A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  No captain had ever sailed the seven seas in quite the style that Drake affected. He regarded himself as more of an ambassador than a mariner. In his cabin he was served on silver plate. His personal entourage included a drummer and a trumpeter to herald his arrival and a group of musicians to play to him at mealtimes.

  Thomas Doughty was all that a part of Drake aspired to be and was not – highly educated, poised, politically astute, able to converse easily with philosophers and princes. He had served in the Irish wars and was an intimate of Sir Christopher Hatton and others close to the queen. This cultivated gentleman was, without doubt, a young man on his way to the top. He was also an intriguer. He thrilled to be party to secrets and enjoyed the power that clandestine knowledge gave him over the lives of others. He had embarked on this enterprise with one trump card up his sleeve: he was the secret agent of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s first minister. Burghley, a cautious and astute statesman, had been opposed to the venture from the start and had officially been kept in the dark as to its true objectives. He envisaged the notorious Drake stirring up all manner of diplomatic hornets’ nests. He, therefore, needed someone on the expedition to keep him privately informed of all that happened. Thomas Doughty was that person and he relished the power he believed that it gave him over Drake.

  Doughty had been made captain of the Mary and the ship soon became the fleet’s focus of discontent. As incidents, insults and rumours increased Drake did nothing but when Doughty and his cronies beat up John Brewer, whom Drake had sent to the Mary with a message, the admiral could no longer ignore the challenge to his authority. He stripped Doughty of his command and had him conveyed aboard the little store ship, Swan. This action may have postponed the inevitable showdown; it did not prevent it.

  The ships reached Brazil, revictualled and turned south. The weather grew colder. The biting pampero shrieked down from the Andes, churning up violent storms and scattering the fleet. Men fell ill with dysentery and fever. The crews grew fearful. Drake had still not told them where they were headed. It was obvious now, that this was no trip to Alexandria, nor even a raid upon the Spanish Main and that their leader was taking them into more dangerous and more distant waters. Doughty and his friends played on these anxieties. Untold horrors lay ahead and the prospects for safe return were remote if Drake was not challenged, they urged. Drake could see the whole enterprise falling apart if he did not act. He tried to defuse the situation by making Doughty an object of ridicule. He had him tied to the Pelican’s mainmast for a couple of days where he was the butt of jeers and crude jokes. All this achieved was the heightening of personal rivalry. The proud gentleman could not, now, back down. It was Drake or Doughty.

  And so they came to doleful St Julian’s Bay. The desolate spot which had decided the fate of Magellan’s expedition was to perform the same service for Drake’s. The admiral convened a drumhead court on the beach. What followed was not a trial in which the interests of justice were served. Drake merely used legal forms for his own ends. He had evidence brought of all the prisoner’s misdemeanours, then harangued the ‘jury’ into demanding Doughty’s death. The unfortunate gentleman challenged the admiral’s authority to impose a capital sentence. He was probably right to do so. Although Drake frequently boasted of the commission he held from the queen, he never produced it or permitted anyone else to scrutinise it. Now, he blustered away the challenge, for there could be no turning back. Death there must be if he were to regain that position of unquestioned authority which alone could force his men to go where no Englishmen, and very few men of any race, had ever been.

  The drama – one might more accurately say the ‘theatricality’ – of Doughty’s last hours strikes modern readers as bizarre, but it was the kind of show the Tudor age expected. On the morning of 2 July, the condemned man made his confession to the expedition’s chaplain. Then he and his judge knelt side by side to receive Holy Communion together on the deck of the Pelican. This was followed by a civilised dinner in the great cabin during which Drake and Doughty conversed cheerfully and the prisoner even toasted the success of the voyage. This concluded, the entire company was rowed across to a small island in the bay and formed up in a square around the block. Drake and Doughty were landed and walked for a while along the shore, deep in conversation. At last, they returned and embraced. Doughty knelt and prayed aloud for the queen, the admiral and the company. Then, turning to the executioner, he spoke his last words: ‘Strike clean and with care, for I have a short neck’. The sword flashed once. ‘Lo, this is the end of traitors!’ Drake shouted. It remained only for the body to receive a decent burial. Drake marked the island on his chart and named it ‘The Island of True Justice and Judgement’. That was too much of a mouthful for his men. They called it, ‘The Island of Blood’.

