by Alec Waugh
He had made a fortune while comparatively a young man. The Queen had granted him a country house. He acquired land. His first wife had died and he remarried. He served on a royal commission, a highly important one, that was to decide the future strategy of naval war. Which was the more effective, the big ship or the little ship? Frobisher, Carew and Raleigh sat with him on the commission. He must have considered his work on it as important as a voyage to distant islands. He entered Parliament. He made speeches, he sat on committees, one of which considered the clauses of a bill ‘for the better and more reverent observancing of the Sabbath day’. His second marriage was only a few months old, his bride was young and beautiful. Everything seemed calm and peaceful, but in the spring of 1585 an English ship called the Primrose sailed into Plymouth with a grim tale to tell.
In the previous year Spain had endured an unlucky harvest. Galicia and Andalusia were faced with starvation. Philip II, to meet the situation, suggested that English ships bring wheat to Spain. He assured them that they could sail into Lisbon Harbour with immunity. He gave his personal guarantee that their persons and property would be safe. But he instructed his authorities in Lisbon to capture by surprise every English boat, confiscate the cargo and imprison the crew. Eleven ships were stolen in this way; the captain of the Primrose alone, suspecting deceit, was on his guard, and in the ensuing battle killed twenty-seven of the raiders, the Primrose herself escaping with the loss of three men only.
Philip did not consider his conduct treacherous any more than his viceroy had in San Juan de Ulúa twenty years before. The end justified the means, and Philip had the absolute certainty that his goal was sacrosanct. But in England the news of his double-dealing roused the country’s wrath. No one, incidentally, appeared to think that the captain of the Primrose had behaved treasonably in carrying food to a fleet that was shortly to invade England.
English merchants were indeed as late as this trading briskly with the enemy. Bristol supplied guns cast in the Forest of Dean. A Sussex ironmaster sold Philip a hundred pieces of cannon. In 1587 nine shiploads of light shotted and long-range guns with powder, shot and muskets crossed the Channel, while Spanish sailors were nourished by west country butter and Cornish pilchards. Business was business, and war had not been declared. The country clamoured for revenge and Drake had no difficulty in obtaining authority to fit out a punitive expedition. In terms of profit it was not his most successful voyage, but the damage to Spain’s prestige was incalculably great.
He began by stealing a Spanish ship loaded with salt fish. When its captain expostulated, he retorted, ‘If we are not at war, why have English merchants been arrested?’ Failing to intercept the Silver Fleet, he made for Santiago; one of his crew was murdered, so he sacked the city. Philip, when the news reached him, offered a reward of £40,000 for Drake’s head or person. Worse news was soon to follow. Drake landed at Santo Domingo. He sent a young Negro with a message to the governor. A Hidalgo who was standing by considered this an insult and ran the boy through with his sword. Drake proceeded to the spot where the murder had been committed and had two friars hanged. He told the governor that he would hang two more friars every day until the murderer had been executed. After due deliberation the governor agreed to hand over his officer. But Drake was not satisfied with that. The Spaniards must hang him themselves.
