A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  As thus he sat in his chair of state, at his right side there stood a page with a very costly fan (richly embroidered and beset with sapphires) breathing and gathering the air to refresh the king, the place being very hot, both by reason of the sun, and the assembly of so great a multitude.5

  Baab was delighted to welcome the Englishmen and trade with them. To him they represented one more piece on the gaming board of oriental politics. He had become adept at playing off the Spaniards and Portuguese against each other and against his rival, the Sultan of Tidore. Now here was the representative of a third European monarch who claimed that his queen was anxious to establish regular commercial relations and was an enemy both of Spain and Portugal.

  The Golden Hind’s crew crammed a consignment of cloves into what little space remained in her hold. It nearly proved her undoing. On 9 January, while threading her way through the coral outcrops south of Celebes, she ran onto a reef and stuck fast. Drake’s first move was to lighten ship. Overboard went eight cannon, valuable casks of fresh food and the newly-acquired cloves. It made no difference. Next, Drake tried to find a purchase point for one of the spare anchors, hoping to take a cable end round the windlass and haul the ship into deep water. This stratagem, also, failed. There seemed nothing to be done but to resign themselves to the mercy of God. Drake called upon the chaplain, Francis Fletcher, to say prayers and preach a morale-boosting sermon. Unfortunately for him, the parson exceeded his brief. Calling upon every member of the crew to repent his sins and get right with God, Fletcher drew special attention to the part they had all played in the condemnation of Thomas Doughty. Soon afterwards a sudden change of wind carried the Golden Hind clear of the reef.

  They were safe and under way again. But Drake was furious. His just dealings in the Doughty affair had been challenged – and in the name of God. How could he deal with his recalcitrant chaplain? The bizarre answer he came up with indicates just how sensitive Drake was about the events in St Julian’s Bay. He called the ship’s company together and solemnly excommunicated Francis Fletcher from the Christian Church. He confined the poor man to the foredeck and forced him to carry a placard stating that he was ‘Ye Falsest Knave That Liveth’.

  The Golden Hind reached Java safely and here Drake and his men were again royally received by one of the Muslim rulers. But the visitors had to make a hurried and unceremonious departure when a Portuguese convoy was reported approaching the island. Fortunately there had been time to careen the ship once more. The strains imposed on the erstwhile Pelican throughout her long odyssey were beginning to tell. Once again, her commander had to point her bowsprit at the empty ocean. Like Elcano, Drake was obliged to give a wide berth to the Portuguese shipping lane from Malacca, via Goa, Mombasa and Mozambique to the Cape. So he had to set a direct course for the southern tip of Africa. Being denied ports of call was a severe hardship. The eighty-four days of comparatively easy sailing across the Indian Ocean stretched to the utmost the supply of water and victuals and forced the crew to dig once more into their reserves of strength and stamina. It was a weak and listless company of men that sailed into the Atlantic on 18 June 1580. They were reduced to fifty-nine in number and several more would have died of thirst had it not been for the spare canvas rigged to catch every drop of rainwater from passing squalls. Another month would go by before they could make a landfall (on the coast of Sierra Leone) to refill their casks. Then, for the first time in over two years, they were back in familiar waters, navigating by familiar stars and plotting their course on familiar, well-worn charts.

  In mid-September they entered the Channel and the excited travellers were soon pointing out well-known landmarks to each other and longing to get ashore. But when, on the 26th, they came to rest in Plymouth Sound and some of Drake’s friends came aboard, they advised him to wear away and anchor by St Nicholas Island while secret messages were despatched to the court. The political situation, they said, was very sensitive. Complaints about Drake’s activities had been pouring in. So, for another month the crew had to wait while their captain was summoned to London to be privately interrogated by the queen. Only then did they know whether they were to be welcomed back as heroes or clapped in irons.

