In 1572, when he was in his early thirties, Drake fitted out two ships and set sail once more for the Caribbean. This was the voyage that was to make his first fortune and to establish his legend. It is described in detail in Sir Francis Drake Revived. Flagrantly self-congratulatory and imbued throughout with jocular triumphalism, the book reads like fiction but, exaggerated though it may be in detail, its main story is confirmed by soberer sources, both English and Spanish. It makes a thrilling tale.
He landed in the Caribbean in a harbor he had discovered the previous year. There he found a lead plate nailed to a tree with a warning message from one of his fellow pirates. “Captain Drake! If you fortune to come to this place, make haste away!” His refuge had been discovered. He moved swiftly on to Nombre de Dios, where he led his men ashore by night. There, so he claimed, they peered into a storeroom where they saw a scene to haunt them for the rest of their lives: a lighted candle, a saddled horse, and “a pile of bars of silver of, as near as we could guess, seventy feet in length, of ten feet in breadth, and twelve feet in height, piled up against the wall.” A fabulous trove, but they failed to get their hands on it. There was a skirmish with the Spanish settlers, a sudden rainstorm; worst of all, Drake was wounded in the leg, and his men, declaring that though they would have risked all else to get the booty they “would in no case hazard their Captain’s life,” dragged him protesting through the shallows back to the boats.
It was a bitter disappointment. But at Nombre de Dios Drake had gained an invaluable ally, an African named Diego who had begged the English to take him with them and who told them “how we might have gold and silver enough, if we would, by means of the cimarrones.”
The cimarrones were Africans—escaped slaves or the children of slaves. As the bishop of Panama reported in 1570, “of a thousand negroes who arrive annually, three hundred or more escape to the wilds.” By 1572 these fugitives constituted a large and well-organized rebel community living deep in the forests under two kings of their own. Many of them had reached adulthood in African villages, so they were far better qualified for life in the tropical rain forest than their European abductors. Drake and his fellow Englishmen were to be greatly impressed not only by their physical strength and powers of endurance, but also by their skill in hunting and pathfinding and constructing shelters and by the orderliness and prosperity of their towns. They hated the Spanish (with good cause). According to a report written by the governor of Nombre de Dios in 1571, they “entered daily into the towns” to free their compatriots. They also stalked the mule trains from Panama and had several times ambushed them, killing men and making off with gold and silver, just as Drake himself intended to do.
Drake had been a slave trader in his time. On the Guinea coast with Hawkins he saw black people as valuable commodities up for grabbing. In Panama in 1572 he found them useful allies in his project of grabbing gold. During his subsequent voyages he was to take a number of black slaves from Spanish ships, including a four-year-old “negrito.” What became of most of them is unrecorded. He has been praised for being, by the standards of his day, unusually free of racism, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was an open-minded opportunist, one boldly unconventional enough to consider any strategy that might bring him nearer his end. It is telling that Diego, to whom he was to owe a fortune, became, not a sharer in that fortune, but his servant.
The alliance between Drake and the cimarrones, which Diego brokered, terrified the Spaniards. Like all slave owners, the Spanish colonists lived in fear of those they oppressed. The cimarrones, supplied with European weapons and stirred up to action by European greed, raised a specter which haunted them for the rest of Drake’s life. When in 1585 Drake was once again in the Caribbean the rumor ran up and down the coast, and was reported in all the courts of Europe, that he was organizing a slave rebellion, that thousands of black warriors had risen at his call. It was pure fantasy—after 1572 Drake never again worked with black allies—but it goes partway towards explaining why the Spanish found him so uniquely menacing.
The cimarrones told Drake that nothing of value would be taken across the isthmus until the next Spanish fleet arrived in the new year. Leaving some of his party under the command of his brother John to build a stronghold which he named Fort Diego, Drake sailed off in one of the pinnaces to use the intervening time in hunting for booty.
