by Alec Waugh
Raleigh was now ready to start upon that expedition. It lasted a month and its discomforts provided one of the grimmest experiences of his service. He ‘carried 100 persons and their victuals for a month, driven to lie in the rain and weather, in the open air, in the burning sun and upon the hard boards and to dress our meat and carry all manner of furniture in them, that what with the victuals being mostly fish, with the wet clothes of so many thrust together and the heat of the sun, I will undertake there was never any prison in England that could be found more unsavoury and loathsome, especially to myself, who had for many years before been dieted and cared for in a sort far differing.’
Yet he did not lose his faith in the Golden City, and he believed that had he started ten days earlier, before the rivers were flooded, he would have reached Manoa. An Indian chief told him that if fifty Englishmen were left to defend his province against the Spaniards, he would show the others the road to Manoa. Everywhere Raleigh showed the Indians courtesy and kindness, and 180 years later another traveller was to discover that the legend still lingered of an English cacique who had urged them ‘to persevere in enmity against the Spaniards’ and who had promised to return with forces that could defend them.
He undertook no belligerent action. ‘It would have been agreeable,’ he wrote,’ to have sacked a city or two and brought back gold, but would have been in my opinion an utter overthrow to the enterprise, if the same should be hereafter by Her Majesty attempted, for then, whereas now they have heard we were enemies to the Spaniards and were set by Her Majesty to relieve them, they would as good cheap have joined with the Spaniards at our return, as to have yielded unto us, when they proved that we came both for one errand and that both sought but to sack and spoil them, but as yet our desire for gold or our purpose of invasion is unknown to them and it is likely that if Her Majesty undertake the enterprise, they will rather submit themselves to her obedience than to the Spaniards of whose cruelty they have already tasted, and therefore until I had known Her Majesty’s pleasure, I would rather have lost the sack of one or two towns, although they might have been very profitable, than to have defaced or endangered the future hopes of so many millions and the great good and rich trade which England may be possessed of thereby.’
There were, of course, no cities available for him to have sacked, but his faith in the wealth of El Dorado was unbounded. He amplified Martinez’ description of the palace. ‘All the vessels of the Emperor’s home were of gold and silver and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and hardness of the metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which seemed giants, and figures in proportion and bigness of all the beasts, birds, trees and herbs that the earth bringeth forth and all the fishes that the sea of waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also ropes, budgets, chests and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of billets of gold that seemed wood, marked out to burn. Finally, there was nothing in this country whereof he had not the counterfeit in gold. ... a garden of pleasure where they went when they needed the air of the sea, which had all garden herbs, flowers and trees of gold and silver – an invention and magnificence till then never seen.’
His imagination embellished every rumour. The mountains were so filled with precious metals that they dazzled the eyes. The resources of Peru and Mexico would be soon exhausted, but Guiana was ‘the very magazine of all rich metals’, a country ‘that hath yet her maidenhead; never sacked, burned or wrought: the face of the earth hath not been torn nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance: the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges nor their images pulled down out of their temples. It hath never been entered by any army of strength and never conquered or possessed by any Christian prince.’
He accepted also the rumour of a tribe that had eyes in their shoulders, their mouths in the middle of the breasts, and from, between whose shoulders grew backward a great mane of hair; a description that was perhaps responsible for Desdemona’s reference to
men whose heads
Do grow between their shoulders . . .
And indeed the belief in this tribe was to persist late into the century, Hartsinck talking in 1770 of a black race in Surinam with forked hands and feet like a lobster’s, with only a thumb and forefinger.
Raleigh was away seven months, and the book in which he recorded his adventures was received with derision by his fellow courtiers. It reflected more doubt upon his truthfulness ‘than all the questionable acts of his life put together’. There were not lacking those who wondered whether he had made the trip at all. Perhaps he had been in Cornwall all the time. The detail that amused the court more than any other was that of the oysters, ‘very salt and well tasted’, that he claimed to have found growing on the mangroves of Trinidad. ‘Oysters on trees indeed, how could you believe anything of the man who presented a report like that.’
