A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  His feats are common knowledge. Every English schoolboy is familiar with the voyage of The Golden Hind, the first English ship to sail round the world, and with his raiding of the mule train between Panama and Nombre de Dios. Both stories read like a serial in a boys’ magazine; all the ingredients are there.

  Before embarking on his first adventure, on the isthmus, he reconnoitred the ground, making two explorer’s voyages on which he sought no trade, and attacking no ship or city. In a small ship of thirty tons, he searched for a small unsuspected harbour near Nombre de Dios which he could use as a base for operations. With the help, presumably, of Spanish refugees, he found one which was such a favourite breeding ground for pheasants that he called it Port Pheasant. He cleared the ground near the beach, he cut paths through the woods, he buried provisions. He also made friends with the local Indians and with a number of escaped slaves known as Cimaroons, who lived as nomads in the bush and were ready to befriend any enemy of Spain. Drake has been called an opportunist, and his success in action was largely due to his instinct for recognizing the psychological moment for swift and bold attack, but he laid his plans carefully, loading the dice in his own favour. When he sailed from Plymouth in May 1572, with the Swan and the Pasha, a seventy-ton ship, he was justified in feeling that he deserved success.

  Students in courses of creative writing are taught that there are formulas for the writing of best sellers. For the romantic novel it is, ‘Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl.’ For the western, for the adventure saga, a hero starts out with courage, resolution and the sense of a just cause. He meets adversity, his luck deserts him, but his courage does not falter. Eventually fortune ‘turns its wheel’ and victory is his. Drake’s voyage to Nombre de Dios fulfilled this formula in every detail. As he landed at his secret harbour, he noticed that the trunk of one of the trees was glittering in the sunlight. A metal plate had been nailed to it. On the plate had been cut the message: ‘Captain Drake. If you fortune to come to this port make haste away. For the Spaniards which you had with you here the last year have betrayed their place and taken all that you left here. I depart from hence this present 7th of July 1572. Your loving friend John Garret.’ Drake read this message on July 12. We know nothing of John Garret or of the Spaniards who betrayed him, but that warning notice is the prelude to a sequence of adverse events.

  In addition to the two ships, Drake had brought three small pinnaces, made in parts, to be assembled quickly. In them he sought another harbour. He encountered two small frigates from Nombre de Dios. The slaves who were loading timber warned him that a garrison of soldiers was shortly expected, to protect the city against the Cimaroons. Drake had to act quickly.

  On the night of July 28, he was within striking distance of Nombre de Dios. The attack would be made at dawn, he told his men. But as the night wore on he realized that his young crew was feeling the nerve strain of its long trek down the coast. Inactivity might prove more than they could stand. The moon began to rise. The sky was cloudless and he grasped his chance. ‘There comes the dawn,’ he cried. ‘Get under way.’

  The attack was a complete surprise. The town was protected against land attack from the Cimaroons, but not against a sea attack. Only one gunner guarded the shoreside battery. He fled in terror. The town was waked by his cries and by the tolling of the bells from the church tower. With his drums beating, his trumpets sounding, his fire-pieces lit, Drake marched down the street toward the market place. The militia and the inhabitants under arms were already mustered. They fired, but they fired low and only one man, a trumpeter, was killed. Drake answered promptly – musket fire, arrows, then a charge. The Spaniards, still in a daze, broke and fled.

  The town lay at Drake’s mercy. But he had to work fast. The pinnaces were threatened. He had to man them before daybreak. He found a storeroom stacked with bars of silver, but Drake wanted the gold and jewels that were kept in the King’s treasure-house by the waterside. During his reconnaissance he had discovered where it was. But luck at that point deserted him. A tropical storm burst upon the town, the matches of his muskets were put out, the powder ruined and the bowstrings loosened. By the time the storm was over it was apparent that Drake was badly wounded in the leg. He had concealed his injury so as not to frighten his raw recruits, but the spot where he had sheltered from the storm was drenched with blood. His men insisted that he return on board where his wounds could be properly dressed. He was more than their leader, he was their navigator. Without him they were helpless. Weak with loss of blood, he let them carry him to the pinnace. He sailed from his harbourage with no richer plunder than a cargo of Canary wine which was to have been landed on the following morning. He had failed at the very moment when success was within his grasp. But he did not abandon hope. He had no intention of returning to Plymouth empty-handed.