  It was, of course, the money that clinched the matter. All the backers of the enterprise received a 4,700 per cent return on their investment. Elizabeth’s own share amounted to £160,000 plus the glittering presents that Drake strewed at her feet. The proceeds of this one venture were almost enough to cover government expenditure for a whole year, something the nation’s hard-pressed treasury could not ignore. The Spanish ambassador might rant and threaten and demand that Drake be punished; it was out of the question for the queen and council to disown him. Nor would the people have stood for it. Drake was a public hero. His exploits were being turned into ballads and talked about in every alehouse in the kingdom.

  It needed only a romantic and patriotic gesture to set the seal on this remarkable enterprise. That was provided on 4 April 1581. The Golden Hind had been brought to Greenwich and completely refurbished by an army of painters and carpenters. There, while crowds cheered and musicians played, Elizabeth I went aboard the ship that had circled the globe and there Francis Drake kneeled before his sovereign to receive a knighthood.

  3

  THE TRIUMPH OF DESIRE

  Drake never followed up the commercial contacts he had made in the Spice Islands and, although his great voyage had inspired many young adventurers, none of them immediately set out to emulate the exploit. One reason for this was, undoubtedly, the growing hostility with Spain which provided action enough in the northern Atlantic for captains seeking booty and the clash of arms. England could ill afford to send some of her best ships and men across thousands of miles of ocean while the conflict with Philip II threatened to erupt into open warfare.

  Another reason for the lack of interest in circumnavigation was the failure of the Fenton expedition. In 1581 Edward Fenton, a soldier of fortune, was appointed by a commercial consortium headed by the Earl of Leicester to command a fleet to the Orient. The backers had two objectives: they wanted to cement profitable relations with the Sultan of Ternate and they wanted to discover the North-West Passage which would open for England a virtually private route to the wealth of the East. The known but hazardous southerly route was expressly forbidden in Fenton’s instructions: ‘You shall goe on your course by Cape de Bona Speranca, not passing by the Streight of Magellan, either going or returning’.1 The hard-headed money men had no interest in circumnavigation for its own sake. Nor, to judge from his subsequent actions, had Fenton.

  He was a man wholly unfitted to such an undertaking. Scarcely had his four ships set sail in May 1582 when he was arguing with his officers, and it soon became clear to them that he had no intention of obeying his instructions. He spoke wildly of seizing the tiny island of St Helena and proclaiming himself its king. When his captains refused to support him in such madness he turned back to plunder Portuguese settlements in the Cape Verde Islands and along the West African coast. He bartered one of his ships for provisions and lost another through shipwreck in the Plate estuary. After that he had no alternative but to return, ignominiously, to England.

  It is difficult to assess the character of a man like Edward Fenton across the divide of four centuries but the attempt is instructive because it makes clear the immense strain long sailing voyages put upon any mariners unequal to the task. Edward was one of those unhappy men overshadowed by a brilliant younger brother. Geoffrey was a fine scholar who attracted the patronage of several leading courtiers, and was accepted among the literary cognoscenti of the day. He settled in Paris and, before the age of thirty, had won fame as an author and translator. Edward could not bear the thought of settling to the dull life of a Nottinghamshire landowner on the estate inherited from his father, while his brother covered himself in glory. He sold his patrimony and went off to serve as a soldier in Ireland. Apart from a brief interlude when he accompanied Frobisher on his third voy
age in search of the North-West Passage, Fenton remained in the troublesome province for fourteen years. He returned home in September 1580. It is probably no coincidence that Geoffrey had arrived in Ireland four months earlier and had already begun to make a mark there (within a year he was appointed secretary to the lord deputy).

