The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  The news that he brought to his squadron commander, Sir Francis Drake, that humid summer afternoon could hardly have been more ill-timed. The fleet had returned only seven days previously from the abortive attempt to destroy the Armada as it lay at anchor in Corunna. Even on that eighteen-day run, many crewmen had succumbed to dysentery and ship’s fever, and only with great difficulty had new men been found or pressed to replace those discharged from the fleet; “the men may not well be spared, being a great number and many from home already with Sir Francis Drake.” Repairs to the sails and rigging of the storm-battered ships had been carried out but, as usual, there had been delays with the victuals, and even supplies of fresh water were a problem in Plymouth. The sources within the town were often inadequate or foul and mariners were “many and often times driven by necessity to go a mile or more from the town and their ships to fetch fresh water.” Fresh supplies were still being loaded aboard some of the ships when the news of the sighting of the Armada was received—low water at Plymouth, with the flood tide just beginning to run. It was impossible to leave harbour against the tide and the south-west wind, and for several more hours Drake and Howard could do little but watch and wait.

  The legend of Drake’s game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe may well be apocryphal—the first reference to it did not come until thirty-six years after the event—though the remark attributed to him, “We have time enough to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too,” fits the “brag countenance” he liked to display. There was little further he could do aboard his ship until the tide began to turn around nine o’clock that night and, whether playing bowls or not, he would certainly have been on the Hoe at some time that afternoon. It was a natural lookout point above the town, from where he could scent the breeze for any change in the wind direction and gaze out past the green slopes of Mount Edgecumbe and St. Michael’s Island, across the wind-ruffled waters of the Sound, flecked with the sails of fishermen returning with the day’s catch. Their mean cottages huddled around the shores, “walls of earth, low thatched roofs, few partitions, no planchings or glass windows and scarcely any chimneys other than a hole in the wall to let out the smoke.” 5

  The route back from the Hoe led past the decaying thirteenth-century Castle Quadrate and through the Barbican, a warren of cavernous cobbled streets, deeply shaded even at the height of the day, and lined with tall stone houses, their oak casements pierced by diamond-paned leaded windows. It would be surprising if Drake had not made the time to say his farewells to his wife Elizabeth, waiting at his town house in Looe Street. Seamen’s wives grew used to such partings, the long absences that followed and the ever-present fear that their husbands might not return, but those emotions would have been multiplied tenfold by the thought of what awaited Drake this time when he put to sea. Perhaps they also spent a few moments in contemplation and prayer together in the walled garden, seated on the stone bench in the shade of a fig tree, the air heavy with the scent of roses, lavender and thyme, and drowsy with the buzzing of bees. It would be some time before he or his men would again have the luxury of such moments of repose.

  In late afternoon or early evening, as the shadows lengthened over the water, Drake walked down through the maze of streets and alleys on the steep hillside above Sutton Harbour, avoiding the piles of horse dung and rubbish. The morning rain had swept some of the filth from the cobbles, washing it into the harbour where the tides would scour it clean, but refuse was piled high in some of the meaner courts and side alleys. Groups of ragged children picked over it like the mudlarks waiting on the shore for the tide to turn and expose a new harvest of flotsam from the sea. The chandlers, roperies and sail-lofts, and the warehouses of New Street, were all closing for the night, the last loads being hauled out on the beams and pulleys projecting overhead and lowered to the waiting carts in the street. The dockside taverns and whorehouses were almost deserted, for the vast majority of men of all ages were already aboard ship or had made themselves scarce lest they too be pressed to serve with the fleet, but a few boats still plied between the quays, slip-ways and gently sloping beaches, and the fleet anchored offshore.

