Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The nature of the charges was hazy, the ensuing argument between Drake and Doughty acrimonious and incoherent. Eventually Drake asked the jury to decide on the truth of the allegations that Doughty had sought to “overthrow the voyage.” Leonard Vicary, a friend of Doughty and a member of the jury, objected: “This is not law, nor agreeable to justice.” He asked Drake, “‘There is I trust, no matter of death?’ ‘No, no, Master Vicary’ quoth he.”

  The jury found the allegations to be true. Drake then left Doughty under guard and called the rest of the men around him down by the water’s edge, and showed them a bundle of letters from important people, from Essex and Hatton and Walsingham, as though to demonstrate the basis of his authority. But still he couldn’t produce a commission from the queen. With ludicrous effrontery he pretended to have forgotten to bring it out: “God’s will! I have left in my cabin that I should especially have had.” He then harangued the crowd, telling them that Doughty sought to kill him, and in doing so he would be the death of all of them, for without Drake, their admiral and chief navigator, they would be lost for ever in this horrid place. He told them that while Doughty lived their voyage could not go forward, but that if it did each man would be made rich enough to live like a gentleman. Then, flagrantly going back on his assurance to Vicary, he called out, “Therefore my masters, they that think this man worthy to die let them with me hold up their hands.” A majority did so.

  Two days later Doughty, who had comported himself in the meanwhile with a dignity and serene courage which impressed everyone, made his confession to Francis Fletcher (admitting to nothing which would have justified his execution), took the sacrament with Drake, dined with him, spoke with him alone for fifteen minutes, embraced him, bade him farewell, and then laid his head on the block. The execution accomplished, Drake lifted the decapitated head with the words “Lo, this is the end of traitors,” and ordered that the corpse be buried on an island which he named the Island of True Justice. (John Cooke designated it differently, as “that place where will was law and reason put in exile.”)

  The episode left a permanent stain on Drake’s reputation. Despotic and irascible as he was, he repeatedly, later in life, quarreled with his deputies, questioning their loyalty or accusing them of cowardice. Each time his killing of Thomas Doughty was brought up against him. Once they returned to England John Doughty charged him with murder. Queen Elizabeth didn’t immediately disallow the case but she contrived to have it thrown out of court on a technicality. Drake was not found guilty, but neither was he exonerated.

  The story remains enigmatic. Malicious gossip suggested a sexual motive for the killing: Doughty was said to have been having an affair with Drake’s wife. Camden had heard variously that Drake was jealous of Doughty’s popularity and “cut him off as an emulator of his glory,” and that he had received secret instructions from Lord Leicester to “make away Doughty by any colour whatsoever.” Perhaps Doughty really was trying to usurp Drake’s command or perhaps, like John Winter, he was nervous about Drake’s piracies. If so, Drake may well have felt he had to silence him before he began on the massive robberies he had come to perpetrate: in killing Doughty, he killed his own conscience.

  Or maybe Drake’s anxiety was of quite a different kind. Dante consigned his Ulysses to Hell because he had run out on his responsibilities as father, son, and husband, driven by his culpable “longing to explore the world, to know the vices and virtues of all people,” and sailed, like Drake, far out to the west, past the Pillars of Hercules, “beyond which men were not to sail.” Two and a half centuries later exploration no longer seemed sinful in itself, but there was still something transgressive about adventures which led people so far from home and family and pitted their puny intelligence against the tremendous forces of the unmapped natural world. Sailors have always, notoriously, been prone to superstition and on Drake’s voyage there was especial cause for fear. John Doughty was a self-proclaimed sorcerer. He told the seamen that he knew how to poison a man with a diamond, inducing a secret malady which took a year to kill, and that he and his brother could raise the devil in the form of a bear, or lion, or an armed man. These were dangerous claims. As their quarrel accelerated Drake repeatedly accused both the Doughty brothers of conjuring up storms. “At any time when we had any foul weather, he would say that Thomas Doughty was the occasioner thereof.”

