Jan Patočka’s answer to the ever expanding ‘front’ on which he saw humanity fighting was what he called ‘the solidarity of the shaken.’ The solidarity he had in mind would emerge in improvised groupings of those who are able to see how nature, both our own and the earth’s, is being aggressed by the current order. Whether that’s in the current rate of extinctions around the world or in a 1951 permission to quarry along Portland’s southern edge. Such fellowships would oppose that order not as some national or doctrinaire formation. They would arise rather from something much more elusive, to register their collective response.
Such a response demands, now, a fundamental retelling of the core stories about who we are. Patočka once took as his theme Europe’s expansion through ‘the voyages of discovery and the scramble for control of the earth’s riches.’ These voyages, he argued, had ‘led to the emergence of a completely new form of reason, by now the only kind we have. This is a rationalism which, in aiming at mastery over material goods, is instead mastered by them, through the search for profit.’
We are all of us, whether we know it or not, the uneasy heirs of that critical moment in human development. Only a new way of seeing that moment can finally make some benign sense of the global awareness it afforded us.
NIGHT FALLS, QUICKLY
The travel narratives of the early explorers are riddled with memory-holes and evasions: dates that don’t agree, glaring omissions, the merest glimpses of what we should now like to know so much more about. I’m drawn to these muddles that get hushed up and played down and rubbed out. What did those islanders in Cornwall, or the Eskimos on the other side, make of Davis mapping their world? Drake might be in favour of the dignity of all human beings by the time he and Diego met, but he had commanded slave ships only a few years earlier. Even if Diego was paid the same as European crew-members, how did he fit in socially? What did he think of the West Country or London once he got there? What did they think of him?
Gappiness of this kind is as endemic to historical as to personal memory. The voyage on which Diego eventually died, namely Drake’s circumnavigation of 1577–80, is as gappy as any of them. It isn’t only ‘operational details’ that the chroniclers kept so close to their chests. There was, for example, a traumatic episode where the thinness of detail strongly suggests more than the protection of technical data.
Thomas Doughty’s execution at Port St Julian is an enduring riddle. There are whole online forums devoted to the subject. I’ll summarise briefly. Doughty was a lawyer by training, one of the ‘gentleman adventurers’ on board. An investor in the voyage, he seems also to have had inside knowledge of its purposes and was made commander of a Portuguese prize taken off the Cape Verde Islands. A chest on board was broken open without the General’s authorisation and looted. Amidst the accusations and counter-accusations, Doughty claimed magical powers and sounded out some of his crew as allies in a plot to seize command of the expedition.
The whole affair is very obscure and Doughty’s motives are baffling. Class conflict, clash of temperament, political and/or sexual intrigue have all been suggested. The argument had simmered for months by the time they reached Port St Julian, in what is now Argentina. Drake formally charged him as a sorcerer and a traitor, and with attempts at ‘hindrance and overthrow’ of the voyage. After a trial of dubious legality, Doughty was beheaded.
Every detail of every narrative has been exhaustively picked over. Two centuries later, Dr Johnson confessed himself mystified and two centuries on from Dr Johnson nobody is any the wiser. But another episode, similarly opaque, has received much less attention. It obviously mattered at least as much to those who were there. It is the only event, from the Indonesian section of the journey, on which all accounts are agreed about the date.
After calling at one of the Spice Islands, the Golden Hinde had already for some weeks been trying to reach the Indian Ocean. The ship needed to travel west but the prevailing wind and the lie of the land forced it to travel south instead, along rugged coasts and now through uncharted waters off Celebes. Through a maze of islands, deep bays and narrow peninsulas the ship had laboriously picked its way until, on the evening of 9 January 1580, open water at last appeared up ahead. It must have been a huge relief to everybody.
The crew, half way round the world and more than two years out of Plymouth, knew they were now approaching the start of the long run homewards. Ballasted with treasure, additionally loaded with six tonnes of spices, the vessel’s hull was low in the water but freshly careened and this was a state-of-the-art war ship. Fortune had been with them. The General ordered full sail to be set.
We know a curious fact about Drake’s daily routine. He retired to his cabin promptly at eight, every evening, presumably to complete the day’s entry in that long-since-vanished log book. Yet this fact is never placed alongside another: when the Golden Hinde struck a reef that evening, it was at ‘the beginning of the first watch’, which is to say, just after eight o’clock.
In an over-confident novice it would have been a disastrous blunder. In a mariner of Drake’s standing, it was something stranger and far worse. His authority rested upon his abilities as a navigator and a man of action. The strangely sloping weather deck, as the crew swarmed up on to it, and the realisation that their General was capable of such an error, must have seemed unbelievable at first, then deeply disorienting.
That order to set full sail, at nightfall, upon a sea for which they had no reliable charts, was one of the very rare occasions on which this great navigator spectacularly misjudged his situation. A short time after the order was given, the vessel lurched abruptly to starboard and rose out of the water, stuck fast, keeling over dangerously. The same strong wind that had so recently filled its sails with fresh hope, now jammed its timbers against this ‘shoal’ and held them there. It was now all that prevented the ship’s rolling off and capsizing at once.