  Whenever ships were to sail, women and old people gathered in groups around the quayside. This time the talk would not have been the customary speculation about the plunder that their men might bring back but sombre discussion about the prospect of invasion and the likely fate of their sons, brothers and husbands. Drake’s appearance on the quayside invariably caused a great stir. Even the children playing in the dust, indifferent to the concerns of their elders, would gaze open-mouthed as this most famous of Englishmen strode by. Many people would call out to him, bless him and jostle to touch his sleeve or scan his face, searching for some sign of hope, some clue to England’s fate. Drake undoubtedly gave an outward show of confidence, and it would not have been assumed; an inner certainty of the rightness of his cause and the blessing of his God was as central to Drake’s being as it was to Philip of Spain; the Protestant and Catholic champions were both driven by a faith that bordered upon fanaticism.

  The smaller armed merchantmen and some of the Queen’s great ships were clustered in the Cattewater, while the remainder rode at anchor in the rougher waters of the Sound. Drake was rowed out to his ship, the Revenge, the finest galleon in the fleet, anchored in the lee of St. Nicholas’ Island. She was over a hundred feet long at the keel, but the bowsprit and the great wooden beak of her prow made her look much longer. Her forecastle, rails and poop deck were decorated in chevrons of green and white but the paintwork was faded and weather-stained. The jet-black hull had a dull gleam, for it was freshly tarred, and the familiar smell of pitch was strong in the air as Drake climbed aboard. He moved stiffly, his limp a permanent reminder of the injuries he had suffered at Spanish hands. The ship stood ready when the order was given; all the barrels of provisions that there had been time to load—“the haste of my Lord Admiral was such . . . that several of his ships had not leisure to receive the full of their last proportions [supplies]”—had already been stowed and secured and the gun tackles tautened and belayed.

  Like the other commanders, Drake at once began his last inspection of his ship before sailing into battle. He stood for a moment looking over his domain, then began pacing the upper deck, the planking beneath his feet fresh-scoured with sharp sand and still warm from the last rays of the setting sun. Fore and aft the bilge pumps were already at work, their cylinders formed from single hollowed-out elm or alder trees, still covered with bark to prevent the wood from drying out and cracking or splitting. The pumps were caulked with pitch, and iron plungers flanged with leather washers rose and fell inside them, sending spurts of filthy bilgewater spewing out of the sides.

  Groups of crewmen stood by the fore- and mainmasts, ready to spring aloft at his command. His keen eye ranged over the masts, banded every couple of yards with iron hoops, the rigging and the sails neatly furled at the yards, and scanned the pennant at the mast tip for the first stirrings of a land breeze that would help him out of harbour, but the wind was still from the south-west, carrying the salt tang of the open sea. If he saw anything out of place, a word from Drake would send crewmen scrambling to rectify the fault. Some of the men aboard were veterans of many voyages with him and they must have greeted him with a look that hinted at shared knowledge and experiences, and confidence in the outcome of the battle that they faced. An empty hogshead was chained to the rails on either side of the ship towards the forecastle “for the soldiers and mariners to piss into, that they may always be full of urine to quench fire with, and two or three pieces of old sail, ready to wet in the piss.” The hogsheads were placed there on all the Queen’s ships, in accordance with orders laid down years before, and none had apparently ever questioned why urine should prove any more effective in fighting fires than the limitless seawater available by dangling a bucket on the end of a rope over the side.

  Guncrews tended the lighter weapons mounted on the upper deck, and others stood ready as Drake descended the
companionway into the darkness of the gundecks where the great bronze and iron cannons and culverins were housed, closer to the waterline where their weight would not unbalance the ship. The master gunner, William Thomas, a veteran of many voyages with Drake, presided over the main gundeck with his apprentice, Russke. It was a single, low-ceilinged space, running almost from stem to stern. Gnarled oak beams close overhead spanned its full width, the marks of the shipwrights’ adzes and axes still clearly visible in the surface of the wood, and the cavernous space was interrupted only by the great trunks of the masts rising like majestic trees in some dark forest clearing. Every timber and beam was blackened by spent powder and gunsmoke, and a faint brimstone smell still hung in the air, even though it was many weeks since the great guns had last been fired in anger. The open hatches and gunports spilled small pools of light into the gloom; the only other illumination came from a single lantern at either end of the deck.6

