A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  He proceeded to Santa Marta. The story was repeated. There was no resistance, there were no inhabitants to plunder. He went on to Nombre de Dios, to discover that it was no longer a large port, that it had been superseded by Porto Bello, twenty miles away, which had a better climate. He was tempted to move westward to this new city, but he was back to his old hunting ground. Surely it would be wiser to strike on a course that was familiar. The old mule trail still led into the jungle, but there was the alternative of the Chagres River, which was partially navigable. A council of war was summoned, and it was decided to attempt the mule train.

  A Captain Baskerville, with 750 picked men and a Captain Maynarde as his second-in-command, was assigned the task. Within five days they were back, with depleted forces, the men half-starved, exhausted, their shoes worn through, their spirit broken. The path was half-covered now by jungle; there were no friendly Cimaroons; on the high ridge from which Drake had looked on to the Pacific a stockade had been constructed. There was no way round it through the jungle. Baskerville made three assaults but they were beaten off. During the march thither it rained continuously; the powder was ruined. Baskerville was convinced that this stockade was the first one of a series. He turned his back on Panama. ‘I am persuaded,’ Maynarde wrote, ‘that never army great or small undertook a march through to unknown places so weakly provided and with so small means to help themselves, unless it might be some few going covertly to do some sudden exploit before it was thought of by the enemy and so return un-spied.’

  Why, one wonders, did not Drake make contact with the Cimaroons before he ordered the march? They had been his friends. They could not have forgotten him. They must have been somewhere. They could have given him the information that he needed. They could have lent him guides. He had gone out of his course to attack Grand Canary. He had wasted nineteen days at Rio de la Hacha and Santa Marta, yet at Nombre de Dios he acted without forethought. Had he forgotten how carefully he had planned that earlier raid, how much he had depended then upon the Cimaroons? Yet even with their help, with all that planning, it was only at the third attempt he had succeeded.

  His heart was heavy. How was he to face Elizabeth? She had invested seventy thousand pounds in the venture, and he was bringing her back a consignment of pearls worth a few paltry hundreds. But he did not despair. From prisoners and escaped slaves he had learned what he had indeed already suspected, that news of his presence was known throughout the Caribbean; every Spanish port was manned and ready. Drake spread his maps and books upon his cabin table. He must find new worlds to conquer. What of that great city they spoke of in Honduras, and the streets by the Lake of Nicaragua that were paved with gold? He addressed his officers with such confidence that they recovered their lost faith. Which of the two would they prefer, Honduras or Nicaragua? Baskerville leaped to his feet. ‘Both,’ he cried. ‘One after the other. And all too little to content us if we took them.’

  Drake burned Nombre de Dios, sank a number of small frigates, and confiscated a little gold and some twenty bars of silver. He captured on his way north one of Philip’s avisos, and learned from it that the towns by the Lake of Nicaragua were impoverished groups of shacks and that the approach to them was strewn with reefs. The wind turned against him and he ran short of food. The Bay of Nicaragua was the unhealthiest area along the coast. The men fell sick; a number of them died, including two senior officers. Drake was sick with dysentery. The wind still blew against him and he decided to return to Porto Bello. He was now so weak that he could not leave his cabin. Maynarde grumbled at him for having brought him out of England on false pretences. Drake shook his head. ‘I know no more of the Indies than you do. I never thought a place could be so changed, as it were, from a delicious and pleasant arbour into a vast and desert wilderness.’

  Never had he encountered such vexatious winds. He was astonished that on this long voyage he had not seen a single ship worth chasing. But sick and enfeebled though he was, his courage did not abate. ‘God hath many things in store for us, and I know many means to do Her Majesty good service and to make us rich. For we must have gold before we return to England.’

  But Drake was never again to see the steeples of the churches that he had emptied on that far August morning; his fever mounted and he died as his flagship came within sight of Porto Bello. Baskerville took command, buried the mighty admiral in Nombre de Dios, then returned to Porto Bello. He burned every house of it, but found no treasure to take home. The greatest expedition that England had ever launched had failed. The fleet returned, through the Florida Channel, fighting the Spaniards as they went, more than holding their own.

