassador. She granted him extended audiences; she sent him gifts of jewels and scarves and cups. She spoke with him at length whenever she saw him, which was often: once he visited her nine times in one day. She gave him lands and manors. She decreed that the Golden Hind should be kept at Deptford “in perpetual memory” of his amazing voyage. He was now an international celebrity. John Stow reports that “many princes of Italy, Germany and other, as well enemies as friends … desired his picture.” In Italy his portrait, exhibited in Ferrara, drew a great crowd of sightseers. In France King Henri III had copies given to all his leading courtiers. “In brief,” wrote John Stow, “he was as famous in Europe and America as Tamburlane in Asia.”
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