Santo Domingo was at this moment at the peak of its beauty and renown. An earlier Spanish report of it had said:
‘As touching the buildings, there is no city of Spain that is to be preferred before this, generally. The houses are for the most part of stone. The situation is much better than that of Barcelona, by reason that the streets are much longer and plainer and, without comparison, more direct and straightforth. For being builded now in our time, besides the commodity of the place of the foundation, the streets were also directed with cord, compass and measure, wherein it excelleth all the cities I have seen. It hath the sea so near, that on one side there is no more space between the sea and the city than the walls. On the other part, hard by the side and at the foot of the houses, passeth the River Ozama, which is a marvellous port, wherein laden ships rise very near to the land and in manner under the houses’ windows. In the midst of the city is the fortress and castle; the port or haven is so fair and commodious to defreight or unlade ships as the like is found in few places of the world. The chimneys that are in this city are about five hundred in number and such houses as I have spoken of before, of the which some are so fair and large that they may well receive and lodge any lord or nobleman of Spain with his train and family, and especially that which Don Diego Colon, the viceroy under Your Majesty, hath in this city is such that I know no man in Spain that hath the like, by a quarter. Likewise the situation thereof on being above the said port, and altogether of stone and having many large and fair rooms with as goodly a prospect of the sea and land as may be devised, seems to me so magnifical and princelike that Your Majesty may be as well lodged therein as in any of the most exquisite builded houses of Spain. There is also a cathedral church builded of late where as well as the Bishop according to his dignity, as also the canons are well indeed. The church is well builded of stone and lime and of good workmanship. There are furthermore three monasteries which are well builded, although not so curiously as they of Spain. There is also a very good hospital for the aid and succour of poor people. . . . To conclude, this city from day to day increaseth in wealth and order, as well for the said admiral and viceroy with the Lord Chancellor and council appointed there by Your Majesty have their abideage here as also that the richest men of the island resort hither for their most commodious habitation and trade of such merchandise as are either brought out of Spain or sent thither from this island which now so aboundeth in many things that serveth Spain with many commodities as it were with usury requiting such benefits as it first received from thence.’
The importance of Hispaniola had waned since that report was sent, but the city itself had waxed in charm and substance. Drake’s destruction of it was not an easy project. ‘We spent,’ the record runs, ‘the early part of the mornings in firing the outmost houses, but they being built very magnificently of stone with high lofts gave us no small travail to ruin them. And albeit for divers days together, we ordained each morning by daybreak until the heat began at nine of the clock that two hundred mariners did nought else but labour to fire and burn the said houses, whilst the soldiers in a like proportion stood forth for their guard, yet did we not or could not in this time consume so much as one third part of the town, and so in the end, wearied with firing, we were contented to accept of five and twenty thousand ducats of five shillings and sixpence the piece, for the ransom of the rest of the town.’
In the town hall where he collected this sum hung the city’s coat of arms. Its motto ran, Non Sufficit Orbis. The world is not enough. He made contemptuous mock of this. They had better, he suggested, send it back to Spain and have the motto changed, or else have the Caribbean properly policed.
Philip complained to Elizabeth in Latin:
Je veto ne pergas bello defendere Belgas;
Quae Dracus eripuit nunc restituantur oportet;
Quas Pater evertit, jubeo te condere cellas;
Religio Papae, fac restituantur ad unguem.
[I forbid you to continue to defend the Low Countries by war; what Drake seized must now be restored; what monasteries your father overthrew I order you to refound; see that the religion of the Pope is restored in every way.]
To which Elizabeth replied:
Ad Graecas, Bone Rex, fiant mandata Kalendas.
[My good King, your commands will be obeyed at the Greek Kalends.]
That is to say, never, since there are no Kalends in the Greek calendar.
A year later Drake was sailing into Cádiz Harbour. He captured the San Philip and brought back papers which proved the value of the East India trade and led to the founding of the East India Company. But the raid did not give Elizabeth much satisfaction, sinc
e it did not declare a dividend. She was concerned with what Drake brought back in plunder, not in what he had destroyed. But, in fact, the burning of many casks, seventeen hundred tons in weight, which could each hold thirty thousand tons of liquid, and which had been intended for the watering of the Armada, was a very serious blow to the Spanish administration. Seasoned staves were in short supply, and Philip was very heavily in debt. Elizabeth and her ministers never appreciated how poor Spain was. And the lack of fresh water because of faulty and leaking casks was one of the great handicaps under which the Armada travailed.
