In the Pacific he robbed Spanish ships of tons and tons of silver and joked afterwards that he had done their captains a favor by lightening their load. In Cádiz he risked his own and scores of his seamen’s lives, gambling on a wind, and fired on some thirty Spanish ships. Afterward, making much of his achievement by making little, he said he had “singed the King of Spain’s beard.” Just before the Armada was launched he interrogated a Spanish prisoner about the size of the force in preparation. The man, whether ignorant or loyally intent on misleading the enemy, doubled the number of ships—which was in truth enough to make it, in John Hawkins’s opinion, “the greatest and strongest combination … that ever was gathered in Christendom.” Drake, nonchalant as ever, remarked absurdly—thrillingly—“That’s not much.” So he aggrandized himself by understatement, his insouciance a kind of braggadocio, implying that galleons and tempests were all one to him, that the death he repeatedly risked was nothing but an awfully big adventure, that, superhuman in his courage, his wiliness, and his fantastic self-confidence, he could master them all.
Achilles wasn’t cool. Homeric heroes weep and rage and preen, boasting of their tremendous physiques and fabulous exploits, grieving over their comrades’ deaths, anticipating with horror the possibility of their own. But Drake’s sangfroid has venerable antecedents. It contains within it some of the insolence of Alcibiades playing at debauchery, so sure of his own glamour he wouldn’t deign to sue for favor by conducting himself as a good citizen or a great commander was expected to do. And it resembles too the outlaw boldness that the Cid of the ballads shares with the English folk hero Robin Hood, the subversive, liberating humor of those who, by their audacity and the successful practice of violence, make a mockery of unpopular authority. The Cid, so the story goes, having captured the count of Barcelona, held him prisoner for three days, during which the count refused to take food. On the last day the noble prisoner relented and broke his hunger strike. The Cid sat laughing and cheering him on while he ate ravenously, and then, having accomplished his humiliation, magnanimously released him. Just so, according to the legends, did Robin Hood feast the abbots and barons he waylaid in Sherwood Forest, treating them to hearty meals of stolen venison before robbing them of all they possessed. And so Drake, having captured a Spanish ship, would entertain its owner and aristocratic passengers in his own cabin, feeding them well while the musicians who went around the world with him played for their pleasure. Then, having stolen all their assets, their ships and their precious cargoes, he would send them each away with a gewgaw as a present, a bowl engraved with his name or a handful of English coins, gifts insulting in their inadequacy but received with gratitude by grandees astonished to have escaped with their lives.
He was a great seaman, by common consent of his friends and enemies alike, and fantastically courageous. “He is one of the most skilled mariners in England,” wrote a Spanish agent to Philip II. “No one else in England” would dare to do what he had done. In 1625 Sir Robert Mansell, who had served with him, said that “in his deep judgement in sea causes he did far exceed all others whomsoever,” and the seventeenth-century historian Edmund Howes confirmed that he was “more skilful in all points of navigation than any that ever was before his time, in his time, or since his death.” The Spaniards came to believe that he was a sorcerer or a devil, capable of doing things impossible for the common run of mortals. For Thucydides, Alcibiades was the only man alive in his time who could have saved Athens. Drake too made others believe that he was unique, free of the natural laws which limit most humans’ capability, and free, by extension, of human law as well. He told his men as they prepared to embark on the most perilous part of their voyage around the world that the queen believed him to be “the only man that might do this exploit,” and that if they mutinied they would be lost forever, drinking each other’s blood in horrible anarchy on an alien shore, for he, and he alone, could master them, lead them on to great riches, and bring them safely home. He was probably right.