  Edward went to the royal court, desperately seeking some new adventure to enhance his reputation. More than one project was discussed before the ill-fated 1582 expedition was planned. When Fenton eventually put to sea it was as an inexperienced sailor leading captains who knew the Atlantic far better than he did. He was no mariner, nor was he a very accomplished commander. Above all, his heart was not in the venture; he saw it largely as a vehicle for enhancing his reputation and escaping from his own mediocrity. Thus, the absurd talk of becoming ‘King of St Helena’ and the subsequent frenzied attacks on Portuguese and Spanish ships and settlements. It is easy, even for seasoned sailors, when at sea and under stress, to lose touch with reality:

  I became convinced that I wasn’t really wanted at home – that it wouldn’t matter to anyone if I never got home and at the same time I wanted to get to England and have done with the voyage as soon as possible . . . I began to weave for myself a completely new life, independent from and quite different to anything that I had experienced before. It would be a fine thing to start life all over again . . . a new pattern of living, a clean sweep away from everything that had gone before. I would go off into some wilderness in pursuit of ideas – break away from the humdrum for ever.2

  Forced to return home in disgrace, Fenton made a crazed attack on his lieutenant, William Hawkins, in a desperate attempt to silence him. Thereafter, he was probably fortunate to be allowed to live out his life in relative obscurity. But to the end of his days (he died in 1603) he had to suffer the slow torture of observing his brother’s continued success in Ireland. Geoffrey, knighted in 1589, added a distinguished political reputation to the one he had already established as a man of letters and died in 1609 a wealthy and honoured royal servant.

  But if Edward Fenton’s is a sad story, that of Thomas Cavendish plumbs tragic depths of Sophoclean profundity. Cavendish deserves better than the history-book footnotes where his name usually appears. For he was the first true circumnavigator. That is to say, he was the first captain to set out with the declared objective of sailing around the world and to accomplish that objective.

  Cavendish was a well-educated, twenty-year-old gentleman, newly established at the queen’s court on that exciting day in September 1580 when Drake returned triumphantly from his round-the-world voyage and he was captivated by the great mariner’s exploits. It was not long before he had conceived the audacious plan of repeating those exploits. The task was formidable, as the stories of the returning seamen must have made clear. Drake had accomplished it against all the odds and Drake was an experienced master mariner who had first gone to sea before Cavendish was born. The young courtier had little to support his own pretensions apart from his enthusiasm, the information and advice he picked up in conversation with deep-sea captains in London alehouses, and a substantial income from his Suffolk estates. It was the last of these that brought him his first chance of maritime adventure. In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh was eagerly seeking support for a colonising voyage to North America. Cavendish mortgaged some of his lands to provide and equip a fifty ton barque and he captained her himself. He spent the summer of 1585 crossing and recrossing the Atlantic in a fleet under the command of Sir Richard Grenville. Although he fell out with the admiral, the reality of an ocean voyage did nothing to dispel his romantic notions of battling with the elements and seeing strange lands. As soon as he returned he set about raising money, ships and crews for his great voyage.

  On 21 July 1586 Thomas Cavendish sailed out of Plymouth in his new vessel, the Desire (120–140 tons), aptly named by one whose yearning for adventure was so great. Two smaller ships, the Content and the Hugh Gallant, made up his squadron. It may have been the queen’s intention when she gave permission for the voyage that the young commander should join forces with the Earl of Cumberland currently fitting out a similar fleet. But Cavendish wisely avoided the problems of shared leadership by getting away a full month before George Clifford’s flotilla. It was as well; the earl’s ships reached Brazil ill-provisioned and too late in the season and were forced to turn back. Cavendish’s expedition undoubtedly benefited from single leadership and clarity of purpose. There was the customary gaggle of gentlemen adventurers (one of whom left an account of the voyage) but they seem to have offered no challenge to Cavendish’s authority.

  The first objective was to reach the straits of Magellan in the middle of the southern summer with ships and men in a fit state to attempt the passage. In this Cavendish was successful. He made a landfall at Sierra Leone, then crossed the Atlantic, reaching Brazil on 1 November. He spent three weeks resting his men and revictualling his ships. He even took time to build a 10 ton pinnace to hold extra stores. Working down the Patagonian coast, he sailed into and named Port Desire. Here his men took advantage of the large seal and penguin colonies to eat plenty of fresh meat and to lay in enough for several days ahead. The fleet sailed on and reached the entrance to the straits on 6 January. The timing could scarcely have been better and for two weeks they proceeded westwards with favourable winds. Half-way through they came upon a deserted Spanish settlement which had been intended as a lock and chain upon the backdoor of Philip II’s empire. The fate of the colonists upon that wild and barren coast must have been terrible. Cavendish named the place Port Famine because of ‘the noisome stench and vile savour wherewith it was infected through the contagion of the Spaniards’ pined and dead carcases’.3 However, he endured the smell long enough to help himself to twelve abandoned cannon.

