The Paradoxal Compass

by Horatio Morpurgo

  This was dangerous reasoning but as an experienced preacher, he could quickly have sought refuge in generalisation.

  Thou most dear father who hast alone the ends of all things in thy hands, watch over thy servants with thy holy power. May the frailty of our flesh never drive us into doubt of your loving kindness. That were death indeed, but they only need fear death that are troubled in their consciences and seek not your comfort.

  But this surely was the time to speak truly. Now or not at all. He might well have raised, perhaps obliquely, the subject of Doughty, might have expressed his regret at having not done more to save him, at having gone along, however grudgingly, with Drake’s ‘deal’. Now was the time to attend to that deeper self-inflicted moral injury from which they were all suffering. The Doughty he recalled to the men then, or re-invented for the occasion, would have been invested with many fine qualities. He would have been the man who had questioned Drake’s plans from the outset. The man who had seen that their future swoop on the Spanish trading routes would be actuated by greed. That it would, at the same moment, both succeed brilliantly and ruin them morally. So here it all was, come horribly true.

  Drake observed this brinkmanship closely. With the crew in their present mood, he wanted most of them where he could see them. Tom Moore now reappeared, briefly conferred with Drake, then again went below. Fletcher faltered at the sight of him, the crew too were distracted, and Drake seized the initiative. Drake often led services himself. This was no time, and it would not have been in character, even in this most precarious moment of his career, to allow such a sermon to continue. He interrupted with some words of his own. Their tone was that of the bluff commander – I imagine them a little self-consciously jaunty, to disguise both the injury and the shame.

  To preach the Gospel with no fine rhetoric, Master Fletcher, lest the Cross of Our Redeemer should lose its power to speak home – such is the Minister’s true office. A Minister does not give up his ship for lost, any more than he may give up a soul for lost. Matters regarding the ship fall rather within the Captain’s competency. Of souls, too, I may perhaps speak, when the chaplain is so eager to fear the worst. I am content – so may we all be – that my soul goes hence to a far better place, when God wills it. For his part, furthermore, the Captain fears there has been some sharp altercation between our ship and a certain Signor Rock. What think you, Master Parson? Shall we endeavour to part them or no?

  That he personally went below to man the bilge pumps is usually cited as evidence of a great captain in action. He left the mere Fletchers of this world to moralise their dilemma into a thousand similes. But it is also possible that the Drake who sought in this way to divert attention back to his competency in practical matters was a dangerously isolated commander, scrambling to reassert his badly damaged authority. And simultaneously fleeing and terminating a sermon he wanted no more of.

  The bilge water would also, it’s worth mentioning, have been the best guide to the state of the hull. What he would have feared, as the first bucket filled, was sea water that smelt just like sea water. Bilge water in a sealed hull soon develops its own unmistakable reek, especially in the Tropics. Drake manned the pumps himself because he wanted to be the first to know what the bilge smelt like. It smelt bad, which was great news. The hull was still sound. The Golden Hinde was not finished yet, and neither was he.

  We should imagine the crew meanwhile waiting up on deck for the sound of a bell. For even here Drake had managed to work in a No-Popery feature: Spanish prisoners who were shown around the vessel reported their indignation at seeing a bell looted from a church set up above the bilge pump. If Drake needed help, he would have rung that bell. He didn’t ring it. A little credibility had been salvaged.

  As day broke, the tide had still not floated them clear. The ship’s boat was lowered. If lead and line could detect good ground anywhere close by, the ship’s anchor would be fastened upon the sea bed, creating a fixed point by which the ship could be prised loose from the rocky cleft in which she had stuck fast.

  THE BARBAROUS PEOPLE OF THE HEATHEN

  Time and again the crew would have seen the lead drop and then watched as the line was paid out after it. The sloping deck offered a clear view of these proceedings to anyone who could bear to watch. Three hundred fathoms of line found nothing all morning and faith in the General’s abilities continued to ebb away. As they had prayed for a high tide to lift them off, now they prayed for the low tide to bring some sea bed within reach. But the tide here, it seemed, was no Christian tide. The wind which neither slackened nor strengthened held them upright here, but was that wind an agent of the Christian God, or was it rather the agent of some foreign demon? The longer this lasted, the greater the strain upon the ship’s structure and their exhausted nerves alike.