This was the 16th century’s Apollo 13 moment. Night had just fallen, quickly, as it does in the Tropics. They had no reliable charts and the nearest land was about twenty miles away. Mission Control, for these stranded sons of Renaissance Europe, was still somewhere like Heaven, not somewhere like Houston.
The wind holding them fast kept up for twenty hours. The episode is generally treated as a frightening but mercifully brief interruption to the Golden Hinde’s progress around the planet and into the history books. That is certainly a view which the officially sanctioned accounts encourage. But in the first of those versions, published nine years after their return, the entire episode is glossed over in one and a half paragraphs. This reticence will have been no accident. Those involved were still alive, with interests to safeguard. Almost half a century must pass before The World Encompassed, the first full official account, would appear. Though more detail is given there, striking contradictions and omissions remain.
There exists also the curiously fragmented ‘Anonymous Memorandum’, which casts doubt on both of these accounts. This Memorandum has long been well known to historians and its authenticity is not in question, but it includes two phrases which have not, to my knowledge, been much dwelt upon.
The ship, of course, survived the ordeal. Had it turned out otherwise the History Channel would be searching still for The Lost Treasure of Pelican. Once the ship had regained the open sea, Drake summoned the ship’s chaplain, Francis Fletcher, and ordered him to be shackled to a ‘staple’ driven into the forecastle deck. We have already encountered Fletcher the wildlife watcher. Not long out of Cambridge when he joined the expedition, he had meanwhile travelled in Italy and as we’ll see he appears to have acted on board as a physician as well as the crew’s confessor. Protestant opinion took hygienic reform of conditions on English ships seriously, which can only have enhanced Fletcher’s status. A Spanish prisoner noted that he was highly respected by the crew, who listened attentively to his sermons.
The notes he made about this section of the voyage were long ago lost. But what the Anonymous Memorandum tells us
is that, shortly after this narrow escape, Drake ‘ex-communicated’ Fletcher ‘out of the Church of God, and from all the benefits and graces thereof.’ He called him ‘the falsest knave that liveth’ and furthermore ‘denounced’ him ‘to the devil and all his angels.’
Clearly there had been a disagreement. From the official narrative we gather that there were, broadly speaking, three things which happened during the stranding. Fletcher did the religion: he preached, led prayers and finally, when all hope was lost, he offered communion. Drake took on the technical side, descending into the hold to man the bilge pump. The ship was found not to be taking on much water, so he waited for daylight then took the boat out to look for any ground within 300 fathoms to which they could fasten the anchor, thereby levering the ship off the rock. Finally, it is known that the crew threw several cannons and three tonnes of spices over the side, before the wind shifted and the ship was re-floated.
It has always been assumed that Fletcher, as he preached, interpreted their stranding as divine retribution, particularly for Doughty’s execution. That seems very likely but Drake’s words hint at more than that. Those who knew Drake described him as a well-spoken man. The violence of these words suggests that he has just had a very nasty fright.
It must have been through his chaplain’s preaching that the offence had come, so the theological inflection to Drake’s insults, denouncing Fletcher ‘to the devil and all his angels’, will have been no accident. Angels, in January 1580, were no sentimental frippery and the devil certainly wasn’t. These years take far more of their colouring from the Middle Ages than we are accustomed to imagine. The existence of angels was still believed in quite literally and the devil also had command of several squadrons. His had fallen through pride, through turning their minds away from God and his creation, to admire their own ‘sublimity and honour’ instead. They were to be found scattered throughout the physical universe, hiding in caves and mines, for example, from which they emerged to do men harm.
Even stranger is the other phrase that has been missed. Drake threatened to hang him if he ever again even once came ‘before the mast’. That last phrase refers to the part of the ship where the crew lived. This is clearly an accusation that Fletcher had tried to incite a mutiny. It also strongly suggests he had met with some success. ‘The General’, in other words, had found his authority seriously questioned during those twenty hours and Fletcher had done the questioning. This was about much more than the dubious legality of Doughty’s execution. Questions about Drake’s leadership and the expedition’s purpose had been opened up at a critical moment and by a highly-respected member of the crew.
We are not told exactly what those questions were, but we can make a pretty good guess. We can certainly do better than explain them away as some kind of left-over from the Doughty Affair, but the trial at Port St Julian offers some useful hints. During and after the trial, Drake made two related but contradictory points about class. He argued in a speech to the jury that the voyage could not continue with Doughty alive and promised rewards unlike any they had known. If they sailed on ‘the worst in this fleet shall become a gentleman.’ In context, this was not far short of a bribe. Drake was offering them a share in the treasure and a leg up the social ladder. But at a religious service after the beheading, he interrupted Fletcher to deliver a ‘sermon’ himself, threatening anyone who questioned his command from now on with the same fate. Doughty’s treachery was traceable to the idleness of his class, he argued now. The ‘gentlemen’ and the ‘mariners’ were now to ‘hale and draw together.’
He offered his crew, in other words, a new start, a personal interest in the plunder and a deceased hate figure, in the form of Doughty, who was alleged to have conspired against their bettering themselves in this way. So when Fletcher raised the question of their later shipwreck as divine retribution, it would have been retribution not only for Doughty’s execution but for the crew’s complicity in that death. In re-opening the question he went right to the heart of what the voyage had been for.