Some of Drake’s feats were, and remain, amazing. On his voyage of circumnavigation he sailed nonstop for 9,700 miles, finding his way without reliable maps from Java, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and northward through the Atlantic, not to touch land until he reached Sierra Leone four months later, a piece of seamanship which his (generally very hostile) eighteenth-century biographer George Anderson called “a thing hardly to be credited, and which was never performed by any mariner before his time or since.” His geographical discoveries were momentous. His successes as a raider of ships, whether on his own account or his country’s, were fabulous both for the daring he displayed in them and the profits they yielded. But, for all that, he is chiefly remembered not for his exploits but for his image (which he himself helped to create), the image of an unflappable, invincible joker, a man who might inspire others to the pursuit of glory but who himself made mock of sublimity, an insulter (like Rodrigo Díaz) of other men’s beards, a cocky adventurer uncowed by grandeur and untrammeled by morality, a laughing thief.
He was born in 1540, or thereabouts. According to one version of his early life he served his apprenticeship on board a coaster trading up and down the English Channel, inheriting the boat when his master died. According to another he grew up in Plymouth, as an apprentice in the household of the Hawkins family, to whom he was related. In Henry VIII’s reign William Hawkins had been the first English mariner to make the triangular voyage to Africa and then across the Atlantic to trade with the Spanish settlers in America before bringing the profits home. Such a trade was in contravention of papal decree and therefore, in the eyes of most Europeans, of international law. In 1493, in response to Columbus’s discoveries, the pope had granted the Spanish a monopoly of all trade with the still-mysterious lands to the west of the Atlantic; Africa and the East Indies were allotted to the Portuguese. The English never fully accepted the ruling, and William Hawkins was anyway careless of legality: in 1544 he served a prison sentence for taking a Spanish ship. In the next generation his son John Hawkins, whose career was to run parallel with Drake’s for thirty years, made several similar voyages. In 1566 and again in 1567 Drake was in his fleet.
The cargo John Hawkins collected in Africa and sold in America was human. He was the first English slave trader, and not ashamed of it. He was to choose for his crest a “demi-Moor, bound and captive.” Slave trading was seen as dirty work. Queen Elizabeth called it “detestable” and prophesied after Hawkins’s first expedition that it “would call down the vengeance of Heaven.” But the profits were enormous enough to quiet even the royal conscience: Elizabeth was one of Hawkins’s backers for his 1567 voyage.
Sixteenth-century adventurers who sought their fortunes beyond the seas generally expected not to produce wealth but, like the Cid, to steal it. Christopher Columbus complained of those who followed him to the Caribbean that “they came simply believing that the gold was there to be shovelled and the spices already bound and at the water’s edge … so blinded were they by greed.” One such was Cortés, who told the colonial official who was urging him to settle on Santo Domingo, “I came to get gold, not to till the soil like a peasant.” Walter Raleigh took no mining equipment, not a single sieve or spade, when traveling in search of the gold of El Dorado. Hawkins’s practice was to assault any ship he encountered on the African coast and steal its cargo. Most of his slaves were acquired by this means, grabbed from the Portuguese who had had the labor of rounding them up. Others were abducted in raids on coastal villages, or captured with the connivance of their tribal enemies. On one occasion, in which Drake participated, Hawkins loaned his men as mercenaries to one of the rival chieftains of Sierra Leone. They assaulted, took, and burned to the ground a town which had been home to eight thousand people. Hawkins was rewarded with several hundred of the prisoners of war, who joined the rest of the “negroes and other cargo” (his words) below the decks of his ships.
Hawkins’s customers were Spanish colonists in the Caribbe
an who, having virtually depopulated the regions in which they had settled, urgently required an alternative labor force. They had the need and Hawkins had the supply. But there was an obstacle: the settlers were forbidden to trade with any but their own compatriots. Local Spanish officials who permitted Hawkins to land were likely to lose their jobs, or perhaps worse. Hawkins’s strategy for circumventing this problem was to save the local governors’ face by the use of violence. He would attack a town, sometimes bombarding it from his ships, sometimes actually landing an assault force. The governor would agree to pay a “ransom” if he would only go away. Once the money was handed over, Hawkins would set ashore some slaves, the governor noting for the official record that they had been abandoned. Thus a trade would be done without being seen to be done.
