The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  Soon after midnight the wind at last got up, a land breeze aiding the fleet’s escape through the channel. The galleys and the galliot gave pursuit and as the dawn broke they opened fire. Drake at once cut sail, dropped anchor and invited the attack. It would have been suicide for the Spanish ships to have obliged him and instead Don Pedro de Acuna, harking back to a more courtly era of warfare, sent complimentary messages and a gift of wine and sweetmeats. An exchange of prisoners was also proposed but, before it could be effected, the wind again strengthened and Drake upped anchor and led his fleet west towards Cape St. Vincent. He left behind the wreckage of a large number of great ships. Spanish reports claimed that twenty-four had been lost, with a total value of 172,000 ducats. “The damage it committed there was not great,” Philip said on hearing the news, “but the daring of the attempt was so.” English estimates of the number of great ships captured or sunk were higher. Robert Leng, a gentleman volunteer with Drake’s fleet, reckoned the Spanish losses at “about thirty,” and Drake himself claimed to have sunk, burned or captured thirty-seven. In addition he had deprived the Armada of a substantial quantity of supplies. He had indeed “singed the King of Spain’s beard,” but he knew the blow he had dealt was far from a fatal one. As he wrote to Walsingham, “I assure your Honour, the like preparation was never heard of nor known as the King of Spain has and daily makes to invade England . . . which, if they be not impeached before they join, will be very perilous . . . This service which by God’s sufferance we have done will breed some alterations . . . [but] all possible preparations for defence are very expedient . . . I dare not almost write of the great forces we hear the King of Spain has. Prepare in England strongly and most by sea.”

  By 13 May Elizabeth had received the news and was pleased enough to tell the French ambassador. When he remarked that it was hard to believe that Drake’s fleet had “burnt the ships in Cadiz and sacked the country,” she snapped, “Then you do not believe what is possible.” As calm returned to Cadiz, the populace were already turning a humiliation into a victory. A procession wound its way from the cathedral to the monastery of San Francisco to give thanks for the salvation of the city, and almost at once the myth began to spread that the invaders had been driven off with heavy casualties and losses of ships. In fact the only English loss was the captured Portuguese caravel, and the only casualty was the gunner on the Golden Lion. 8

  Drake had meanwhile gone in search of the Biscayan squadron of Juan Martinez de Recalde, then at sea with half a dozen ships and five pinnaces and daily expected in Cadiz, but the closest Drake came to him was the capture of a dispatch boat carrying orders for de Recalde to change course and make for Lisbon at once to avoid Drake’s numerically stronger squadron. On 9 May, Drake broke off the search, summoned a council of war and told his captains that they were returning to Cape St. Vincent to capture the castle of Sagres, “being moved . . . in his Prince’s service with his courageous company to aggravate the honour of his fame.” Sagres was a shrewd choice, the point where all homecoming Spanish ships from the East and West Indies sought their landfall. It was even said that seamen could find it in darkness, mist or low cloud, for they had only to reach the 37th parallel of latitude out in the Atlantic and then sail due east until the scent of pine resin from the tree-clad slopes around Sagres told them that they had reached their destination.

  Not venturing to argue with Drake face to face, Borough returned to his ship after the council of war, but then sent an immediate letter protesting the decision. “There is no watering place nearer than half a mile, which is but a pool, to the which the way is bad . . . If you should achieve your purpose what have you of it? No matter of substance. Neither shall any man be better by it but a satisfying of your mind that you may say ‘What have I done upon the King of Spain’s land?’” He told Drake that his proper course was to cruise off the Cape and intercept Spanish shipping, rather than make a dangerous and superfluous landing on the coast. Whatever his motives, Borough’s advice was foolish. Galleons and men-of-war could not long remain at sea before foul food, tainted water and disease laid waste the crew. The slim, sleek lines of English galleons made them very fast and manoeuvrable but once the armaments, munitions and crew had been accommodated, little storage space was left belowdecks, and Drake and his men would far rather have filled their holds with Spanish gold than provisions and barrels of water, salt-beef and ship’s biscuit.