  The great guns were decorated with coats of arms in bas relief and lifting handles in the shape of dolphins, wolves and lions, and their polished barrels shone dimly in the faint light. The gun-carriages that bore them were equally massive, stepped like ziggurats, with wheels cut from solid rounds of a tree trunk. The oak planking around them was worn and grooved where the guns had been run in and out, over and over again. Pyramids of great shot and piles of cloth and “paper royal” cartridges—stout paper cylinders each containing a measured charge of black powder—had been stacked in the lockers by the guns, with lengths of unlit match-cord coiled alongside them. Long-handled ramrods, powder scoops and “sponges”—lambskins to swab out the gun-barrels between shots—stood at the side of each gunport, held in place by leather straps. A failure to sponge the cannon properly before reloading could prove fatal; hot powder residue could ignite the fresh charge prematurely and kill the guncrew. Powder and shot were not brought to the guns until action was imminent—powder could rapidly become damp and unusable, and shot breaking loose from the lockers in heavy weather was almost as much of a menace to the guncrews as that fired from enemy ships—but none knew what awaited them as they cleared the Sound that evening and the crew was prepared for any eventuality. The main shot and powder stores were sited below the waterline on the ballast at the bow and stern, as safe as they could be made from enemy fire. The black powder contained there was so volatile that it could be detonated by a spark of static electricity, and artificial light was permitted in the stores only “upon special occasions”—emergencies— and then only “a candle . . . fixed in a close-glazed lanthorn.” Cartridges were carried from the stores inside wooden cases “to avoid the peril of being fired by the way.”

  The light grew progressively more dim and the air more foul as Drake descended into the stifling confines of the lower deck. The cramped quarters of the ship’s surgeon, one of only a handful in the fleet, contained a wooden table fitted with leather restraining straps, on which casualties would be laid. The surgeon’s chest stood ready for use, filled with the savage tools of his trade: “incision knives, dismembering knives, razors, head-saws, cauterising irons, various types of forceps, probes and spatulas designed for drawing out splinters and shot,” all wrapped in oily rags to protect them from rust. The “plaster box” next to it contained less extreme remedies: “Stitching quill and needles, splints, sponges and clouts [cloths], along with cupping glasses, blood porringers . . . and a range of plasters.”

  The ship was ballasted with gravel, laid on the seeling—the thick planking above the bilges in the bottom of the hull. Well compacted, the gravel was not overprone to shifting in heavy seas, but it was a harbour for filth and disease and had to be “rummaged”—removed and cleaned or replaced—every few weeks, if the exigencies of the service permitted such a luxury. Although this had been done while in Plymouth and the ship thoroughly cleaned and sluiced, the holds still reeked with the sour odour of bilgewater. The sail stores, rope and cable lockers, timbers and tools of the ship’s carpenters, the caulkers’ pitch, tallow and tow, and the hides, wooden plugs and lead sheets used by the divers and carpenters to repair shot-holes in the hull were stored in the holds or wherever space allowed. Spare masts and yards were usually lashed to the outside of the hull.

