The Paradoxal Compass

by Horatio Morpurgo

  THE FIRST SIGNATURE

  Tom Brewer was Drake’s trumpeter and definitely one of the General’s ‘old heavy friends’. But I like to think at this moment at least, he came into his own. Drake in the same moment recovered all his daring. Just as it had been lost, so his whole reputation was restored to him now, in an instant. There came a bearing Gale of wind on one Side, as if it were sent from Heaven.

  By some channel of communication unknown even to themselves, the crew took to their stations at once. This would be a matter of split-second timing. But he was the man to carry this off if anyone was. With the first change in the wind the ship seemed only to settle back a little further on her timbers. True, the ship was now lighter and responded more readily than it might have, but what Drake gathered from that slight movement was that this was none other than the extraordinary hand of God reaching down to them.

  The signal Brewer gave was unlike any blast on that trumpet he had ever given: to more than one sailor, dangling aloft, frantically unfurling sail, at the limits of exhaustion, heads swimming with religious imagery and fear and remorse, it must have seemed like Judgement Day. The ship began a roll from which it could not possibly recover. Nothing could prevent them now from going the same way as their guns and merchandise. You could almost feel the water reaching in through those empty gun ports to pull the ship under. They clung on – what else was there? – as the ship heeled and rolled, then bucked and kicked.

  The Golden Hinde sat gently righting herself alongside the reef, water streaming from her decks, risen from the waves to new life. But the General remained all vigilance, his eyes on the rapidly filling sails now easing the ship away from what it had been pinned against. They appeared to be free of all obstruction but must not lurch, now, into further trouble. He instructed the steersman, called on mariners above to reduce sail, ordered any remaining unspoilt cargo to be returned to the hold. The Golden Hinde was Francis Drake’s ship once again. He set a special watch as the ship, more cautiously this time, threaded her way south. Brewer’s trumpet was heard again, calling gentlemen and crew to a general assembly in the forecastle.

  Fletcher, wherever Drake’s ‘heavy friends’ found him out, would have been ‘brought thither like a prisoner’, just as Doughty had been before his trial. Drake probably knew that to execute him outright would make a mutiny more likely rather than less. But he wanted to give Fletcher the fright of his life and let everyone watch, lest anyone be tempted ever again to see in him an alternative commander.

  Drake addressed the prisoner sitting on a chest – I picture him cross-legged, in a kind of celebrity-yogic posture, his informal, CEO manner fairly crackling with a fiendish mischief. As in the appeal he had made during Doughty’s trial, he would have taken this earliest opportunity to remind everybody just how rich they would soon be, if they only trusted in him now.

  I fasten this posy that I have composed, thus, about the prisoner’s arm and assure you all, before I answer Master Fletcher’s sermon, of one last thing. I make a solemn promise. By God’s mercy, we shall reach England again. The King of Spain, through his envoys at court, shall surely petition the Queen upon our return. Just as he did when we, chancing upon certain overloaded mules in the hills above Nombre de Dios, gently relieved them of their intolerable burden. Once again the Spaniard will urge that we restore to them what they have lost through their own negligence.

  And we, my friends, shall swear in writing that the sums of which they speak are much exaggerated. So we shall. Only silver and some gold was here and there taken – how much we know not. But a very small sum in relation to what is reported. So we shall swear, every one of us. And among the signatures to that deposition, Francis Fletcher, yours shall be the first.

  It was all very well for the Fletchers of this world, he would have continued, already warm to his theme, all very well for the Francis Fletchers, with their college learning, to talk. His own education had been otherwise. Would Fletcher be so scornful of the world as it was now opening up if his family had paid rents to the abbot and patched cob walls, had eaten cheese and watched the roof beams blacken, one generation after another? He would not so lightly condemn the new freedom, with all its risks, if he had known the old incarceration, and its wretchedness.

  Might he not have reminded them of how he himself had watched the King’s men carrying away their old landlord’s treasure, from Tavistock Abbey, taking it away to the Tower of London? Likewise, now, it would take Philip five years to make up the losses they had inflicted on his reserves of silver and gold. It was only thus that the Anti-Christ would be brought to nothing. Did the chaplain really think God had no purpose in placing these means, rather, in the hands of true believers than in those of idolaters and blasphemers? How little did this ‘chaplain’ trust in his own religion! How poorly did he understand the ways of his own God!

  He had claimed their very use of the stars was in breach of God’s law, when God himself had created and ordained ‘the lights in the firmament of heaven’ to be ‘for signs and for seasons and for days and for years’, for the measurement of time, that is. How then was it against God’s will to use them as just that? Why had he accepted the gifts the General offered him, the golden ornaments taken from the church in Santiago de Chile, if he despised riches? And why had he agreed, with everyone else, to sail for a share of the proceeds, if his conscience was against it? If Doughty had been a wronged gentleman, if he was a sacrificial lamb upon the altar of gold and silver, then why had he, Fletcher, signed the deposition against him?