  The voyagers had to stay another six weeks in St Julian’s Bay, waiting for the worst of the winter weather to pass. Those were uncomfortable, demoralising days and Drake had to stage other dramatic demonstrations of authority in order to stamp his will on the enterprise and quench the last, smoking embers of mutiny. It was during this period that Drake renamed his ship the Golden Hind, in honour of Sir Christopher Hatton, whose coat of arms bore ‘a hind trippant or’. It was a prudent gesture, for the man he had recently executed (some would say ‘murdered’) was a member of Hatton’s household.

  The fleet, reduced to three ships, because the Swan and the Christopher had been scuttled, and the Mary broken up for parts at St Julian’s Bay, set sail on 17 August. Six days later they lay at anchor within the Straits of Magellan. They had an easy passage and emerged, on 6 September, into what Magellan had called Mar Pacifico. But for these first Englishmen the ocean failed to live up to its name. They ran straight into a north-westerly gale, which almost put an abrupt and tragic end to the voyage:

  The day being come the sight of sun and land was taken from us so that there followed as it were a palpable darkness by the space of 56 days without the sight of sun, moon or star as . . . we thus . . . continued without hope at the pleasure of God in the violent force of the wind’s intolerable working of the wrathful seas and the grisely beholding (sometimes) of the cragged rocks and fearful height, and monstrous mountains being to us a lee shore where into we were continually drawn by the winds and carried by the mountain-like billows of the sea . . . If at any time we had a little opportunity to seek some harbour for refuge to come to anchor and rest till God in mercy might . . . give us more safe sailing at the seas, such was the malice of the mountains that they seemed to agree together in one consent and join their forces together to work our overthrow and to consume us, so that every mountain sent down upon us their several intolerable winds with that horror that they made the bottom of the seas to be dry land where we anchored, sending us headlong upon the tops of mounting and swelling waves of the seas over the rocks, the sight whereof at our going in was as fearful as death.2

  On the morning of 30 September the little Marigold foundered. On the decks of the other vessels the cries of men threshing around in the icy seas were clearly heard by comrades helpless to render any assistance.

  At last there came a lull in the storm. The two ships clawed their way north-westward and found what appeared to be a safe anchorage in a cove to the north of Cape Pilar. But within hours an offshore wind beat down with such ferocity that anchor cables parted and the exhausted mariners had to put to sea once more. This time the Golden Hind and the Elizabeth were separated. The flagship was driven far to the south-east before the wind abated. Drake found himself in 57° near a cluster of islands to which he gave the name ‘Elizabethides’. In fact, he had discovered, without realising it, the southernmost point of the American continent. Later generations of sailors would know it as Cape Horn.

  It was 7 November by the time the Golden Hind regained the western end of the straits and there was no sign of her sister ship. In fact this was because the Elizabeth was by now well on her way back through the channel. Captain John Wynter and his men had had th
eir bellyful of Francis Drake’s perilous mystery tour. The sailing master probably spoke for all when he declared that ‘Mr Drake hired him for Alexandria, but if he had known that this had been the Alexandria, he would have been hanged in England rather than have come in this voyage’.3 The Elizabeth reached Ilfracombe on 2 September 1579.

  Meanwhile, Drake settled to the main purpose of his voyage: doing as much damage as possible to and extracting as much plunder as possible from the ill-protected nerve centre of Spain’s commercial empire. With one small ship and his storm-and-disease-depleted crew (the complement was now down to about eighty), this man the Spaniards called El Draco, the Dragon, spread havoc and confusion along the entire seaboard. Merchant captains at anchor and citizens about their lawful occasions on the quayside were stunned by the wholly unprecedented vision of an enemy ship coming into harbour with cannons blazing. At several ‘ports of call’ the Englishmen were able to help themselves to coin, food, ship’s supplies, trade goods and charts – all valuable to mariners far from home in strange waters. From various prisoners, whom he took a pride in treating well and entertaining royally, Drake also gathered information. The most intriguing news concerned a mouth-watering potential prize. The Nuestra Señora de la Concepcion had recently sailed from Callao, the port of Lima, headed for Panama with a major consignment of silver.