  The huge water butts stood on the gravel in the bilges, adding their considerable weight to the ballast. Nearby were the provision stores and the galley fires on cast-iron hearths, from which smoke rose through a crude wooden chimney to the upper deck. The galley fires were sited on the ballast because it was the only fire-proof element in the ship, but the heat hastened the decay of the provisions stored nearby. Scraps of rotting food, bilgewater, the refuse of the boat and even human ordure also contaminated the ballast. Seamen usually defecated over the rails of the forecastle—the flukes of the anchors slung against the hull were often fouled as a result—but men racked with dysentery, scurvy or ship’s fever inevitably fouled their quarters and the resultant waste, sluiced from the decks with buckets of seawater, found its way into the gravel in the bilges. Enlightened ship’s surgeons argued that “close-stools” (portable commodes) should be provided so that a seaman suffering from dysentery might “find comfort in his most pitiful distress . . . a poor weak man in his extremities should not continually go to the shrouds or beak head to ease himself, nor be noisome to his fellows”—but they were deemed inessential and the ship’s ballast continued to be fouled. The galley and food stores and the source of disease and infection were thus in the closest possible proximity to each other. On such wooden ships, fire was also a constant fear. The galley fires were extinguished at sundown and men were detailed to search the ship at night to make sure that no candles were in use. All the candles belowdecks were housed in lanterns glazed with wafer-thin horn and were allowed only for the most essential purposes, and the smoking of pipes was forbidden anywhere but on the upper deck.7

  The men’s quarters were spartan, cramped and minimally furnished. Those who had sailed to the New World had seen the natives of the Caribbean using hammocks, and John Hawkins had pioneered their use in English ships in 1586, but though the fashion had spread rapidly, there were still relatively few men striving “for a place to hang up their netting for to lie in.” The majority of their crewmates still slept on the bare boards of the deck, with only a single coarse and frequently lice-infested blanket “of dogswain” (rough cloth), and “a good round log” or a folded jerkin for a pillow. Even the most well-equipped men had few clothes and fewer possessions aboard and the pressed men often had nothing but the clothes they stood up in. The experienced men had already staked out their portion of deck, leaving the lower ranks of the shipboard hierarchy—the pressed men and cabin-boys— with the least favoured areas, hard up against the bows where the pounding of the waves was loudest and where, in even the most well-found ship, water always leaked from around the base of the bowsprit as it flexed and twisted, rising from and burying itself in the swell.

  Drake’s own cabin and quarters beneath the poop deck at the stern were much more comfortably furnished, but far from large. In such a tight and narrow ship, no more than thirty-eight feet at its greatest breadth, there was little space to spare even for the Vice-Admiral of the Fleet. On his circumnavigation and his voyages to the New World, Drake had often dined in style with two or three musicians to serenade him as he ate. There would be no such luxuries on this voyage and precious few moments of repose. His charts and navigational instruments were stowed away. He had little need of them in the Channel waters, which were as familiar to him as the streets of Plymouth. Before sailing, as was his routine practice, he called his men together around the mainmast and led them in prayers for the safety of their loved ones and for victory in the battles to come, kneeling on a cushion at a table, while his crew chanted the responses. Then each man went to his post, alone with his thoughts as they prepared to make sail, the warm, familiar sounds and smells of the dockside drifting to them over the water.8

  Just before nightfall, with the wind easing and the tide now
on the ebb, a signal gun was fired and orders were shouted, the noise rolling over the water and echoing through the streets of the town. The royal galleons and the largest and best-armed of the other great ships weighed anchor, the capstans creaking and the decks resounding to the rhythmic tread of men straining at the bars. As the great cables wound around the capstans, seawater was squeezed from them like wrung washing and rivulets snaked across the deck, spilling into the scuppers. As each huge iron anchor broke surface, rust-stained, wet and glistening, and trailing mud and weed, it was caught and swung aboard one of the ship’s boats, instead of being hauled up and lashed against the hull. The men bent to the oars and began warping their ships out of Cattewater and down Plymouth Sound, using the lee of Mount Edgecumbe to shield them as much as possible from the south-westerly wind. It was a slow, laborious process. Again and again a longboat would row out ahead of the Revenge, carrying the anchor and fathoms of sodden, weed-encrusted cable. Six inches in diameter, the cables weighed between one and two tons when dry, and their weight doubled when wet. When all the cable had been paid out behind the boat, the anchor was pitched overboard and the galleon winched up to it by the sweat of the crewmen manning the capstans. As one cable was hauled in, a second ship’s boat was already rowing ahead with another.