  Philip said, when the tidings of Drake’s death reached him, ‘This should cure my sickness,’ but his sickness lay beyond the limited knowledge of his day. For a number of years he had been tormented by gout, and now his whole body was afflicted by decay. In contrast to his father, who had been a glutton, he had lived abstemiously in terms of food and drink, but his death was to be a greater torture than any that had been executed by the Holy Office. His last journey, when he was carried in a litter to the Escurial, took seven days because the least jolt caused him the acutest agony. He had sores that would not heal, sores that spread. He could not bear to be touched. His sheets could not be moved. A man exquisitely fastidious in his comportment, he was exposed to the most humiliating revenges of our mortal nature. So that his physical functions could continue, an aperture was cut beneath him in his bed. The stench of the room was nauseating. To the nurses and priests attending him, the process of decomposition appeared to have begun already. But he never complained. His eyes shone; a slot that may still be seen was opened in the wall so that he could watch the service of the Mass. He was existing on a level of the highest spiritual exultation. To his son and heir he said, ‘I should have wished to spare you this trial, but I want you to see how the monarchies of the earth end. . . . You are young as I too have been. My day draws to a close; the time of yours God alone can see, but it must end like mine.’

  His agony in the Escurial lasted for forty-seven days. No man has met the approach of death more nobly.

  4 The Brethren of the Coast

  Elizabeth survived Philip by five years; the stage was then occupied by lesser mortals. James I, ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’, was a shambles of a man and Philip III was agreeably indolent. Each realized that war between them was wasteful and unrewarding, and James readily guaranteed that his ships would not trade in the New World. Within a few weeks of his accession, Raleigh was in the Tower.

  James’ treatment of Raleigh provides the best example of the changed atmosphere at the English court. James held Raleigh responsible for the execution of Essex, whom he had thought of as a partisan. Raleigh had been the favourite of the Queen, who had ordered the execution of his mother. Raleigh was the foe of Spain. The trial on a flimsy charge of treason was conducted shamefully and brutally, and Raleigh was condemned to death. The sentence was not, however, carried out, and Raleigh was left in prison.

  He was there for thirteen years, but even in prison he was a source of irritation to the King. Henry, the Prince of Wales, a young man of charm and character, who, had he lived, might well have changed the road of history, became his friend. Foreign guests paid calls on Raleigh. The success of Raleigh’s History of the World nettled James’ pride, and he tried to get it suppressed on the grounds that it did not pay sufficient respect to the sanctity of monarchy, but too many copies were in circulation for the fiat to have much effect. The royal vanity was hurt. James was constantly being made to feel that the most significant man in England was not on the throne but in the Tower. He itched to be rid of Raleigh.

  He was also desperately anxious for an alliance with Spain. He hoped for a marriage between his son Charles and one of Philip III’s daughters. He was abjectly under the influence of the Spanish ambassador, the Count of Goldimar. He was ready to do anything to placate Spain. Spain hated Raleigh, and all the time Raleigh, from the Tower,
was pleading for permission to sail once again in search of that golden city which still haunted his imagination. Raleigh was ageing fast; he had had a stroke, he shivered with ague, he limped from the wound he had received at Cádiz. Yet during his lonely pacings of the battlements, he yearned that ‘something ere the end, some work of noble note, might yet be done’. Finally James yielded. He did not pardon Raleigh. Raleigh was still ‘a man dead in law’. He was only released so that he could make another attempt upon the gold mines of Guiana. The commission which empowered him to search heathen territories, but forbade him to trespass on the possessions of the Spanish King, did not contain the words ‘trusty and well-beloved’. Raleigh was warned that if he committed any acts of piracy he would be beheaded on his return.

  James was a devious creature; his motives were mixed. He was avaricious and would have welcomed gold, yet he hoped for Raleigh’s failure and he did his best to ensure that failure by informing Goldimar in detail of his subject’s plans. It was impossible to tell at that time where the Spanish possessions began and ended, and indeed two and a half centuries later the Venezuelan boundary line was still in dispute, but it was certain that the Spanish, now that they had been put on their guard, would offer opposition, James had, in fact, hedged his bet. If Raleigh succeeded, his coffers would be full. If Raleigh failed, he would be quit of a tiresome rivalry. He could not lose. Raleigh, no doubt, suspected this, but he was prepared to run the risk; he knew that if he returned with his holds full James would overlook a little letting of Spanish blood.