  Drake went in pursuit. Two weeks later (1 March 1579), he caught up with the galleon off Cape San Francisco, just above the line. She was, as he had already discovered, well armed. So, instead of brazening it out with her, Drake resorted to cunning. He disguised the Golden Hind as a sluggish merchantman. This was done by the simple expedient of hoisting a Spanish flag, running out several water-filled wine jars on a stern line and then hoisting full sail. It was an old pirate trick, intended to disarm an enemy by making it seem that there could not possibly be anything to fear from a craft which could make such poor speed through the water. The stratagem worked admirably. The Nuestra Señora altered course and came within hailing distance. Only at the last moment did armed men suddenly appear above the Golden Hind’s deck rail. One of her cannon exploded into life and the Nuestra Señora’s mizzen mast fell over the stern in a tangle of rigging. While the Spaniard’s deck was still a confusion of cries, shouted orders and running feet, Drake’s pinnace slipped round to her far side with a boarding party. It was all over in a few minutes without a shot fired from the Spanish ship which was coarsely nicknamed by her sailors Cacafuego (Shitfire).

  With the Spanish crew transferred aboard the Golden Hind as his ‘guests’, Drake examined his haul at leisure. As the inventory was checked off, he and his men knew that all the dangers and suffering they had endured had been worthwhile. Thirteen hundred bars of silver (26 tons) were ferried across to the English ship. There were fourteen chests of coin. In addition, a search of the cabins yielded a large quantity of plate and jewellery. None of the wide-eyed Englishmen had ever seen such treasure, worth perhaps £40,000,000 in modern value.

  The voyage was ‘made’. That fact lifted a great weight of anxiety from Drake’s mind. Until the capture of this stunning prize he was fearful about his reception in England. Enemies would be waiting. There would be accusations to be faced – murder, piracy, needless risk of ships and men. Elizabeth and Burghley would not hesitate to throw him to the wolves if the political situation required it. But now he had an insurance against persecution. No one, not the queen, nor her council, and certainly not his powerful backers would quibble over legal or diplomatic niceties if he brought home such a vast profit.

  Reaching home was now Drake’s sole objective. But how? To return the way he had come was out of the question. Spanish warships were already in pursuit and merchant captains and garrison commanders would be on the lookout for the English corsairs. That left two possibilities; the mythical Straits of Anian and the known but nightmarish western route. Neither was much more attractive than running the gauntlet of the angry Spaniards.

  Drake’s first move was to stand out to sea to avoid his pursuers. Then he headed north-westwards, intending to pick up the coast of North America and follow it in search of the passage which would, if the geographers were right, bring him back to the Atlantic. The Golden Hind reached a high Pacific latitude and may have been on a parallel with modern Vancouver before wind and weather forced her to turn back. It was cold. There were frequent fogs and fierce north-westerly gales blew intermittently. By the time the heavily-laden ship had been at sea for fifty days she was leaking badly and food supplies were dangerously low. Drake turned eastwards, urgently seeking an anchorage. Eventually, he found a haven on the coast in a latitude variously recorded in early documents as between 38°N and 48°N.

  For over a century scholars have argued about the exact location of this landfall which, because of subsequent events, took on a special significance in the history of the USA. While Drake beached his ship to carry out the necessary repairs, he also patiently established friendly relations with the shy Indians who lived in that place. On 26 June 1579 a remarkable ceremony occurred. The chief came down to the white men’s camp attended by hundreds of his people, dancing, chanting and bearing gifts. The ruler made a speech and then presented Drake with a feathered head-dress, necklaces and other adornments. Unable to understand what was meant by these rituals, the visitors put their own interpretation on them:

  . . . the king and divers others made several orations, or rather, indeed, if we had understood them, supplications, that he would take the province and kingdom into his hand, and become their king and patron; making signs that they would resign unto him their right and title in the whole land; which that they might make us indeed believe that it was their true meaning and intent, the king himself, with all the rest, with one consent and with great reverence, joyfully singing a song, set the crown upon his head, enriched his neck with all their chains, and offering unto him many other things, honoured him by the name of Hyóh. Adding thereunto (as it might seem) a song and dance of triumph; because they were not only visited of the gods (for so they still judged us to be), but the great and chief God was now become their God, their king and patron, and themselves were become the only happy and blessed people in the world.