These assaults on Caribbean towns were not charades. People died. Houses were destroyed. One of the first actions that can with any certainty be credited to Drake is the bombardment of the governor’s house at Rio de la Hacha on the northern coast of what is now Colombia. The governor, an unusually law-abiding official, had steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the Englishmen. When Drake’s cannonball failed to intimidate him, Hawkins landed with two hundred men and drove the Spanish out of the town. Still the governor resisted. Only when Hawkins had captured hostages, seized the contents of the treasury, and begun to burn houses was a deal finally made. Their Whig apologists have celebrated the sixteenth-century English contrabandists in the Caribbean as defenders of the principles of free trade against the jealousy and greed of Spain, but “free” seems a curious epithet for trade made under such brutal duress.
The voyage of 1567–69, on which Drake for the first time commanded his own ship, ended in disaster. As Hawkins turned for home his ships were caught in furious storms and one was badly damaged. No safe port appeared. For nearly a month the little fleet was battered in unfamiliar waters until eventually they reached the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulúa, having first—in order to persuade the people there to sell them provisions and allow them time to repair their ships—attacked three Spanish ships and taken their passengers hostage.
They were permitted to enter the harbor but the very next day a fleet arrived from Spain, bringing the new viceroy, Don Martín Enríquez. Hawkins threatened to keep the Spaniards out of the port. Enríquez temporized, promising not to molest the English if they would just refit their ships and leave quietly. He had no intention of keeping that promise. To him Drake and Hawkins were pirates whom it was his clear duty to apprehend. As soon as reinforcements came up he ordered an attack. Three of the English ships were sunk. The two that got away were the Minion, with Hawkins on board, and the Judith, captained by Francis Drake. The Minion was grossly overmanned with sailors who had managed to escape from the lost ships and she carried almost no supplies. Hawkins had to put a hundred men ashore in Florida to take their chances (only two are known to have made it back to England). Forty-five more died on the journey home. After four months Drake brought the Judith safely in to Plymouth. Five days later the Minion came home, with only fifteen men left alive, scarcely enough to keep the ship on course. Drake’s failure to help those on the Minion was much censured. One of the mariners later reported that Drake did everything Hawkins commanded him to do, another that he blamelessly “lost us.” But Hawkins, in his published account of the voyage, wrote with unmistakable bitterness that the Judith “forsook us in our great misery.” Drake was not named, but his reputation was stained ineradicably.
Never again, except in the pursuit of the Armada, during which he once again disobeyed orders and deserted his post, did Drake serve under another commander. Like Achilles, like Rodrigo Díaz, he fit uneasily into any community or chain of command. He didn’t take orders well, nor did he find it easy to trust those to whom he gave them. Repeatedly in later years he rounded on his deputies and associates, accusing them of disloyalty, and in 1587 one of them, William Borough, turned the accusation back on him. When Drake had him tried for mutiny Borough spoke up, referring to what must have been the well-known story about Drake’s conduct at San Juan de Ulúa, “when contrary to his admiral’s command he came away and left his said Master in great extremity.” He was an unreliable deputy, a tactlessly overweening commander. His greatest successes were achieved when he was completely autonomous, over the seas and far away, beyond the reach of any law except his own, absolute master of his own little ship.
The debacle at San Juan de Ulúa was the beginning of the story of his life as he liked to tell it. In the 1590s, after the abysmal failure of the counter-armada he led out against Spain, Drake set his chaplain, Philip Nichols, to saving his face by narrating the story of his wonderful adventures in the Caribbean twenty years earlier. In the resulting book, Sir Francis Drake Revived, all his raids on Spanish ships and territory in the West Indies are characterized as attempts to seek redress for the “wrongs received” on his voyage with Hawkins, for the viceroy’s broken promise, and for his lost property. According to Nichols, it was the righteous “indignation engrafted in the bosom of all that are wronged” which made Drake a pirate. Drake himself probably genuinely believed this. As soon as he returned from San Juan de Ulúa he went to London to ask the Privy Council to grant him and Hawkins “commissions of reprisal” which would have allowed them to attack Spanish shipping and seize goods to the value of those they had lost. He was refused. Having failed to obtain authorization for his projected piracies from man, he sought it from God.