LISTENING WITH AN EARTHENWARE POT
Francis Fletcher was an educated man who had, for more than two years now, heard the confessions and tended the injuries of crew-members. He had won their confidence. These were men who had enlisted for a trading voyage to Egypt. They had not enlisted for a three year journey to the ends of the earth. There are clear signs that on this, as on other long-range voyages of the time, what we would call depression was a problem. But he knew also that to weigh freedom from all debt, forever, to weigh long coveted fields and houses, not to mention bragging rights, against abstractions like justice, is to ask much.
Francis Drake had received little formal education and was keenly conscious of this. He was, however, one of the world’s great navigators and a famous man. He also knew his crew, but as their General and, ultimately, as their paymaster. His authority rested on the ability to bring his men home and make them rich. His skills as a man of action would make this possible.
There is another curious circumstance here which historians do not dwell on. All detailed accounts are agreed that the cannon were jettisoned only after Fletcher had preached and celebrated communion. By then, almost an entire day had passed since the ship ran aground. Drake’s hesitation is of course understandable: he was loath to disarm the vessel. He was by then the most wanted man on the planet. Indeed, we know, as he could only guess, that the flotilla of Spanish ships sent to intercept him left harbour in the very same week that the Golden Hinde was ‘delayed’ off Celebes. The ship was still only half way around the world: to complete this journey un-armed would be a gigantic risk. Drake had only just blundered as never before and had now, additionally, to explain to his men that he was not going to lighten the vessel by the readiest means available.
Fletcher could do little more, at first, than seek to contain some of the hysteria. He would have done so in the language of the time. Doubt not, he would have assured them, that from death we go straight into life. He would have meant it, too. This was an age of literal faith and he was that faith’s official representative on board. A lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path is God’s word. He would have called upon the Judge of all men, in all ages, in all places, to visit them here with His spirit.
Of your great goodness, merciful father, you have fashioned us even of the dust to be living creatures according to your image. Your providence has breathed into us also the knowledge of our salvation in the redemption of Christ. Visit us now on these horrible seas and fearful waves – visit us in the greatness of your fatherly kindness and fortify our faith that we waver not in this most perilous place and dangerous time.
Once these negotiations with the celestial powers were underway, Tom Moone would have been sent below decks. Moone was a large man, a hedonistic and violent mercenary and a firm friend of the General’s. He had personally guarded Thomas Doughty as he awaited ‘trial’ and seems to have taken keen pleasure in terrorising and robbing the Spanish inhabitants of coastal settlements. As ship’s carpenter on one of Drake’s earlier expeditions, he had been trusted to carry out secret orders to scuttle a vessel. Someone was needed now who could remove decking at speed, allowing access to the damaged timbers. Moone had the skill, the physical courage and the devotion to Drake. He would surely have made one of the small party which made that descent.
Fletcher would have noted Tom Moone and other of the General’s ‘old heavy friends’ being sent below. As Fletcher prayed on deck, these men fetched from the galley an earthenware pot to detect the exact location of any broken timbers. Placed with its open end against the lower deck, an ear pressed against its base would detect a low roaring when they had found the place.
Was it the absence of Drake’s closest allies or the urgency of their plight or both which inspired Fletcher to venture certain risky suggestions? The scriptures and the Church Fathers are, after all, not exactly silent about this kind of thing.
He that loveth gold shall not be justified, and he t
hat followeth corruption shall have enough thereof. Gold hath been the ruin of many, and their destruction was present. It is a stumbling-block unto them that sacrifice unto it, and every fool shall be taken therewith.
Fletcher would certainly have been able to summon such verses.
Or did he venture even closer to the bone? And men go forth to admire lofty mountains and the ocean and the course of the stars, and forget their own selves while doing so. Knowing passages of St Augustine would have been one way to taunt the General. Would he have refrained now, when Drake, who gave no quarter himself, had never looked so vulnerable?
Or was it, rather, as much as Fletcher could do to hold their attention at all as the vessel shifted uneasily beneath them, bumping against the reef, ready to split at any moment? Might it have been in silence rather that they prayed?
From that part of his notes which has survived, it’s clear he interpreted the ship’s treatment by the elements as a direct and literal expression of God’s verdict on their behaviour. Of a fifty-six-day storm which the ship had survived in the South Pacific, he wrote:
it Pleased him againe for his name sake to heare the prayers of them wch vnfeignedly called vpon his holly & reuerend name … Wherefore hee caused the Sonn by day & the moon & stars by night to shine vpon vs.
There is no reason to imagine he saw this present disaster any differently. Indeed, that it had struck precisely when the ship was farthest from home would surely have impressed him as significant. God had given them exactly half the circumference of the globe to reveal to Him their true purpose in setting out. The assumption that a technical competence would see them through had been abruptly suspended. This switch back to a religious interpretation of the voyage was accompanied by a sudden inversion of the command structure. And both of these, for Fletcher, were part of a divine plan to rescue this mission from itself.
The Paradoxal Compass Page 8