But Raleigh was to remain haunted till the end by the legend of Guiana, whose ‘great unspoiled city Geryon’s sons call El Dorado’.
While Raleigh was upon these travels, Philip, crouched over his files in his bleak cell, racked by gout and arthritis, was to learn that Drake was planning another trip to the West Indies. For six years Drake had been ashore. Soon after the Armada, he had led a raid on Cádiz that had proved unsuccessful, and he was out of favour with the Queen. In a desultory way, England was still at war with Spain. But Philip had now turned his attention to Huguenot France. This was a welcome relief for Elizabeth, though she did not welcome the establishment of a fortified strongpoint across the Channel. She was content to let Drake return to Devon, build Plymouth up into an important naval station, and later, as a member of Parliament, busy himself upon committees. If another Armada were to be launched, she would have him in reserve. It was slowly that the tide of events drove her to reconsider the value of her old servant. Henri IV now sat upon the throne of France. The man who had thought Paris worth a mass was adept at playing one party off against another. Elizabeth sent an expedition to the defence of Brest. The English losses were heavy; Frobisher died of his wounds, but Brest was relieved and a threat to England passed.
Philip’s difficulties mounted, He was short of money and his signature on a bill had been dishonoured too often in Genoa and Augsburg for anything but bullion to be accepted there. Now, surely, so it seemed to Drake, was the time to strike a final and conclusive blow. A return to Nombre de Dios, a march across the isthmus, the sacking of Panama, the plunder of its treasure – why not? Drake longed to be at sea again, and this time Elizabeth listened sympathetically.
If the first raid upon the mule train contained all the best-seller ingredients of a boys’ adventure story, his last voyage contains the Aeschylean unities of Attic tragedy. It is an eternal theme, the man of fifty trying to relive his youth, to recapture youth, to disprove the evidence of time. Drake’s scheme in itself was sound, just as the scheme of his Cádiz adventure had been sound, but he was no longer thirty. Napoleon said after Austerlitz, ‘A general has twelve years, I have seven left.’ Ten years later, at Waterloo, immobile upon his horse, he was unable to summon a flash of that inspiration which had once been his and might have carried a day that was, as Wellington said afterward, ‘a damned close thing’.
At fifty, after six years ashore, Drake, without knowing it, had lost his suppleness, not so much in body as in mind. His responses were no longer swift, and his early success had been won by the rapidity, the sureness, the confidence with which he struck, allied with the careful, methodical preparation of his plans.
Elizabeth too was ageing, and her counsellors were timid. She made difficulties, she laid down conditions. She insisted that another admiral should sail with equal authority, and she chose as that other man John Hawkins, who was now sixty-three, who had always disagreed with Drake on points of naval strategy; Hawkins, under whom Drake had sailed as a junior on ‘that troublesome voyage’; Hawkins, who had reported unfavourably on Drake, and later had been outshone by Drake in terms of fame and wealth. Elizabe
th could not have chosen worse.
Worse was to follow. The news that Drake was to sail again brought volunteers in thousands to his command, and when the rumour of it reached Spain, nine thousand soldiers deserted and the inhabitants of Lisbon took to the hills. A swift blow at this point, in spite of the handicaps that had been imposed on him, might have succeeded. But Elizabeth procrastinated. She was afraid that Philip was planning a second Armada; and indeed four Spanish galleons which had intended to raid the Channel Islands lost their direction and landed by mistake in the charming Cornish fishing village of Mousehole, among whose inhabitants today can be detected a trace of Spanish ancestry, and burned Newlyn and Penzance.