  The swift and violent end for which they had first prepared themselves gave way now, in their sleep-deprived ruminations, to an even grislier scenario. It lurked just below the everyday consciousness of any long-distance mariner in that age. The ship was built to last, after all. She might remain here, intact, for weeks, while they quickly ran through their supplies. Perhaps God had devised a more cunning set of torments.

  It is significant that, in the narrative we have, the sailors speculate at this point about the ‘barbarous people of the heathen’ which are sure to inhabit that island looming on the horizon. It is, of course, a property of the barbarous people of the heathen that they eat not only each other but also and especially any strangers that chance upon their shore. It was surely the prospect of cannibalism – their own – which they were actually contemplating.

  We should consider also that they were two degrees south of the equator in the hottest season of the year. Strong winds might have taken the edge off the worst of the heat and humidity but would only have added to the dangers of dehydration. The ship’s boat carried twenty at most. They were fifty-nine. Which twenty would sail with the General if he decided to leave?

  Any departure was sure to be justified as a search for fresh water. Those who wished to believe that were free to do so. Meanwhile the thirst intensified and the water they had was strictly rationed. As they watched that vain search for some sea-bed, even as they prayed, they must also have been remembering, doing the calculation in their heads. Would it be those who had spoken up for Doughty, or those who had kept quiet? Is it not highly likely that Drake set an armed guard on the weapons store the moment his ship hit?

  None of this is to suggest that the chaplain and the crew did not continually implore the Heavens to be merciful as they watched from that tilted deck. God does not delight in the death of a sinner. It was not to be believed that the reef could fall away beneath them so steeply on all sides. Christ would be merciful yet.

  The image of these men as maritime heroes and/or international gangsters is so deeply imprinted that the scene on that deck, as the last hope trickled away, is hard for us to picture. Their famous General, out there on the water, the day after his nightmare mistake, would not, I think, have resembled very closely that Son of Devon who smiled confidently from the pages of Proud Heritage. Haggard, sleepless, here was a man in serious trouble. Tossed violently back and forth in a little boat on an angry sea, he desperately cast about for the luck which had abruptly deserted him.

  Having taken that boat as close to the reef as he dared, Drake gives the order to return to the ship. As he steps on board, having found nothing, so those other explanations for the disaster, hinted at earlier by the chaplain, surge back to the fore. One source records that Drake walked with a slight limp, from a gun-shot wound sustained years earlier. If it had once seemed to lend him a martial swagger, to enhance his legendary aura, it only added now to the air of dejection as he rejoined his crew. The ingenuity of the greatest mariner on the planet cannot avail against the truth: their collision with this rock is divine retribution.

  Drake knows this is the perception he is returning to. He has put it off for as long as he can. But at last his wi
zardry has failed him and failed them all. The ship’s boat is swung back onto the weather deck and secured against the railings. It is ‘by general voice determined’ that the chaplain shall give a sermon and then offer communion.

  EARTH, ASHES AND EMERALDS

  Francis Fletcher left Plymouth with a physician’s chest in his cabin, but less than six months into the voyage the bottles of medicine inside were all smashed during a storm off Brazil. By the time they made landfall on the other side of the Atlantic he had nothing to treat the crew, many of whom were ill. He found that seal fat would heal sores, ‘whereof diuers of our men had good Experience by my directions to their great comfortes.’ He went in search of medicinal herbs, too. The expedition lost its surgeon early on and Fletcher’s notes suggest that he filled the vacant role. It is worth noting that it was a pharmacist who later took such care to copy out his narrative.