  Whatever it was that had stung Drake so in the sermon would certainly have been answered now. To the suggestion that he had abandoned, never mind misused, Maria, he would have given no quarter. Yet I suspect it would have been upon his honour as a Christian that he rejected the suggestion. If there was any truth in the charge that he had ‘got rid’ of Maria and the child, he might well have answered that Fletcher was fully complicit. He would have had to baptise the child, making him responsible for it. This was why he had not objected to leaving them there.

  And was it only with terror of the sentence to be passed that Fletcher listened to this? Was this a trial? Did he feel his own complicity in Maria’s abandonment? Or wonder, even for a moment, how it might have been to sail into Plymouth Sound with that child on board?

  What they had done was not unlawful, the General continued. It was merely untried. In every age there are those who understand that distinction and those who do not. Those who condemn it as unlawful are, like most of humanity, clinging to the wreckage of the old forms. And there they would perish if those who understood the times better came not to their aid. He knew men well: that was why he had not told them where the ship was really bound. They would live to thank him for it, but they would have to trust and obey him first. It was not only for the silver that they had sailed. Above all, it was the future they had been entrusted to go out and find and fetch home again, in the name of the living God.

  Fletcher’s sermon he condemned as a shameful loss of self-command, as both an act of insubordination, tending to undermine the Captain’s authority, but worse than that, as tending to undermine that general discipline without which no ship ever came home safe. It was true: the gold and silver were what others would admire, on their return. And let there be no canting about this: they won’t be wrong to admire it either. But the self-command required to bring it back – this was beyond the comprehension of ordinary men. And yet it was better known to the simplest man on this ship, than to the chaplain himself.

  ‘For your false sermon, delivered with intent to weaken the men’s resolve in our time of greatest peril, I do hereby ex-communicate you out of the church of God, and from all the benefits and graces thereof, and I denounce you to the devil and all his angels. I charge you furthermore not once to come before the mast. If you do, I swear I shall see you hanged!’

  The crowd parted to allow the General passage. One or two pressed forward immediately to read the verse for themselve
s, hardly able to believe its wording could truly be as their General said it was. Tom Drake, burly brother and reliable henchman, stood solemnly over the former chaplain, appointed to stand guard and very proud indeed of the appointment. For those too far away to read it for themselves, or disinclined, perhaps, to try, he eagerly lent his assistance: ‘Francis Fletcher, the falsest knave that lives!’ he cried out, then resumed his grinning, complacent airs.

  Some there were that met Tom’s eye and some that smiled, too, as they did so, but upon most the effect of the General’s angry words was still working. One or two might savour the savagely comic touches of his performance but its larger meaning was now added to the still astonishing fact of their having survived at all. And which among them could fault the General? He had never faltered. He had maintained his good humour even after all hope was seemingly gone and so had been prepared, uncannily so, the moment it returned. He had been vindicated.

  And yet there was in this crowing over Fletcher, plainly, also a deep and dangerous insecurity. Drake’s harshness reminded many of how fully persuaded they had been by the chaplain’s sermon. Not everyone went quite so far as Tom in his admiration for the General.

  The crew went their ways with a general uneasiness, knowing this question now officially closed. Each man, as he went, stowed it below decks as best he could, hammering down planks, securing hatches. Though for some days, certain glances exchanged could not but betray them to one another.

  It was above all by the looks they did not exchange with Fletcher during the weeks he spent there exposed to general derision, that they communicated, each to himself, that the matter was not closed and never would be. Fletcher in chains and that ‘posy’ around his arm set the General’s seal of ownership upon this story. And it has been in his ownership ever since. Under those planks and hatches this story has lain, for four centuries and more.

  The return of the treasure was indeed demanded by the Spanish upon the ship’s arrival in England. Elizabeth famously responded by having Drake knighted. Where exactly upon his ship, she asked her favourite sea captain, would he like to receive the honour? He selected the weather deck, just by the capstan where Fletcher had preached, so that the assembled dignitaries and the crew – but most of all so that Francis Fletcher himself – should have as clear a view as possible.

  In private the Queen is said to have quipped she was so cross with Drake that she would ‘take away all his treasure’. He was actually paid some ten thousand pounds. A further eight thousand was distributed to the crew. The rest was paid out to investors. The quantity of precious metals claimed by the Spanish authorities was denied by the crew, in writing. The first signature at the foot of the document, which still exists, is that of Francis Fletcher.

  THE MEDICINAL POWERS OF DRAGON ROOT

  To say that everyone is agreed on the date of this nearmiss is not quite accurate. Most sources say the ship struck on the 9th, one or two say the 8th. On their return to England the crew of the Golden Hinde found, like Magellan’s crew at Sanlúcar before them, that they had lost a day. Their log presumably said they had struck the reef on the 8th but most sources corrected the date, retrospectively, to the 9th. The ‘International Date Line’ which today runs down the middle of the Pacific did not then exist. Any ship crossing it now puts its clock forward by one day.

  It may be objected – in fact it surely will be – that to expend, as I just have, such effort on fanciful but ultimately idle speculations is to commit the most elementary of freshman errors. By all means indulge your childish re-enactments, your pantomime, but the only question anyone asked when the Golden Hinde got back was: How much loot? And the entire crew evidently swore not to tell. End of.