  For six months Drake played the pirate along the Spanish Main. First he discovered near Darien a harbour concealed from view that was never used by Spanish vessels. Here he established a camp which he called Port Plenty; he built houses and a clubroom for his men. He trained them in archery. They played bowls and quoits; they were well fed with fish and deer and hogs. They recovered their health and spirits. He organized a series of raids. He captured on the high seas a number of frigates laden with wheat, poultry and live hogs. At the mouth of the Magdalena River was a settlement where the Spaniards replenished their ships on the homeward journey; it contained a consignment of a country cheese that was highly prized in Spain. That winter the Hidalgos of Seville and Madrid were deprived of that special delicacy. He sailed for Curaçao and captured a ninety-ton ship with a cargo of well-salted food.

  The Spaniards never knew where he was; he was here, he was there, striking suddenly, then slipping away like a panther in the jungle. And all the time he was weighing his new, second raid on the stores of treasure. Nombre de Dios was warned and guarded, but he had another project; to raid the mule train that crossed the isthmus between Panama and Vera Cruz. Herein lay the cause of his five months’ wait. He had learned from the Cimaroons when the great stores on the Pacific coast would be unbarred and the mules assembled. Many of his men were sick with fever, and several had died, including his brother Joseph, but on February 3, with eighteen of his own men and twenty-five Cimaroons, he set out across the isthmus.

  The journey took eleven days. They marched from dawn till ten o’clock, rested while the sun was high, then marched till four o’clock. Each night the Cimaroons built a camp out of palmetto boughs with a thatching of plantain leaves. Finally they reached a ridge. The guide led Drake to a tree in whose trunk had been cut steps. An arbour in which ten men could sit had been constructed at the top. Drake was the first Englishman to look on the Pacific. He knelt and prayed to God to let him sail on that ocean in an English ship. He then summoned his crew to stand beside him and listen to his repetition of the prayer. As he descended from the ridge, he felt that he was entering another universe. In the place of the wet, cool woods, he tramped through an open savannah; over its high pampas grass he caught glimpses of the church towers of Panama.

  This change of scenery determined the tactics of his ambush. Owing to the heat of the open savannah the first stage of the journey was made by night; the later stage was made by day through the cool woods. Drake planned to make his attack by night. He dressed his men in white so that they should not attack each other in the dark. He divided them into two groups.

  He had been told that the mules would be in harness, one behind the other, and that if the first mule was held it would lie down, and those behind would follow its example. Drake therefore set his men fifty yards from the road, spaced so that the first mule of the last train would reach his second group at the same time that the first mule of the first train reached the other.

  They waited, their eyes strained; at last, after an hour, they heard the tinkle of bells along the path, but once again Drake was to be disappointed. A drunken member of his crew was overhasty and warned the Spaniards
. The mule train that they captured was merely the commissariat of provisions. Only two of the mules were laden with ingots, and those with silver ones. Once again Drake was forced back to his pinnaces, but not even then did he abandon hope.

  The formula of the adventure serial was being followed to the final detail. He assured his men that the attack would be repeated, this time with greater strength; to be repeated, though, under different conditions. This time the attack was to be launched on the Atlantic side of the ridge, and this time they had the assistance of a French ship, which had been met by chance and whose captain would be clearly of greater use as an ally than as a competitor or adversary. The Frenchman was not welcome as a partner but there was no alternative.

  This time everything went to plan. Two caravans, one of fifty mules and one of seventy, weighed down with gold and silver, stumbled into the ambush. In the short battle that ensued the French captain was seriously wounded, but the Spaniards were outmanned and outgunned; within a few minutes Drake’s men were busy with the unloading of the mules; a little of the silver was buried in holes dug by land crabs under the roots of trees, but they carried the greater part on their own shoulders, along with the boxes of jewels and the gold. For two days they struggled under the weight of their plunder toward the river where they had left the pinnaces.