  His physician’s chest somehow came to the attention of the Patagonian Indians with whom they made contact in the (southern) winter of 1578. Fletcher seems to have liked them. His warm account of their hospitality and egalitarian society immediately precedes his account of Doughty’s show trial and execution and the implied contrast is hard to miss. The use they made of plants and animal fats interests him too and he is attracted by their love of music. They, in turn, discover hitherto unsuspected potential in his physician’s chest full of broken bottles. Much to its owner’s delight, they put it to use as a novelty percussion instrument.

  When Drake threatened Doughty’s supporters after the execution, the chaplain would have been among those he was addressing. Yet only weeks later, having broken through into the Pacific, Drake was hit in the face with an arrow during a fight with indigenous people on the island of Mocha. Might it not have been Fletcher who extracted the tip and tended the wound? Fletcher would certainly have prayed with Diego, Drake’s servant, as he died from wounds received in the same fight. Did this restore the bond of trust, or only put it under further strain?

  Perhaps they hardly knew themselves. Less than two weeks later, after the attack on Santiago de Chile, Drake gave gold fittings taken from the cathedral there to Fletcher. Was this as close as the great man came to apologising? Was it thanks? But in England, Catholicism at this time was closely associated with the witchcraft of which Doughty had been accused. Was this an insult, then, or barbed with mockery, an accusation of some hidden weakness for Popery? Or was he deliberately aiming at a sinister incoherence? In any case, Drake was known to them all, but especially to Fletcher, as a man of flesh and blood, as vulnerable to injury and, it now appeared, as liable to error as anyone else.

  The Fletcher, then, who addressed the crew on that deck more than a year later, addressed men he knew well at the very limits of their endurance. This was the experienced crew of a state-of-the-art war ship, utterly undone by a single calamitous error of judgement. This voyage had transformed their expectations so many times already, but the future had never been so dark. He had more than a license to say exactly what he thought. He had a duty to do so. One subject in particular would have been fresh in his mind.

  Maria was one of three or four slaves they had taken during their run up the western sea board of the Americas. If that really was her name, was she Catholic, then, when they found her? Did the crew of the Golden Hinde proceed to impress upon her the virtues of the Protestant faith? Was she convinced? She was pregnant, anyway, by the time the ship reached the Spice Islands. Drake left her and the two other black passengers on the island where they had spent some time careening the ship and feasting on crayfish so enormous that one of them could feed three or four men.

  Another anonymous account, the ‘Short Abstract of the Present Voyage’, written by a crew-member, states that Maria became pregnant ‘between the captaine and his men pirats.’ It is quite possible that this reflects nothing but somebody’s intense dislike of the General. But even William Camden, a contemporary and an admirer, reproached his conduct in this affair. The ‘fair Negroess’ had been ‘given him for a present by a Spaniard whose Ship he had spared.’ His conduct in setting her ‘on Shoar’ had been ‘inhumane’.

  The ‘falsest knave that liveth’: that is how Drake damns his chaplain. This can only be the response to a very serious accusation. Since none of the official accounts tells us what it was, what are the other possibilities?

  There was da Silva, too. The Portuguese pilot, seized along with his ship off the Cape Verde Islands, was pressed into service as their guide to the Brazil coast. He seems to have been popular. Both Drake and Fletcher befriended him. He also attended their religious services and was seen doing so by Spanish prisoners, who were sure to report that to the Inquisition once they were set free. So to abandon da Silva to his fate in Guatalco, Mexico, the following year was certainly to abandon him to the ministrations of the Holy Office.

  Seen a certain way, Drake might stand accused of many things. Daring master of surprises, he caught the Spanish napping: isn’t that how the story runs? But Fletcher could have turned that against him easily enough. They had been taken for Spaniards or Portuguese everywhere they went in the Pacific, because no English boat had ever been seen there before. Like the Spanish and the Portuguese, they wore beards, too. Their equipment and their appearance were barely distinguishable from those of their enemies. Yes, that had given them a tactical edge. But what if their motives, too, were identical to those of their enemies? Had English greed not proved to be much the same as Spanish greed?