There is something dreamlike about the impunity with which, according to the account in Sir Francis Drake Revived, Drake cruised up and down the Caribbean coast that year, helping himself to whatever he wanted. There were “above two hundred” Spanish frigates in the area at the time, “the most of which, during our abode in those parts, we took; and some of them twice or thrice each.” He boarded ships unopposed and helped himself to their contents. He encountered Indians who cheerfully gave him information about the Spaniards’ movements and “many sorts of dainty fruits and roots.” He found five storehouses crammed with provisions intended for the Spanish treasure fleet. At his approach the solitary guard ran off to hide in the jungle, leaving Drake’s men to help themselves to enough food for them “if we had been two thousand, yea three thousand persons.” The Spanish officials and traders who were his prey—fully aware of his presence, fully aware of his thieving intentions— seemed impotent to defend themselves against him. He took so many ships he had no use for them and set them adrift, or scuttled them, or burned them. At last, after he had encountered some unprecedentedly determined opposition from the Spaniards at Cartagena, and after his men had begun to weaken after weeks at sea in an open pinnace, he returned to Fort Diego to lie low.
In the only poem he is known to have written Drake invited all brave men to follow him along “the way to purchase gold.” At Fort Diego he learned, if he did not already know it, in what currency that purchase was to be made. His brother John had been killed, along with another man, in an attempt to board a Spanish frigate. There was worse to follow. In January twenty-eight men out of the seventy-three he had brought with him died of disease, probably yellow fever; one of them was another of his brothers, Joseph Drake. The mariners renamed their camp Slaughter Island.
At last came the news that the Spanish fleet had landed at Nombre de Dios. The mule trains would be on the move. Leaving a few men to guard the ship and his ransomable Spanish prisoners, Drake set off with a party of eighteen Englishmen and twenty cimarrones, the latter, led by a remarkable man called Pedro, acting as guides, porters (the English, exhausted by the heat, were barely able to carry their own gear), providers of game, camp builders, and protectors.
For ten days they traveled in dead silence through the equatorial jungle, some of the cimarrones going ahead to hack a way through vegetation so dense that one of Drake’s men later compared it to an English hedge. At last they found themselves on grassland overlooking Panama and the Pacific. Later, when they had come to believe him capable of almost any feat of cunning and courage, the Spaniards related that Drake disguised himself and went into the town, spending several days there gathering information. Had he done so it is unlikely he would have got away with it; even eight years later his Spanish was not good enough to dispense with an interpreter. In fact it was one of the cimarrones, risking recapture and certain death, who went into Panama. He returned after a few hours with the news that a mule train carrying at least eight loads of gold would set out as soon as darkness fell.
Drake’s party concealed themselves. The mules came so close that as they lay in ambush the Englishmen could hear their bells sounding through the stillness of the night. For the second time fabulous wealth was so close they could all but touch it. For the second time they lost it. Drake had given strict orders that his men were to remain hidden until the mule trains were right upon them. But one of them, drunk on brandy, broke cover and was seen by a Spanish horseman traveling from the inland settlement of Venta Cruces towards Panama. One of the cimarrones pulled him back and sat on him to keep him quiet, but it was too late. The horseman galloped on a
nd gave the alarm; the mule train turned back. Drake’s party, disappointed and now in extreme danger, had to fight their way past a Spanish garrison at Venta Cruces before vanishing once more into the jungle. Their return to the coast was even harder than the outward journey. Drake would not permit any delay for hunting, so for days they traveled on nearly empty stomachs. When the exhausted, half-starved party reached the shore they seemed to their fellows “strangely changed,” not only because “our long fasting and sore travail might somewhat forepine and waste us” but also because “the grief we drew inwardly, for that we returned without that gold and treasure we hoped for, did no doubt show her footprint in our faces.”
Two months later, by which time their number had dwindled to thirty-one—which meant that of the men who had sailed from Plymouth with Drake more were now dead than alive—they tried again. At the end of March they came across a shipload of French pirates led by Captain Nicholas le Testu. It was a frightening encounter. Le Testu’s men outnumbered Drake’s and his ship was much larger, but amity was established. The two captains exchanged gifts. Le Testu gave Drake a scimitar which had belonged, so he said, to a king of France. Drake responded with a gold chain and medallion. They agreed to join forces and attack the mule trains together, sharing the profits equally between them. The ships were left in a deepwater harbor. Le Testu with twenty of his men and Drake with fifteen of his, along with a group of cimarrones under Pedro—who was, as before, the true leader of the expedition—set off in the pinnaces. This time, instead of crossing the isthmus, they were to ambush the mule trains on the road just short of Nombre de Dios. They landed at the mouth of the river Francisca. Some of the men were ordered to return to the ships, some twenty miles from the Francisca, and to bring the pinnaces back to the same spot in four days. The attacking force stealthily made their way through the jungle, the Frenchmen anxiously and correctly complaining that if the cimarrones were to abandon them they would never find their way back. By evening they had reached the road at a point so close to Nombre de Dios that as they lay hidden in the darkness they could hear the shipwrights working through the cool of the night on the ships of the Spanish fleet.