He told the contemporary historian William Camden that he had consulted a priest, who “had easily persuaded him” that it would be lawful to rob representatives of the nation that had cheated and robbed him. There is no need to question his sincerity in this: God’s approval was important to him, and he felt he had a real grievance.
Only a quarter of the men who set out on Hawkins’s voyage returned alive, but a substantial amount of the takings were saved. A hostile and probably unreliable Spanish source relates that Drake tried to claim all the booty, alleging that he had seen Hawkins’s ship go down, and that when Hawkins gave him the lie by reappearing he was imprisoned for the attempted swindle. What is certain is that when he told Camden that at San Juan de Ulúa he had suffered the “loss of all his means” he was lying. His share of the profits was sufficient to allow him to take a wife and to return to the Caribbean in 1570 and again in 1571, his own master now, in ships paid for by himself.
The wealth flowing into Spain from the New World took the form of silver and gold mined in Chile and Peru and brought by ship up the Pacific coast of South America to Panama. From there it was transported across the isthmus to the Caribbean port of Nombre de Dios to be loaded onto the ships in which it was carried in a heavily guarded convoy to Europe. Those convoys were virtually impregnable: in a century and a half only three successful raids were made on the treasure fleets. But while it was still on land the bullion was harder to protect. The isthmus was about sixty miles across at that point, mountainous, pestilential, and swelteringly hot, with open grassland on the Pacific side, dense jungle along the northern Caribbean coast. The bullion was carried from coast to coast by mules in trains of forty or more animals apiece. Drake was one of a number of pirates, English and French, who preyed on the Spanish settlers around Nombre de Dios during the 1570s. All of them dreamed of capturing some of that precious metal.
Drake came of criminal stock. His father, Edmund Drake, a Protestant preacher, had been charged in 1548 with two robberies. He and an accomplice, armed with staves and swords, had on one occasion stolen a horse and on another waylaid a traveler, assaulted him so violently “that he feared for his life,” and made off with his purse. Like father, like son. Francis Drake was genuinely devout. He was said to spend three hours a day on his knees, as many as his great opponent, King Philip II of Spain. But he, like Edmund, found his religious faith no bar to the repeated breach of the eighth commandment. He took to piracy with gusto.
The pirates waylaid and plundered the trad
ing ships which passed up and down the Caribbean coastline of Central America and raided the poorly protected Spanish towns and storage depots. They used small open boats, pinnaces, which could go close inshore, rowing into the shallows to avoid pursuing frigates, dodging into creeks, darting up rivers. Drake was fast, ferocious, and bold. On his second trip he captured two Spanish frigates and a dozen or so small trading vessels, stripping them of all their valuable cargo (velvets and taffeta, gold and silver, wine and slaves). He and his men carried swords and arquebuses, painted their faces with red, white, and black warpaint, and sounded trumpets to announce their presence and intimidate their (usually unarmed) victims. They were young (only one of the men who went with Drake in 1572 had turned thirty), cocksure, and violent. They rowed up the Chagres River into the interior of the isthmus and snatched a stack of valuable merchandise from the wharf of the little riverside depot of Venta Cruces (which was guarded by only one man). They stripped a friar naked, and marooned captives on an uninhabited island. They killed seven men and wounded at least twice as many more. They left a letter full of swaggering menace on board a frigate which they had looted and smashed up after the terrified passengers, one of them a woman, leapt overboard into chest-deep water: “We are surprised that you ran from us in that fashion … And since you will not come courteously to talk with us, without evil or damage, you will find your frigate spoiled by your own fault; … if there be cause we will be devils rather than men.” They stole so much booty they were puzzled how to take it home. Drake began to acquire the fearsome reputation which would soon make him the terror of all Spanish colonial officialdom. “This coast and the town … are in the greatest danger,” wrote the governor of Nombre de Dios to his king. “It is plain we are going to suffer from this corsair.”
Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship Page 25