  Whilst the Golden Hinde was sailing on through the Spice Islands with its chaplain in shackles, Carolus Clusius, in faraway Vienna, was writing his name and the date (11 January 1580) at the end of a long letter to a German prince. He had just made a list of suggestions for the new botanical garden being laid out in Heidelberg. Clusius, as Europe’s leading expert on exotic plants and a tireless correspondent with other collectors, was a natural choice as royal advisor. His list has survived. It is twenty-five pages and one hundred and fifty species long.

  It’s fun finding out about people like Carolus Clusius. I do recommend it. My experience of palaces is limited, but the Bishop’s Palace in Exeter is easily the nicest one I’ve met. Unassuming, situated half-way down the least frequented approach to the cathedral, you can make some of it out from the road, behind several big old trees and lots of holly. Towered over by the cathedral on the north side, it overlooks a walled garden to the south. It is home to a music school as well as the cathedral archive.

  Clusius, unlike our TV historians, had more questions about than ready-made answers to Drake’s Famous Voyage. He therefore got himself to London, where he was staying with a friend and fellow naturalist early in 1581. Once there he did what any sensible person would have done. What’s really strange is that nobody else thought of it: he talked to Drake and to as many of his crew as he could.

  This was altogether in character. Born in Arras, Clusius worked and travelled all over Europe. In fact, he never left it, but quickly saw the implications of the non-European peoples and plants and animals being encountered by the explorers. He later spoke to two Indians in Holland, from Gujarat and Bengal, about the trees and fruits of their native land. He was the first man to scientifically describe the potato. Ditto the penguin. He imported the first tulip into Holland. His cabinet of curiosities in Leiden, and the educational garden he designed and laid out in the same city, were famous throughout Europe.

  We are fortunate indeed that such a man secured interviews with Drake and his crew on their return. The result, discreetly published in Antwerp as additional ‘notes’ on the work of a Spanish botanist, appeared in 1582. The English government having ordered an information black-out, this is the first substantial account of the circumnavigation. Clusius did not ask about gold. Perhaps he knew there was no point. Or perhaps the gold is just not what the expedition’s success meant to him. ‘God gave each plant strength to live, and each plant teaches us about His presence,’ he once wrote.

  He observes that Drake’s sailors had brought cocoa beans from the coast of Peru. One of them showed him a piece of ‘dragon root’, which he said the Spanish settlers ‘would not part with for any price’ on account of its medicinal powers. Drake himself gave him a bezoar stone. John Winter, commander of the Elizabeth, which sailed through the Straits of Magellan before becoming separated from the main expedition and sailing home, gave him a specimen of the bark he had found in Patagonia, which he had used to cure his crew of scurvy.

  The breadfruit and the land crabs and the fireflies they’d seen in the Spice Islands, the papyrus they’d brought back from Java: all were duly written up by this Frenchman who evidently hadn’t noticed that the circumnavigation was about politics and economics and nothing else. The reference to Javan papyrus is particularly intriguing – it was ‘the white bark of a tree … a very slender membrane, which took every kind of writing.’ The city on Java at which they called after the mishap off Celebes had been an important Hindu and Buddhist centre in its time and would soon be Muslim: this was a highly literate society. Clusius recorded that Drake’s crew went to some lengths to obtain these exotic writing materials ‘in exchange for other commodities.’

  Clusius must have realised that he was, in his quiet way, breaking the embargo on what the world was allowed to know about the voyage. Perhaps the government considered such information harmless, or a useful distraction, even, from the ‘main business’ of the venture. Perhaps they saw it as merely a variation on the gushing eulogies which had also appeared in Drake’s honour. But there is nothing to suggest that the crew themselves saw these plants as a ‘distraction’. They had mattered enough that they wanted to collect them, get them home and discuss them with a botanist once they got there.

  Those who have studied Clusius’ let
ters most closely have been struck by how extensive his contacts were. His Europe-wide network, at a time of heightened religious and political tensions, transcended all such divides. Science, or ‘natural philosophy’, had not yet been professionalised. Clusius was in regular contact with people across religious, class and gender divisions. He translated from Spanish and, as we’ve seen, corresponded with English and German collectors alike. He had lived in Hungary. He had botanised in the hills around Bristol.

  ‘At a time when most of Europe was locked in war over matters of religion and imperial ambition,’ the historian Deborah Harkness has written, ‘the exchange of natural objects prompted an intellectual civility that stood in stark contrast to national disputes.’ The audience for his account of Drake’s journey was international and intellectually curious. Such an audience may have been deemed insignificant by the English government of the day and some historians may still, four centuries later, feel obliged to go along with that verdict. The rest of us are free to find significance as and where we please.

  Those centuries have taken their toll on the Exeter Cathedral archive’s copy. I replace the rubber bands holding it together, wondering how I could have missed this place for so long. The book I’ve been looking at is one of a large collection donated by an 18th-century Exeter physician. I see from the catalogue that it includes early editions of Gesner, Galileo, Kepler and Descartes, as well as Renaissance editions of Galen and Aristotle. I don’t consciously decide that lunch can wait but I ask for a biography of the man who put this collection together and begin to read.