  In Elizabethan England even the most sophisticated of intellectuals took magic seriously. Drake himself was believed to be a wizard. His Spanish enemies thought him one, and in several stories which were still being told in Devon at the beginning of the nineteenth century he is credited with magical powers and with having a devil at his beck and call. According to one fable his wife, despairing of his ever returning from his circumnavigation, resolved to marry again. As she approached the altar to celebrate her second wedding, Drake, on the other side of the world, divined what she was about and fired a cannonball clean through the earth, so that it erupted suddenly through the Devonian church floor, an awful warning to his faithless wife and a stunning way of getting rid of her suitor. Robert Southey, collecting folk tales in the 1820s, was told that the missile could still be seen.

  Whatever the nature of the threat Doughty posed, Drake had to confront and overcome it before he attempted the passage through the Magellan Strait. In retrospect, Doughty’s execution, performed beneath Magellan’s gibbet, takes on the nature of a sacrificial ritual, a purge of Drake’s personal trepidation and the excision of a point of weakness in his troop of men. Before the Greek ships could sail for Troy, before Achilles and his fellows could begin their grim quest for glory, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia at Aulis. In Patagonia Drake, putting to death the man who had been, by all accounts, his closest friend, hardened himself and his fleet for the ordeal ahead of them by the spilling of human blood.

  That ordeal was indeed awful. With surprising candor Drake told his men, “I have taken that in hand that I know not in the world how to go through withal; it passeth my capacity, it hath even bereaved me of my wits to think on it.” Two and a half centuries later, Southey found West Country people still boasting of Drake’s fabulous exploit in “shooting the gulf” and, on further questioning them, realized that the “gulf” they envisioned was not simply a geographical one, a stretch of navigable water, but a fabulous chasm dividing the ends of the earth one from another. According to their cosmography the earth was not a perfect globe. East and West curved round toward each other, but the twain did not quite meet, and Drake’s ships, in passing from the known world to the unknown, would have to leap over a horrid abyss, bottomless and dreadful, before reaching the questionable safety of the ocean beyond.

  Drake knew better, but even he, a master navigator, was at the limits of the known. He was heading for the Strait of Magellan because, like all other Europeans at the time, he believed the land to the south, the archipelago of islands including Tierra del Fuego which constitute the triangular tip of South America, was the outlying region of a vast unexplored continent, Terra Australis, which stretched southward unbroken across the Antarctic to the South Pole. It is a misconception which may have made little difference to his plans—later sailors often chose to pass through the strait, where they could take on water and trap penguins, rather than expose themselves to the ferocious seas around Cape Horn—but it is a measure of the darkness into which he was going. At Port San Julian he was a man afraid, not because he was a coward but because he was about to attempt something which as far as he knew had been achieved only once before in human history. And of Magellan’s crews only one man in fifteen came back alive; Magellan himself was among the dead.

  First Drake reestablished his authority on a new basis. Hernán Cortés, on landing in Mexico, proclaimed the foundation of the city of Vera Cruz (this foundation was a purely conceptual act, the city had as yet no material existence) and appointed a council to govern it. The councillors declared all preexisting orders and appointments (including Cortés’s generals
hip) invalid. They then instantly reappointed Cortés, who from this time on owed his authority not to the Spanish colonial government but to his own initiative and his men’s consent. Similarly Drake, before embarking on his voyage into the unknown, claimed absolute control over his little fleet.