  These would have been dangerous arguments, coming from a chaplain of all people. But some such ‘dangerous argument’ certainly was raised. Wasn’t their cover, about a new religion through which Christ would set the world free, really just that, a cover? Protestant fig-leaf trumps Catholic one. To question this would have come perilously close to treason. But perhaps this is where the reference to the devil and all his angels comes from. What if this new gloves-off Fletcher represented the gould and sylver in their hold as devils? Their condemnation of Doughty, their seizure of one ship after another since – these had been forms of devil worship. Here, now, was the destruction they had brought upon themselves.

  No 300 fathoms of line would ever come close to measuring the depth of the trouble they were in. He would have argued, with St Paul, that the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God.

  You who have knowledge of our innermost hearts, keep us from all sinful intentions and injurious dealings with our fellow men. Grant that we may possess at last the heavenly wisdom to do as we ought.’

  For the Greeks, as Fletcher would have known well, eyesight was a divine gift allowing men to admire and study the heavens. This was how they had learnt to harmonise the natural truth of reason within them and the divine reason which governed the stars in their courses. This was how they learnt to regulate their actions. But what the General had applied to the heavens instead was the wisdom of this world. Their skills, their compasses and quadrants and traverse boards, had warped their understanding all down one side. They might think of themselves as the new men but theirs was merely the old sin of pride.

  An illustration would have come to mind easily enough. The two brightest stars in the Little Bear, known as ‘the Guards’ for their proximity to the Pole Star, were used by mariners as a clock and would certainly have been used so by the crew of the Golden Hinde, just as the Southern Cross was, and is, used in the southern hemisphere. Were the heavens, then, a time-piece, a useful appliance, an ingenious device? Was this what the new learning amounted to? Had it made of the stars so many navigational aids, so many pegs by which to lever ourselves back and forth about the world?

  But seek her early, said the Preacher, wisdom is worth more than emeralds. Neither breadth nor space shall keep us from the Word of God, said Paul.

  If you, Lord, have determined to gather us to your people, so prepare us every one that our death may be to your glory and to the salvation of our souls. We are but earth and ashes. Possess us at last, oh Lord, with a holy unity, i
n the fear and love of your majesty …

  In what they all took to be their last moments upon earth, what flashed upon the preacher’s inner eye was all they might have sailed for, and had not. He implored these men to send each one of them a fathom line deep into his own heart, to sound his own motives and actions, right to the bottom, to see them for what they had been and repent at last, while a little time was still left to move God’s pity.

  But this was not yet his final word. He had listened the previous day, with the rest of the crew, to Drake’s order that the guns were not to be thrown over the side. In God’s name he now countermanded that order, adding that as much of the cargo as was ready to hand should also be jettisoned. And he added a proviso, a saving clause, the crucial distinction that made this an act of obedience, all be it to a higher authority. This action, he argued, would only find favour with God if every man, in carrying it out, acknowledged his part in the collective guilt and in this way unburdened himself of it. It must be their souls and not their ship only which they sought to lighten.

  So Fletcher preached. The import of his words would not have been lost upon his listeners as he prepared the sacraments and invited the crew of the Golden Hinde to the Lord’s table. It was a dangerous Christ they remembered that day on the sloping deck. And moments later, in bundling those sacks of ginger and cloves and pimento through the main deck gun ports, each one worth its weight in silver, the longing for redemption and survival were completely fused. To the General this was mutiny, but Fletcher had claimed to be speaking on God’s orders and Drake would have been a fool to contradict him. His command was, in effect, suspended.

  Perhaps the behaviour of the crew just as the wind began to swing round would have been most mysterious of all. They would have been attuned, for twenty hours, to the slightest change in its direction or force. Perhaps even below deck they were so at one with this vessel by now, they would have sensed the alteration in a moment. There was nothing of theology in this. This was mastery of a craft pure and simple. And the moment this change was detected, the polarity of the situation was instantly reversed once again.