Elizabeth, in her alarm, insisted that Drake and Hawkins, before sailing for Nombre de Dios, should reconnoitre the south of Ireland and the coast of Spain, then cruise in the Atlantic in the hope of intercepting the gold fleet on its way from Havana. She even fixed a date by which they must return, and was incensed when her admirals explained that it was impossible to make such promises, and that as large a force as it was proposed to send to Panama could not be maintained on board for such a length of time. In her anger she would probably have cancelled the expedition had she not been informed that the chief ship of the Mexican gold fleet had been crippled in a storm and had taken refuge at Puerto Rico, with bullion worth two and a half million pounds aboard. It was too great a prize to be resisted. So, at the end of August, twenty-seven ships manned by twenty-five hundred men, the biggest expedition that England had ever launched, set sail from Plymouth.
Within a few days trouble had begun. A dual control can never be satisfactory, particularly when the two leaders hold contrary views but in this case there was the latent lack of harmony that had always lain between the cousins. They began to quarrel over the kinds of incident that feed the flame of disunion in families. Drake protested that he was carrying too large a share of the armed force. Hawkins retorted that he should have been ‘entreated’, not ordered, to take over Drake’s surplus. Then came their first big disagreement. It was Drake’s habit to plunder some fort or other on his way to the West Indies; he now chose the Grand Canary. Hawkins disagreed. In his opinion they should make first for Puerto Rico. There was a hot argument at the war council and Hawkins was overruled, but the outcome proved that he was right.
It was ten years since Drake had sailed these waters, and during that period Philip had strengthened his defences. If Drake had followed the tactics that had proved successful years before at Santiago, Santo Domingo and Cartagena, and landed his troops in the dark, he might have had the town at his mercy. But he waited till daylight and in full view of the fort looked for a suitable landing beach; the sea was rough, however, and the beach which he had selected was heavily protected. He could not risk a landing, and was forced to cancel the operation. He sailed away without the firing of a shot. Never had El Draqui withdrawn before. His soldiers felt ashamed. Their morale went down.
Luck now turned against him. He made for Dominica and reached his anchorage on the leeward side by the northern route. Hawkins went southward through the channel between Dominica and Martinique. Two of his ships were slower than the rest and fell behind. Ninety-nine times in a hundred this lack of speed would have made no difference. The two ships would have arrived at their rendezvous in Guadeloupe a day late and that would have been all. But this was the hundredth time. Philip had sent five of his fast new frigates to bring back the treasure of the galleon stranded in Puerto Rico. To their astonishment they saw ahead of them two small English ships; they attacked and captured one of them. Ninety-nine times in a hundred this capture would not have been of great importance, but once again this was the hundredth time. Hawkins had imprudently told his officers that their first objective was Puerto Rico. The rumour had spread through the ships. The five fast frigates discovered the purpose of the expedition and made full speed to warn the governor there.
Drake realized instantly the full implications of this disastrous news; a surprise attack was now impossible, yet it might still be possible to attack before the defences of the town were completely organized. Only one course was open – to attack at once. Hawkins, however, opposed this plan. He insisted that the ships must be watered first and the batteries placed in position. He was old and he was ill; he was weary rather than wary. He refused to commit his squadron to an action that seemed to him haphazard. At Grand Canary, Drake had got his way and events had proved that Hawkins’ advice had been the sounder. Now, when he should have insisted on his point of view, Drake yielded to the older man. Had he lost his confidence as a result of his retreat at Grand Canary? Had the war council lost its faith in him? Did family feeling at the last assert itself? How could he quarrel with a kinsman desperately sick? Drake yielded and the enterprise was doomed. There was a delay of three days in Guadeloupe, then of another day in the Virgin Islands. At Virgin Gorda, in the hope of a surprise, he sailed through a channel that had never been used before and that is known today as Drake’s Channel.