In Sir Francis Drake Revived the rest of the tale is told in a tone of ever-increasing exultation, a gloriously self-satisfied paean to Drake’s triumphant audacity and luck. In the morning they heard once again the deep-toned mule bells approaching. There were so many that the cimarrones told them they would soon have more treasure than they could carry. It was absolutely true. Three mule trains, totaling some hundred and seventy mules, came into sight. Each train was guarded by fifteen Spanish soldiers. They were carrying nearly thirty tons of silver in all, as well as 100,000 pesos in gold. The pirates broke cover and seized the first and last mule in each train. As they had been trained to do, the other animals instantly halted and lay down. There was a brief battle, during which one of the cimarrones was killed and le Testu was shot in the stomach, but then the Spanish troops, seeing themselves outnumbered, ran for the town, leaving Drake’s men to “ease some of the mules which were heaviest loaden” of their burdens. The black slaves who were acting as drovers helped the robbers “through hatred of the Spaniard” by pointing out where the gold was packed. They took it all, but the silver was too much for them. They buried some of it, hid more in land crabs’ burrows, and sank the rest in a shallow stream, and then, according to the rueful Spanish report, “they made off, rapidly and in military order, this realm being powerless to prevent or hinder.”
By the time the Spanish had raised a troop of soldiers to pursue them, Drake’s gang had vanished into the jungle. All, that is, except for le Testu, who, badly wounded as he was, had been unable to keep up with the rest. Once more Drake proved himself a bad colleague: he abandoned his ally. Le Testu was captured. His head was cut off and displayed in the marketplace of Nombre de Dios. The Spaniards found and retrieved some, but not all, of the hidden silver, and then, with a fearsome storm coming on, they returned to Nombre de Dios. But Drake was not yet safe. Two of his party went astray in the jungle and were caught by the Spaniards. Under torture, one of them told where Drake had arranged to rendezvous with his pinnaces. After two days of struggling through the jungle heavily laden with precious metal, and having weathered the storm without shelter, Drake’s men arrived at the river Francisca to find lying offshore, not their own two boats, but seven Spanish ones full of armed men.
It was a dreadful moment. They naturally assumed their pinnaces had been found and captured. And if the pinnaces were taken, it could not be long before one of the men on board them revealed under torture where the ships were hidden. Pedro, taking in the hopelessness of the situation, suggested the Europeans abandon all thought of returning home and join the cimarrones in their outcast life. But Drake was not ready to give up. He rallied the men with a speech of desperate enthusiasm. They had not yet been seen. There might yet be time to reach the ships, he said, not by land (the cimarrones estimated that would take sixteen days) but by water. Declaring that “we should venture no farther than he did,” he called upon them to build a raft and volunteered to sail in it himself to fetch the ships.
Some sort of a craft was patched together from trees felled by the recent storm. The sail was a biscuit sack, the rudder a sapling. Drake and three other men, two French, one English, set off on their desperate mission. The raft rode so low that the water came up to their waists, rising to their armpits at each swell. Another storm, or even a high wind, and they would have foundered. Drenched in salt water and completely exposed beneath the tropical sun they rapidly became so sunburned that their skin peeled off in strips. Somehow they clung on, and for six hours they sailed like this through shark-haunted waters. Then, miraculously, they sighted their pinnaces, which had not been captured after all but had missed the rendezvous after the storm blew them miles to westward.