  On the Sunday after Doughty’s execution Drake ordered every man in his company to make his confession to Francis Fletcher and to receive the sacrament, presumably with the intention of putting the fear of God into any would-be mutineer. Throughout the time they remained at Port San Julian he issued a stream of threats, declaring at one time that anyone who was even an eighth as guilty as Doughty should die for it, at another going aboard John Winter’s ship, the Elizabeth, and threatening to hang thirty of her crew. Then, on August 11, when he was almost ready to sail on, he called the entire company ashore again for a great assembly on the beach. Fletcher appeared ready to deliver a sermon, but Drake forestalled him: “Nay, soft, Master Fletcher,” he said, “I must preach this day myself.” He began by reminding his men how far they were from home and friends and how compassed about with enemies; he exhorted them to work together. He then offered one of the ships, the Marigold, to any who wished to turn for home, but he made sure it was an offer they couldn’t accept: “Take heed they that go homeward, for if I find them in my way I will surely sink them.” The men all agreed to stay. He then asked them from whom they wished to receive their pay. From him, they replied. He asked them further whether they would have wages “or stand to my courtesy.” They chose the latter. In other words, rather than accept the regular pay (presumably for the short trip to Alexandria for which they had originally signed up) they would settle for a share of whatever spoils the voyage might yield, to be paid not by the syndicate of investors who had got up the expedition, but by Drake himself, at his “courtesy.” They were henceforth to be his men, and his alone. He had dissolved their allegiance to the modern state of Tudor England and reformed the company on the archaic lines of a feudal war band, with himself as liege lord.

  They were probably a fit crew for the task before them. It was by no means unusual for half or more of the men on a long voyage to die in the course of it: only those with very little to lose went to sea. Richard Hakluyt described the men on a typical voyage of discovery as being drawn from prisons and “dark corners.” Sailors were decayed merchants, debtors, escaped convicts, and “others that hide their heads.” Walter Raleigh called them the “scum of men,” and Drake himself said they were “unruly without government” and “the most envious [in the archaic sense of surly and begrudging] people of the world.” According to John Cooke, who was one of them, the men who went around the world with him were “a company of desperate bankrupts that could not live in their country without the spoil of that as others had gotten by the sweat of their brows.”

  There were yet the officers and gentlemen to be dealt with. Rodrigo Díaz, whose father was a nobleman and who grew up at court, was romanticized by the balladeers as a man of the people, one whose hard-headed, hardworking, hard-fighting persona put the silk-clad courtiers to shame. To those who sang of his exploits in the centuries after his death it was an important part of his legend that the Cid was a self-made man, neither an obsequious courtier dependent for his fortune on his lord’s grace nor an effete aristocrat who owed his status to an accident of birth. One ballad has him defiantly asserting that his brocaded tents are finer than the king’s and, what is more, they are evidence of wealth not passively come by but hard-earned: “I gained them on the battle field / With this good lance of mine.” Another, in which he refuses to abase himself before the king, pointedly contrasts his bluntness of manner and plainness of dress with the fancy clothes and propitiating ways of highborn courtiers: “They all bestrode their prancing mules, / A steed of war rode he.” They have scented gloves and plumed hats; he has gauntlets and a steel casque. While their swords hang idle from their belts, Rodrigo carries his in his hand, ready for any challenge.

  What the Cid was imagined to be, Francis Drake really was. He was not wholly uneducated. He was literate and a fine draftsman and he had learned enough astronomy and mathematics to become a superlative navigator. He had made himself rich. But his origins were obscure to the point of shadiness. Back home, where social advantage and political clout might rate as high as actual achievement, where charm counted for as much as courage, Drake (no Alcibiades) was at a disadvantage. But at Port San Julian he decreed into existence a classless society in which all (other) men were equal, and equally subordinate to him. “Here is such controversy between the sailors and the gentlemen, and such stomaching between the gentlemen and sailors, that it doth even make me mad to hear it,” he said. “But my masters, I must have it left, for I must have the gentleman to hale and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman.” His speech has been quoted over and over again as a statement of egalitarianism and a sturdy refusal of social injustice, and so it can be read, but it is worth bearing in mind that the man who wrote it down, John Cooke, said of Drake that “he in tyranny excelled all men.”

  Still standing in the freezing cold and louring semidarkness of that dismal beach Drake turned to the most important of the gentlemen, his captains, and one by one he publicly dismissed them from their commands. This was no rehearsed charade. John Winter, Drake’s vice admiral, and John Thomas, captain of the Marigold, both protested vehemently, asking him to give his reasons for sacking them. He responded by asking brusquely “whether they could make any reason why he should not do so.” The killing of Doughty had given him an awful power over his subordinates. Back in England John Winter was to say that as Drake’s officer he went in fear of his life. There was no further protest. Drake harangued the company a while longer, describing the genesis of the voyage in terms which stressed his own paramount authority and his closeness to the queen, and then he declared all the officers reappointed. Like the crew, they were now, willy-nilly, Drake’s men.