  The voyagers were almost through the narrows when they ran into ‘most vile and filthie fowle weather’4 which obliged them to spend three and a half weeks skulking in what shelter they could find and hazarding the ‘best cables and anchors that we had for to hold, which, if they had failed we had been in danger to have been cast away, or at least famished’.5 Food supplies were already low and one account states ‘we fed almost altogether on mussels and limpets and birds or such as we could get on shore, seeking for them every day as the fowls of the air do’.6 At last, on 24 February, they passed Cape Pilar and Cavendish became the first commander to lead a convoy intact into the Pacific.

  The soft underbelly of Spain’s American empire now lay exposed, and he was intent on inflicting severe wounds upon it en passant. In the event, he indulged in an orgy of destruction surpassing even that perpetrated by Drake. One reason for this was that the enemy was now in a better state of preparedness than it had been eight years before. As the English fleet proceeded northwards, alarm signals went before it, carried by sea and land. Coastal towns looked to their defences and occasionally the colonists went onto the offensive. When Cavendish sent a party ashore for fresh water south of Valparaiso two hundred horsemen appeared over the dunes. In the ensuing skirmish twelve Englishmen were slain and several others were taken prisoner.

  In April 1587 the fleet entered the tropic zone and Cavendish put into Arica where he took four merchant ships and held them to ransom, demanding the return of his captured men. But the Spanish authorities were under strict instructions not to give way to terrorism. Thus when the English sailed away without their colleagues they left four prime merchant vessels at the bottom of the harbour. Those were the first of more than a dozen ships and three towns that Cavendish burned along that coast, having first plundered them of anything of value. Among the assorted merchandise that fell into his hands there was very little in the way of treasure, but food, wine, navigational instruments and charts were almost as welcome to men with thousands of miles sailing still ahead. Cavendish was particularly pleased to capture a Greek pilot, Jorge Carandino, who knew the local waters, and to replace the leaky Hugh Gallant with another vessel renamed the George.

  The f
leet had been careened and refitted on the coast of Mexico when Cavendish received news of a great ship on her way back from the Philippines richly laden with oriental merchandise. He sailed to southern California and there patrolled impatiently back and forth waiting for the argosy. She was sighted, at last, on 4 November and, after some fierce hand-to-hand fighting she surrendered. The 700-ton Santa Ana was a formidable opponent. But for the fact that her cannon were stowed below decks because no enemy was anticipated on that coast Cavendish’s challenge might have had a very different outcome.

  This great ship ‘was one of the richest vessels that ever sailed on the seas; and was able to have made many hundreds wealthy if we had had means to have brought it home’.7 The Santa Ana yielded 22,000 gold pesos and 6oo tons of silk, pearls, satin, civet and other goods. She was not as rich a prize as the Cacafuego but her capture had ‘made’ Cavendish’s voyage even though he could ship only a fraction of the merchandise. Cavendish spent two weeks sorting through the cargo. Fifty tons of it was transferred to his own vessels. The rest was burned with the ship. The commander’s problem was a manpower shortage. We have no details but it is clear that scurvy, ship’s fever and battle had all taken their toll. The George had already been scuttled because there were not enough sailors to man her. Cavendish had enough crewmen for two ships and, since the mariners had to be fed, victuals accounted for much of the space in the holds. It must have been galling to watch the richly-laden Santa Ana slip beneath the waters of San Lucas Bay in a cloud of steam and smoke, but Cavendish and his men were in good heart as they set sail for Cathay on 19 November.