  Raleigh took a year assembling a fleet of seven ships of war and three pinnaces, manned by ninety gentlemen adventurers and a sorry assemblage of 318 cut-throats. He sailed from Plymouth in May 1617. His own ship was ironically called Destiny. Luck was consistently against him. Gales drove him back, first into Falmouth, then as far north as Cork. Sickness broke out among his crew. The best summer days were lost and he did not reach the Canaries until early in September. Here the Spanish governor set upon the men whom he had sent ashore to search for supplies and murdered fifteen of them. On the way westward fever struck his fleet. On Destiny alone, forty-two men died and Raleigh himself was prostrate for a month. When at last they reached Trinidad on New Year’s Eve, he was too sick to join the landing party. He instructed its leader to avoid hostile encounters with the Spaniards and he himself remained aboard. He read, met his old Indian friends, repelled a few feeble Spanish attacks and studied local plants and flowers. While he was thus peacefully employed, the news reached him that the alerted Spaniards had harassed his party, manned a tiny settlement from which they had delivered an attack, and that in the ensuing action his own son had lost his life. This was, he knew, the end.

  He could, had he wanted, have taken his ships and men to France, but he preferred to fulfil his promises to the friends who had stood surety for him. He sailed back to Plymouth, to arrest and to a re-trial on the original grounds of treason. A few weeks later, James I handed his head to Goldimar on a charger, as a proof of his loyal intentions and good faith.

  Philip accepted the gift complacently, as he had accepted his father’s legacy – in a way that his father had foreseen. Philip II had created a system that his son could not continue; Philip II had the soul of a bureaucrat, his son had not. It was inevitable that his son should delegate that vast body of paper work to an adviser, to a series of advisers. The fate of Philip II’s system depended on the quality of those advisers, and the system itself was built upon a false economy.

  With the Silver Fleets arriving regularly twice a year, with the cities of the New World growing in wealth and stature, it was impossible for the Spaniards to recognize that their country was impoverished. At Madrid, in terms of the arts and sciences, Spain’s golden century was in flower. Cervantes was writing Don Quixote’, the plays of Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirso de Molina, Montalban, Mouto were producing in profusion the plots that were to embellish the French stage a century later. Quevedo was publishing his satires. Philip III himself was a littérateur of considerable merit. He and his successor were the patrons of Velazquez, Zurbaran, Murillo and Rebena; they adorned the Escurial with the pictures of Titian and Tintoretto. They bought the pictures of Charles I of England which the commonwealth put upon the market. They added to the library of the Escurial the spoils of the Moroccan Emperor. They built the palace of Buen Retevo. The life of the court under Philip III was so formal that the French ambassador repbrted jocularly that the King had been killed by the heat of a brazier because the appropriate official was not at hand to move it; yet the life of the court was no less sumptuous for being formal. Ladies of gentle birth walked masked in the streets. There was an ostentatious parade of carriages. The lure of wealth had drawn a large section of the population across the water, and there was no incentive to ambition. The alcabala - the tax on every sale – was raised under Philip III from 10 per cent, to 14 per cent., and in addition, a further tax was levied, through a series of custom-houses, on goods in transit. The need for quickly realizable taxation led to the burdening of transactions in food and manufactures, which strangled both agriculture and industry. It is an axiom of colonial administration that the colonies should supply raw materials and that the mother country should supply manufactured goods in return, but Spain did not produce manufactured goods. She had to obtain them from abroad. She insisted that no ships other than Spanish should deal with the Spanish colonies. The centralization of this commerce in Seville enormously increased the cost of goods to the colonists; it is not surprising that the colonists welcomed the Dutch, British and French privateers who could supply them not only with manufactured goods but also slaves at a much smaller cost. Gold and silver flowed continuously across the Atlantic, but very little of it reached the Spanish treasury.

  During the sixteenth century the population of Spain was reduced by half, by wars and emigration. In Philip III’s reign it was further reduced by the expulsion of the remaining Moriscos from Andalusia. There were political reasons for this step. The Moriscos” sympathies lay across the Mediterranean; but none the less their removal was a liability. They were mainly employed in agriculture, since other professions were barred to them. Andalusia is one of the most fertile territories in the country, and Spain could not afford the loss of so many peasants.