It was getting dark. They had no way of making contact. The pinnaces, oblivious to the totally submerged raft, sailed straight past it. Then, as the men on the raft watched in despair, came a second miracle: the pinnaces turned into a cove. Drake managed to bring his ramshackle vessel onto a beach just around a point from them. And then, close to physical prostration as he and his three companions must have been, half crazy from the strain of the last four days and the terror of their desperate raft ride and wild with the sudden relief, he staged a joke, what must for him have been one of his best ever. He ordered his companions to run frantically with him up to the pinnaces, as though they were being pursued by an enemy. Those aboard, evidently believing the four men to be the last survivors of some ghastly catastrophe, anxiously helped them into the boats and asked “how all his company did.” Drake, keeping a straight face, grimly answered, “Well,” his tone so somber that “his hearers all doubted that all went scarce Well.” Then, when he had fully fooled them, with a flourish he was still gloating over when he edited Nichols’s account twenty years later, he pulled a great disk of gold out of his shirt and told them, as they gaped at it, that “the voyage was made.”
The rest was easy. By the time the pinnaces reached the Francisca the Spanish boats had called off the search and left. All the surviving men were safely brought aboard with their gold and taken back to the ships. Two weeks later Drake sent a party back to the scene of the holdup. The Spaniards had dug up all the ground for a mile around, but his men were able to retrieve thirteen bars of silver that had not been found. The cimarrones were rewarded for their part in the adventure with presents of silks and linen and scrap iron. Pedro set his heart on the king’s scimitar which le Testu had given Drake, and Drake, reluctantly but gracefully, gave it him. The Frenchmen sailed for Europe with half of the booty and so did the English, but not before Drake had indulged in one last act of outrageous insolence. The Spanish fleet, now fully laden and on the point of setting out for Spain, was assembled at Cartagena. Drake sailed past in full sight, his ship decorated with silk streamers and banners so long they swept the water, and flying the flag of S
t. George. No one opened fire. No one pursued him. That night he provisioned for the Atlantic crossing by stealing another shipload of food. On August 9, 1573, he reached home. It was a Sunday morning. When the news was whispered in the church the people of Plymouth streamed down to the waterfront, leaving the preacher speaking to vacant pews. Some went to welcome home their sons and lovers; others—more than forty families—to receive the grim news that their young men were dead. The rest went simply to see Francis Drake bring home his gold.
Drake was now, in Camden’s words, “abundantly rich,” but as far as his own countrymen were concerned he was still obscure. Two years after his return from the Caribbean the Earl of Essex, writing to the Privy Council, referred to “one Drake,” whose ships might be for sale—clearly not a person of whom the earl or any of his peers had yet heard. To the Spanish, though—especially the Spanish officials in the Caribbean—he was already “El Corsario,” the pirate, the quintessence of criminal predation, the adversary whose quasi-supernatural prowess would serve to explain and excuse their own failure to defend themselves against him. As the councillors of Panama wrote to Philip II: “This realm is at the present moment so terrified, and the spirits of all so disturbed, that we know not in what words to emphasise to Your Majesty our solicitude … Disaster is imminent.”
The Spaniards also called Drake “El Draque,” the dragon, a simple pun which vividly conveys the role he came to play in their collective imagination. A dragon is a solitary predator, the enemy of all settlements, all civil communities. To Drake’s contemporaries dragons had until quite recently been real. One was sighted in Suffolk in 1405, “vast in body with a crested head, teeth like a saw and tail extending to an enormous length.” It slunk off back into the marshes from which it had come after devouring “very many” sheep. Dragons represented the wild. They emerged from horrid meres or sinister caves or dark, mysterious forests. They were embodiments of disorder and untamed bestial energy. To the Spaniards in America, in their little settlements encompassed by vast tracts of frighteningly alien, unmapped landscapes, by towering mountains and impenetrable rain forests, and looking out over seas aswarm with pirates, their communities must have felt as vulnerable as the city St. George saved when he speared his dragon. And then came El Draque, swooping down, swift, fierce, and greedy, on the terrified settlers of Nombre de Dios, of Cartagena, of Rio de la Hacha, and on the inadequately defended ships which plied between then. He was only a well-armed sea bandit with rather more skill and courage than his victims were accustomed to, but he seemed to them superhuman.
Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship Page 26