  Four days later the little fleet, now reduced to only three ships, the Pelican (soon to be renamed the Golden Hind—Drake gave it its new name soon after entering the strait), the Elizabeth, and the Marigold, moved on southwards.

  The Magellan Strait is not a channel but a maze. The Atlantic entrance is framed, in Francis Fletcher’s account, by “high and steep grey cliffs full of black stars, against which the sea beating, sheweth as it were the spouting of whales.” The passage is tortuous, sometimes a narrow channel between awesome cliffs, sometimes opening out into lakes immeasurably deep. Fierce and erratic currents race from east to west. As Drake’s men entered they saw a volcano, “burning aloft in the air, in a wonderful sort, without intermission.” All around towered mountains whitened by ice and snow but made gloomy by their own monstrous shadows. Surrounded by this awful grandeur the little ships battled against the elements. Fletcher describes whirlpools that “would pierce into the very bowels of the sea.” Winds roared through the chasms, sometimes sweeping them back in an hour over distances it had taken them days to cover, at others meeting with contrary winds in terrifying welters of howling air and water. On an island they found a human skeleton, which in the written accounts of the voyage takes on a portentous weight as the sentinel over a pass as terrible as the Valley of the Shadow itself. De Silva, the kidnapped Portuguese pilot, reported that in passing the strait “many of Drake’s men died of cold.”

  After sixteen days they reached the Pacific Ocean, but their ordeals were not over. A series of storms engulfed the ships and for some six weeks they struggled desperately with ferocious winds and wild seas. The darkness of the southern winter was compounded by an eclipse of the sun. The men, already enfeebled by the bitter cold, began to succumb to scurvy. Of the fifty men on the Elizabeth only five escaped the sickness. At times they were close enough to shore to hear the waves crashing against rocks invisible to them in the darkness and fog. At others they were driven far out into the uncharted oceans. Those who survived came to believe they were being subjected to a fearf
ul test through which only those marked out for hero status could pass while others perished or turned back dismayed.

  One of the ships, the Marigold, was lost. Fletcher recorded seeing her go down “swallowed up with horrible and unmerciful waves, or rather mountains of the sea” and hearing the anguished cries of the twenty-eight men on board her. Then the Elizabeth, captained by Winter, became separated from Drake’s Golden Hind as they both struggled to avoid being dashed to pieces among rocks. Winter managed to find his way back into the strait and to anchor there. A few weeks later he turned for home—because the master and mariners refused to go further, according to his account; because he himself had despaired, according to one of theirs.

  The Golden Hind was left alone. Driven before winds “such as if the bowels of the earth had been set all at liberty,” buffeted by seas “rolled up from the depths, even from the roots of the rocks, as if it had been a scroll of parchment,” scudding onwards in great clouds of spray, carried “by the violence of the winds to water the exceeding tops of high and lofty mountains,” Drake and his men, now only 60 or so remaining of the 160 (or thereabouts) who had left Plymouth eleven months before, were driven farther and farther south until at last they were able to anchor by an island. There Drake, or so he later told Richard Hawkins, made the most momentous of his geographical discoveries: that beyond him there was nothing but water, that “both the seas [the Atlantic and the Pacific] are one.” Some of his contemporaries were skeptical. Richard Madox, who sailed to the strait in 1582, believed that Drake had cribbed the astounding information from stolen Spanish charts and claimed it for his own discovery like “a man who has cast off all shame.” But Drake’s account is perfectly plausible. He told Hawkins that he went ashore carrying a compass with him and at the southernmost point of the southernmost island of the archipelago he “cast himself down upon the uttermost point, grovelling, and so reached out his body over it.” Like a figurehead on the prow of the American continent, he breasted the tumultuous ocean that no other European had seen before him. Returning to his ship he declared he had been on the “southernmost known land in the world.”