‘God blew and his enemies were scattered.’ The galleons of the ‘Invincible Armada’ were broken on the Scottish shoals and the Irish coasts; barely half of them limped back to Spain. Philip received the news in Barcelona. He could not believe that it had happened, that the fleet whose banners had been blessed should have been destroyed, that the fleet that had sailed to fulfil God’s will had sailed in vain. For a week he shut himself away in prayer and agony. He emerged tired and drained, but with the old assurance, the old self-confidence. If it was God’s will, he must accept it. God, in His own time, in His own way, would reveal the mysteries of the divine intention. Meanwhile, his work awaited him. There was the endless accumulation of dispatches and reports, the long rows of figures. There was the war in the Netherlands to be prosecuted. He must strengthen the security of the Silver Fleet, fortify the harbours where it was collected, so that the raids of El Draqui could be beaten off; institute a fast messenger service – avisos - so that news of an English or French sailing could set the governors on their guard. The cargoes of gold were taken on board small, fast cruisers at Havana. God must have had His own good reasons for the winds that had fallen on His fleet. Himself, he must wait and watch and be on his guard.
A mighty victory, an utter rout, a defeat whose very completeness gave it the high dignity of tragedy – so that for the vanquished as much as for the victors, for Philip as much as for Elizabeth, for the Spaniards as much as for the English, the preparation, the sailing and the destruction of the Armada can be seen in retrospect as ‘their finest hour’. It was the climax of thirty years of plotting, planning and high endeavour. The years that followed were, in many respects, grey with anticlimax for many of Elizabeth’s greatest seamen, for Drake and Hawkins, for Frobisher and Martin, and most of all, in spite of an occasional flash of the old magic, for Sir Walter Raleigh.
Raleigh, in many ways, stands apart from his contemporaries. He crossed the Atlantic in a different spirit. Whereas Hawkins had gone there as a merchant, Drake as a privateer, the Spaniards in search of gold and the conversion of the heathen, Raleigh had had the imperial vision. He was the first Englishman to see the value of a ‘New England’ which would send back raw materials, purchase English woollens, offer a home to a surplus population and provide an army when danger threatened. He never visited North America, and his colony in Virginia did not succeed in his lifetime, but it was the first stage in the building of the British Empire.
In his last great adventure, however, he did imitate the Spaniards, setting out deliberately in quest of gold. In the same way that Ponce de Leon had believed in the fountain of eternal youth, so did a great many Spaniards believe in the existence of an El Dorado in the centre of South America. They held that after Pizarro conquered Peru, a number of Indians fled inland and refounded their empire in the vast plains eastward of the Andes. The gold of Peru, they argued, must have come from somewhere. Surely, somewhere inland lay Peru’s heart of gold; surely, its wealth flowed through the veins of Guiana. This was the legend that fired Raleigh’s imagination.
In 1594 Raleigh’s personal stock stood low, his favour, in his own words, ‘declining and falling into a recess’. He had only intermittently enjoyed public popularity. He was arrogant; he had risen too fast; as the Queen’s favourite, he had made too much money. He was one of those to be accused, as Marlowe was, of atheism, and he had now lost the Queen’s good will by conducting an intrigue with one of her ladies-in-waiting, even though he subsequently atoned with marriage. He spent several months in prison, and on his release was banished from the court to his estate at Sherborne. He needed to restore his status. ‘I did therefore in the winter of my life undertake these travels, fitter for boys less blasted with misfortunes, for men of greater abilities, for minds of better encouragement.’
A year earlier one of his privateers had captured the report prepared for the Governor of Trinidad, Don Antonio de Berreo, by the head of a mission of thirty-five men that had been sent up the Orinoco to find and annex the capital, Manoa. The report encouraged Raleigh to send one of his servants, John Whidden, who had served with him during the cruise to the Azores in 1586, to examine the coast of Guiana. Berreo invited some of his men ashore and had them murdered. This action confirmed Raleigh’s resolve, and in the following February he sailed for Trinidad with a commission from Elizabeth ‘to discover and subdue heathen lands not in possession of any Christian prince or inhabited by any Christian people’. He was empowered ‘to offend and enfeeble the King of Spain’ and instructed ‘to resist and expel anyone attempting to excel within the place he chose for his colony’.