  These things being so freely offered, our general thought not meet to reject or refuse the same, . . .

  Wherefore, in the name and to the use of her most excellent majesty, he took the sceptre, crown, and dignity of the said country into his hand . . .4

  Before leaving the locality, Drake set up a brass plate claiming the territory in the name of his queen and naming it Nova Albion. This first English colonisation occurred five years before a similar claim was made to land on the east coast and seven years before the establishment of the ill-fated Roanoke settlement in what is now North Carolina. It is a pity, therefore, that no documentary or archaeological evidence has yet appeared enabling us to fix ‘Drake’s Bay’ beyond dispute.

  The Englishmen stayed in this pleasant land until 23 July, by which time Drake had abandoned any thought of the northward route home. All that he had learned from captured charts and interrogated prisoners indicated to him that this was a good time of year to attempt a Pacific crossing. With Spaniards to the south and storms to the north, this was the only option left open to him. He was committed. He would have to attempt the third circumnavigation of the world and he would have to try to become the first captain to complete such a circumnavigation.

  This meant, first of all, facing an ocean completely unknown to English navigators, then confronting Orient seas patrolled by Spanish and Portuguese men of war. For the first of those tasks he was singularly ill-equipped. There can be little doubt that Drake’s Spanish charts underestimated the width of the Pacific. Philip’s subjects had been regularly sailing the Manila route for little more than a decade and, although many earlier misconceptions had been cleared up, the lack of any accurate means of measuring longitude left considerable scope for cartographers’ optimism. Drake had probably discovered that the
galleons from Acapulco could make the crossing in under three months. Beyond that he knew nothing. He would be proceeding, as mariners called it, ‘by guess and by God’.

  In fact, the Golden Hind enjoyed a trouble-free crossing. Sixty-six days with the trade winds at her back brought her to the Caroline Islands where she was soon surrounded by Polynesian canoes whose occupants brandished fruit, fish and coconuts, suggesting that they wanted to trade. Drake had read of Magellan’s experiences in these waters and was wary. As soon as there was any sign of trouble, he fired off a culverin to frighten the importunate natives and, when that failed to disperse them, he had his arquebusiers shoot directly at the boats, killing about twenty men. Drake had not come all this way to be stopped now by a bunch of ‘thieving savages’.

  On 21 October the voyagers reached Mindanao, took on fresh food and water and then sailed south in search of the Spice Islands. Drake hoped to crown his achievements by establishing an English presence in the Orient trade. Yet, only after wandering chartless for days among the reefs and islands did he come to Ternate. Sultan Baab received the newcomers in princely splendour:

  The king at last coming from the castle, with 8 or 10 more grave senators following him, had a very rich canopy (adorned in the midst with embossings of gold) borne over him, and was guarded with 12 lances, the points turned downward. Our men (accompanied with Moro the king’s brother) arose to meet him, and he very graciously did welcome and entertain them. He was for person of low voice, temperate in speech, in kingly demeanour, and a Moor by nation. His attire was after the fashion of the rest of his country, but far more sumptuous, as his condition and state required: From the waist to the ground was all cloth of gold, and that very rich: his legs bare, but on his feet a pair of shoes of goat skin, dyed red. In the attire of his head, were finely wreathed in diverse rings of plated gold, of an inch or an inch and a half in breadth, which made a fair and princely show, somewhat resembling a crown in form. About his neck he had a chain of perfect gold, the links very great and one fold double. On his left hand was a diamond, an emerald, a ruby, and a turkey [turquoise], 4 very fair and perfect jewels. On his right hand, in one ring, a big and perfect turkey and in another ring many diamonds of a smaller size, very artificially set and couched together.