During that last day’s sail John Hawkins died. It has been suggested that his illness was aggravated by his disagreement with his cousin. Certainly during his last hours he was in a bitter mood. ‘Sir John Hawkins on his deathbed,’ so ran the message that eventually reached Elizabeth, ‘willed me to use the best means I could to acquaint Your Highness with his loyal service and good meaning toward Your Majesty, even to his last breathing. And forasmuch through the perverse and cross-dealings of some in that journey who, preferring their own fancy before his skill would never yield but rather overrule him, whereby he was so discouraged and as himself then said, his heart even broken that he saw no other but danger of ruin likely to ensue of the whole voyage, wherein in some sort he had been a persuader of Your Majesty to hazard as well some of your good ships as also a great quantity of treasure; in regard of the good opinion he thought to be held of his sufficiency, judgment and experience in such action willing to make Your Majesty the best amends his poor ability would then stretch into, in a codicil as a piece of his last will and testament, did bequeath to Your Highness £2,000 if Your Majesty will take it.’
In the view of the bitterness, injustice and self-pity of this message, it is possible to acquit Drake of the strictures laid upon him by Hawkins after the action in Vera Cruz.
The death of Hawkins inevitably dispirited the crews. Drake, however, went into action with restored self-confidence, knowing that he was in sole command; but he was soon to realize that the capture of his ship at Dominica was not the only piece of bad luck to intercept him. Before the five frigates had brought the news of his exact destination, a fast ship from Grand Canary had warned the governor of Puerto Rico that Drake was on his way to the West Indies. Philip in the spring had told the governor that Drake was reported to be preparing an expedition, but the governor had not considered that Puerto Rico was a likely object of it, and had taken no particular precautions. If Drake had not visited Grand Canary, the slow ships would not have encountered the fast Spanish frigates, nor would an avizo have brought news of his presence in the Atlantic; he would have found San Juan unprepared. But now he found the approaches to the city guarded by guns that had been dismounted from the frigates and sited advantageously along the cliffs. As Drake was dining in his flagship on the eve of attack, a battery opened fire on him and cannonball crashed into his cabin, killing two of his three chief officers. In that disastrous moment he recognized that the chances of a surprise attack had disappeared.
The tourists who today pour into San Juan by ship and plane would find it difficult to reconstruct the terrain of the action that Drake launched during the next two days, but the walls of the fort of El Morro, with the waves dashing against them, look as formidable now as they did to Drake three and a half centuries ago. San Juan has spread and its lagoon has been enlarged. In Drake’s day it was clustered on a bulge of ground, linked to the mainland by a narrow neck. He planned to take his fleet into the harbour and land his men under the covering fire
of his guns. But the entrance was very narrow, guarded partially by the anchored frigates. He decided to burn them out; he would have been wiser to cut them out. He made the attack by night, and though eventually he managed to set the biggest of the ships alight, the success was to his disadvantage. The flames lit the scene so clearly that the guns and the muskets of the forts had an excellent target. The English were beaten off with heavy losses.
Next day he made a second attempt, this time by getting to windward of the island and sailing past the forts through the channel, but the governor had anticipated his plan, and the narrow entrance was blocked by sunken ships. Drake was too experienced a sailor not to recognize that his chance had gone. He told his officers not to be despondent. ‘I will bring you,’ he said, ‘to twenty places far more wealthy and easier to be gotten.’ After all, had not his first plan been an attack on Panama? Once again a triumphant close would settle the account of the disappointments along the way. He was thinking himself back twenty years. He had not realized the extent to which Philip had learned his lessons, how the harbours had been fortified, and how the system of avisos guarded those towns against surprise. He did not realize with how much greater speed he would have to strike if he was to achieve success. He did not recognize how much he had lost the capacity for speed in twenty years.
The Drake of thirty would have been horrified by the course followed by the Drake of fifty during the next six weeks. He sailed southward across the Caribbean to where he could pick up the trade wind, but instead of making with crowded sails for Nombre de Dios he made for Rio de la Hacha. He met no opposition but he found a wily governor. The inhabitants had fled to the woods, burying their valuables. Drake demanded a ransom. Negotiations were delayed. The governor played for time; the longer he could keep Drake at anchor the longer would be the time at the disposal of his colleagues along the coast. Finally, when his warnings had been acknowledged, he told Drake that he was at liberty to burn the town. Drake did so, and little good it did him.