  Step by step during the seventeenth century Spain’s power diminished. She could no longer retain her hold on her possessions. Philip III made a truce with the Dutch Protestants; his son recognized their independence. In 1643 at the battle of Rocroi, the dreaded Spanish infantry was routed by the French; the Spanish square, the solid phalanx of pikemen, had been considered invincible, but Conde proved that once it was broken it was helpless. Spain’s prestige, however, still stood high. It was as hard for Europe as for Spain to recognize that bullion was not necessarily wealth. Madrid basked in a florid luxuriance. The Spanish heart was rigid still with pride, even though it had lost faith in pretensions which it could not enforce. Spain sustained her self-importance with a sulky opulence and with contempt for labour; across the water, the hardier northerner took what she could not hold.

  Spain’s needs in the Caribbean were now confined. She needed fortified bastions for her treasure fleets, but she had no use for the smaller islands. She considered them as hers, but she could not enforce her claim to them. She could not be bothered to occupy the western section of Hispaniola. It was mainly populated now by wild horses and the descendants of the bloodhounds that had been imported to chase the resistant Indians.

  Puerto Rico also was neglected. It had been discovered on Columbus’ second voyage, and when Ponce de Leon sailed into San Juan Harbour he exclaimed, ‘Quepuerto rico’ (‘What a rich port’), and the name stuck.

  Juan Ponce de Leon was a native of Santervas de Campos in Leon. He served for fifteen years as a shield bearer to a Knight Commander in the Moorish Wars, and he fought so well against the Indians that Ovando made him a captain and sent him to prospect the area round San Juan, where he was subse
quently installed as the island’s first governor. His name is remembered for his discovery of Florida, for his vain quest for the fountain of eternal youth, and also because of his ruthless gallantry in battle. With a hundred men he routed a force of five or six thousand Indians. His crossbowmen were particularly effective from behind an entrenched camp. The Spaniards, who were wounded, exhausted and hungry, wanted to attack the Indians and get it over, but Ponce would not let them. He told his best archers to wait till the chief who wore a disc of gold round his neck came within range. As soon as he did, he was shot. The Indians at once retreated, and armed resistance was at an end.

  The Indians were distributed among the conquerors. But Ponce de Leon never succeeded in subduing the Caribs, and there were not enough troops available to pacify Puerto Rico. The Spaniards quarrelled among themselves. The islanders took to the hills; the Caribs constantly raided the southern and eastern sections of the island. Smallpox struck the island; there was a plague of ants. The news of Cortés’ achievements in Mexico attracted the adventurous. The death penalty was imposed on the Spaniards who tried to leave the island, but there was no adequate authority to implement the order. The island became a jungle. There were a hundred or so stone houses in San Juan, but in 1536, crown officers were writing that no ship from the Peninsula had entered its port for two years. Negroes and Indians escaped into the hills, from which they conducted raids upon their former masters, who abandoned the search for gold and developed agriculture in a desultory fashion. The first settlement at San Germán disintegrated and disappeared. Probably San Juan would have, too, if the French corsairs had known that it was undefended. When at last desultory attacks from English and French privateers forced Spain to defend it, the King made an assignment on the royal treasury of Mexico for nearly half a million pesos. This levy – a situados –continued till the Mexican revolution. Eventually, in 1600, San Juan became a penal settlement, a presidio with four hundred inhabitants, black, white and mongrel. Spain neglected Puerto Rico, but she had even less use for the Lesser Antilles, the group of islands that curved, green and mountainous and fertile, from the tip of Florida to South America. They held no gold or silver, and the Caribs were fierce and hostile. No race, indeed, could have been more different from the gentle Arawaks. Most of our knowledge of it comes to us from Père Labat, the French priest who spent a dozen years in the islands at the end of the seventeenth century. The Caribs, according to him, were tall and brown, with shining, long black hair which they dressed carefully every day and only cut short when they were in mourning. Eight days after its birth, a child’s ears, lower lip and the cartilage between the nostrils were pierced, strings passed through them and pendants attached. The Arawaks flattened the heads of their children with boards, but it was the Carib mother who was responsible for this operation. Seated during the day, she would put one of the child’s legs on one of her thighs with its head on the other thigh. When the child was asleep she would open her right hand and put it on the child’s forehead. Leaning her left elbow on it, she would recline her head against it. She would often sleep this way.