  At last they saw it, glittering between the trees in the morning sunlight, and then, at that final moment, Drake came very near despair. He saw, instead of his own two pinnaces, seven Spanish pinnaces patrolling the mouth of the river. He imagined that his crews had been captured, and had revealed under torture the secret anchorage where the frigates awaited him.

  Drake watched, concealed from view. At length the Spaniards abandoned their patrol and made for Nombre de Dios. The English were still in a desperate plight, marooned on a foreign shore, but Drake had recovered his composure. The pinnaces might have been captured, but it would take some time for the Spaniards to interrogate the sailors and plan their course of action. There was possibly still time to get to the ships, by water if not by land. Let them make a raft, and he for one would sail in it.

  Trees were felled, a sail was made out of a biscuit bag; an oar and rudder were made out of a sapling. With one of his crew and two Frenchmen, Drake climbed aboard. ‘If it pleases God,’ he said, ‘that I should put my foot in safety aboard my frigate, I will, God willing, by one means or another, get you all aboard, despite all the Spaniards in the Indies.’

  It was a hazardous journey. The sea was rough, the waves washed over them, the heavy tropical sun beat down; but the wind was at their backs, and at last, after they had struggled for nine miles down the coast, they saw their own pinnaces. There had been no cause for alarm. A head wind had delayed Drake’s two pinnaces and forced the Spanish pinnaces to shelter in the Rio Francisco.

  Drake saw the pinnaces before they saw his raft, and at this last moment his warm, full-blooded Devonian sense of humour inspired him to the playing of a practical joke. The swift dusk of the Caribbean was falling fast; the pinnaces were sheltering for the night. Drake landed out of sight, then ran round the spur of land as though he were being chased by Spaniards. He and his three companions stumbled aboard breathless and gasping. The crew of the pinnaces were convinced that disaster had befallen the expedition. How had things turned out, they asked. Drake replied with the cold monosyllable, ‘Well’, as he invariably did when he was the victim of misfortune; then, with a laugh, he pulled out from under his shirt a bar of gold.

  From now on the voyage was relatively simple. He recovered a part of the silver he had buried and made for home. He sailed past Cartagena with the cross of St George flying from his maintop. He captured a frigate that was loaded with food and honey, the latter a very useful medicine for the sick. In Cuba he acquired a great store of turtles. He sailed through the Bahama Channel, leaving behind a reputation not only for audacity and skill but also for gentleness. As Nichols, the official historian, relates, there were at that time upwards of two hundred frigates active in the Spanish Main, ‘the most of which during our abode in those parts we took, and some of them twice or thrice each; yet never burned nor sunk any, unless they were made out men-of-war against us or laid snares to entrap us. And of all the men taken in these several vessels, we never offered any kind of violence to any, after they were once come under our power; but either presently dismissed them in safety or kept them with us some longer time, provided for their sustenance as for ourselves and secured them from the rage of the Cimaroons.’

  Drake landed in Plymouth in early August on a Sunday morning, and the news of his arrival emptied the churches. The priests finished their sermons to vacant benches. The congregation was assembled on the quay ‘to see the evidence of God’s love and blessing toward our gracious Queen and country by the fruit of our captain’s labour and success’.

  He had been away fifteen months. Of the seventy-three men and boys who had sailed with him, less than half returned, but that was a reasonable quota in Elizabethan days, when disease was as lethal as the Spaniards’ muskets, and in compensation the holds of his ship were crammed with jewels and gold and silver. It was the first great voyage for plunder in the Caribbean. It set the pattern for piracy for a hundred years, until Henry Morgan brought the curtain down with his sacking of Panama.

  During the next thirteen years, achievements even greater were to be credited to El Draqui. On his return from the West Indies he furnished at his own expense three frigates which he put with his own services under the command in Ireland of the Earl of Essex. He achieved high distinction in battle both on sea and land, and it may be assumed that this service was a recognition of the Queen’s clemency in allowing him to keep his treasure, for at this time England was officially at peace with Spain, and it is undeniable that his exploits complicated her policy of appeasement.