He was six weeks at sea, but he did not find the journey irksome. He travelled with a box of books and studied for several hours a day. He needed only five hours’ sleep. He set sail with five ships, only two of which reached Trinidad. He found the island scantily settled and was able to make a thorough reconnaissance. First casting anchor in the southwest of Curiapan, he followed the coast for five days. He found a salt river with oysters growing on its trees. He discovered a lake with ‘such an abundance of stone pitch that all the ships of the world might be laden from them’. He trimmed his ships with the pitch and found it excellent; it did not melt in the sun as Norwegian pitch did. He proceeded to what is now San Fernando. The island, he reported, ‘hath the form of a sheephook and is but narrow: the north part very mountainous, the soil excellent, will bear sugar, ginger, or any other commodity which the Indies yield, ... a store of deer, wild pigs, fruits, fish and fowl, ... for bread there are maize and cassava and divers roots: there are many wild beasts such as are not found in the Indies.’ There were several different tribes of Indians. The Spaniards had found gold in the rivers but neglected it because they were more interested in Guiana.
Such Spaniards as he met were ‘friendly, more for doubt of their own strength than for aught else’. They came on board to buy linen, and Raleigh ‘entertained them kindly and feasted after our manner. . . . These poor soldiers having been many years without wine, a few draughts made them merry, in which mood they vaunted of Guiana and all the riches thereof and all what they knew of the ways and passages, myself seeming to purpose nothing less than the entrance or discovery thereof, but bred in them an opinion I was bound only for the relief of those English whom I had planted in Virginia.’
The governor was an elderly man, the son-in-law of the powerful adelantado Gonzola Ximenes, from whom he had inherited considerable wealth. He did not interfere with Raleigh’s activities, but ordered the hanging and quartering of any Indians who befriended him. This decided Raleigh on offensive action. He felt genuine sympathy for the Indians; he also remembered Berreo’s treatment of Whidden’s sailors. He recognized that it would be highly dangerous for him to enter Guiana by small boats, travelling four hundred miles from his ships and leaving behind a hostile garrison that was interested in the same enterprise. Had he done so, he ‘should have savoured very much of the ass’. So he sacked the Spanish settlement of St Joseph and took Berreo prisoner?
In Berreo he recognized and appreciated a fellow aristocrat. He described him as ‘very valiant and liberal, a gentleman of great assuredness and of a great heart. I used him according to his estate and worth in all things I could, according to the small means I had.’ From Berreo he received what seemed to him a first-hand account of the Spanish officer, Martinez, who as a punishment for unsoldierly conduct was marooned on the Orinoco. Dis
covered by Indians, he was taken as a curiosity to their Emperor, who lived in Manoa. He was blindfolded during his journey, which lasted for two weeks. His bandages were removed when he entered the city. That was at midday; he travelled on till nightfall before he reached the Emperor’s palace. It was Martinez who invented the name El Dorado, because it was the custom of the chiefs to strip naked, anoint their bodies with a kind of white balsam, and have their servants blow powdered gold on them through hollow canes. They would then sit aglitter from head to foot, feasting and drinking for a whole week on end. Martinez stayed among these golden men for seven months; he was then blindfolded once again and led outside the city.
Raleigh lingered longer than he should have done in Trinidad because he wished to obtain as much information as possible from Berreo. He found Berreo companionable, but was deeply shocked by his treatment of the Indians. He showed their chiefs the Queen’s portrait, explaining to them that he was the servant of a queen who was the great cacique of the north and a virgin, who had more caciques under her than there were trees on the island, who was an enemy of the Castellanos in respect to their tyranny and oppression, and had sent him to free them and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest. Raleigh learned that the resentful Indians had driven the Spaniards out of Guiana and that there remained only a small garrison on an eastern branch of the Orinoco delta, which would not interfere with the exploration he planned to undertake up the western channel.