  That policy was to be further complicated by the mighty voyage of circumnavigation on which he embarked in the autumn of 1577, a voyage, however, that was undertaken with the Queen’s connivance. When he had looked from that high tree at Darien he had prayed that one day he might be allowed to sail his own ship on those far waters. On his return to England, his imagination had been fired by the prospect of plundering the Spanish galleons on their way up the Pacific coast to Panama. Within three years he had begun to organize his plans, and Elizabeth was in a mood to offer him protection. She was aware that Philip IPs illegitimate brother, Don John of Austria, was planning to marry Mary, Queen of Scots, and share the throne of England with her. An expedition to attack Philip on the Pacific coast, where his harbours were unguarded, and the ships that brought the treasures of Peru to Panama were unarmed, fancying that they enjoyed complete immunity, might well provide the needed counter-irritant. Philip was again near to bankruptcy. Elizabeth saw a chance of teaching him that he could not carry out his plans in Europe unless he kept the peace with her. She informed Drake that she ‘would be gladly revenged on the King of Spain for divers injuries that I have received’. But she instructed Drake that he was to keep his plans a secret. So complete indeed was the security observed that when Drake’s fleet of five ships sailed out of Plymouth Sound, the Spanish ambassador in London believed that he was bound for the Levant.

  The voyage he undertook may well be regarded as the greatest ever made by an English seaman. Drake was not only the first Englishman to sail round the world, but he was the first sea captain to insist on equality before the mast under his command. He was accompanied by a number of gentleman adventurers such as had harassed Columbus’ second voyage; young men of birth and wealth who were ready to fight the Spaniard but who expected their share of the plunder in return for the financial aid they had given to the expedition, and who were not prepared to undertake menial tasks. Columbus’ Hidalgos were indignant at being forced to hew wood and build houses. Drake insisted that his young men of fashion should scrub decks and man the pumps. On this score alone, his voyage is one of the most important in the history of the sea; yet it l
ies outside the scope of a history of the West Indies. He never in the course of it sailed in the Caribbean. He made south for Mogador, called at the Cape Verde Islands, captured a Portuguese caravel and acquired from it a Portuguese pilot who knew the Brazilian coast. He rested in the mouth of the River Plate, sailed southward through the Straits of Magellan, then, working up the coast, began his series of raids on Spanish ports and shipping that led as much as anything to the delay of the ‘invincible Armada’.

  When he sailed from Plymouth, he had hoped after his attacks on the Spanish ships to return to England by the Northwest Passage. He had believed that there was some route through into the Caribbean. He sailed into San Francisco Bay. He planted the Queen’s standard in what now is Canada, but he found no Northwest Passage. He had, therefore, to turn westward and sail round the world if he would once again see Plymouth Sound. When he set out he had no idea that this expedient would be forced on him. He did not know to what extent he would be making history.

  He returned to Plymouth in the autumn of 1580. He had been away for close upon three years. He had the vaguest idea of what had been happening in his absence. As The Golden Hind swung into the Sound, one of his crew shouted to an astonished fisherman, ‘Is the Queen alive?’ Had the Queen not been alive, had Mary, Queen of Scots, been ruling in her stead, the situation might have been ominous for Drake, whose holds were filled with plunder from a nation that was, in diplomatic usage, friendly. But Queen Elizabeth was very much alive and very ready to appreciate the tangible results of her seaman’s enterprise. Though the English merchants in Seville, fearful for their property and status, besought her to disavow the pirate, though members of her council were insistent that the treasure should be returned to Spain, Elizabeth was too avaricious, too tenacious of her own authority to resign her share of half a million pounds. On New Year’s Day, wearing the emerald crown that Drake had given her, she announced that in the spring she would visit The Golden Hind in person and there dub its general a knight. She was already walking the road that led to the bonfires on the downs and to the fire ships in the Straits of Dover. But they lay seven and a half years away, and three years later it might well have seemed that Drake’s days at sea were over.