  The uncertainty about the duration of voyages also made supplying them a matter of luck. The rule of thumb adopted by the English navy was that the salted meat from one bullock’s carcass would feed one man for four months at sea, but on every voyage Drake always took pains to secure bases in which his ships could be repaired and careened, and his men rested and provisioned. On his voyage to Panama in 1573 he established a base on “Slaughter Island (because so many of our men died there),” hauling a prize he had captured ashore to serve as “a storehouse for ourselves and a prison for our enemies.” He had already been at sea a month. If he was to remain off the Spanish coast for perhaps two or even three more months a base was essential. Drake had once had his ship’s chaplain chained and manacled for what he perceived to be a disrespectful sermon, and to be lectured by Borough on the custom and practice of the navy, and told that he had exceeded the Queen’s instructions, was insufferable to him. In his eyes, Borough was at best insubordinate and at worst a traitor, sabotaging the morale of his men. Drake at once summoned a group of his captains to the Elizabeth Bonaventure and presided over a drumhead court martial, reading excerpts from Borough’s letter to make his case. Captain Marchant, sergeant major of the land forces, then took command of the Golden Lion and placed Borough in his cabin under arrest.9

  Drake’s plan to seize Sagres went ahead without further demur. He first landed his men at Lagos, fifteen miles down the coast, and a column of 1,100 men marched towards the town, either to test its defences or, more probably, as a diversion to conceal their true target. They made no attempt to breach the city walls but merely patrolled past them, exchanging fire with the defenders, and then returned to their ships. The diversionary raid complete, Drake’s fleet upped anchor and sailed up the coast to Sagres, where his troops made an immediate assault on the castle. It was “a place of such natural and ingenious strength as is a very miraculous matter,” occupying a forbidding site, high above the rocks at the very tip of Cape St. Vincent, and protected on three sides by the sheer cliffs and the sea. On its landward, northern side was a massive stone wall, forty feet high and ten feet thick. Four round towers protected the gatehouse, each mounted with a large brass portingale sling—a breech-loading, swivel-mounted gun with a killing range of up to a quarter of a mile.

  In the fifteenth century Henry the Navigator had established the castle as a formidable base where navigators, chart-makers, ship-designers, sailors, adventurers and explorers from all over Europe came together to pool their knowledge and expertise in a common goal: the exploration and conquest of new worlds. There they mastered the arts of navigation, studied maps bought, copied or purloined from as far away as Arabia and China, and then set out for southern Africa, Asia and the Americas, the first Europeans to sail there. Drake gave no sign that he recognized the history and significance of the site; it was simply a target to be attacked, conquered and then destroyed. He first offered the commander the chance to surrender. When this was declined, the attackers kept up a storm of musket and arquebus fire against the garrison at the firing slits and on the ramparts, while Drake himself laboured alongside his men to pile a mountain of pitch-soaked logwood and faggots against the great wooden gates. Within two hours they had been reduced to ashes, and as the English musket fire caused carnage among the defenders, the commander—already wounded twice—finally agreed to surrender.

  Drake allowed all the soldiers and civilians within the fort to escape with their personal property, leaving only their weapons behind, and by mid-afternoon his forces controlled the castle. Having conquered Sagres, Drake at o
nce destroyed it. Heavy guns—the portingale slings, a demi-cannon, a culverin and a demi-culverin—were lowered over the cliffs to the shore and loaded aboard his ship. His own armaments were already more than adequate but such heavy weapons, cast from bronze, were hugely expensive and rich prizes to add to his haul from Cadiz. Provisions and other items of value were stripped from the fort and it was then put to the torch. The terrified inhabitants and soldiery fled the other fortifications in the area without a fight and all four “castles at the Capes” were razed, “a matter of great importance respecting all shipping that comes out of the Straits for Lisbon.”

  Drake spent the next five days reprovisioning and resting his men, and beaching, rummaging (cleaning the gravel ballast) and careening each of his ships in turn, hauling them onto their sides with cables attached to the mainmast, allowing the ship’s hull to be scraped clean of barnacles and weed, and coated with grease or tallow, brimstone and tar. At the same time, the water butts were hauled out of the hold, scoured with sand and then refilled with sweet water. He could carry out these tasks with perfect impunity because even the fastest messenger, using relays of horses, would take days to carry the news of his attack on Sagres to Lisbon and Madrid. Even if troops were dispatched at once, it would take several days’ march over the rugged terrain and dismal roads before they could reach Sagres, and by then Drake would have completed his repairs and reprovisioning and put to sea. In any event, his onslaught and his reputation had put “the country in such awe that no man comes near us.”10

  He next set sail for Lisbon. Santa Cruz was in port with his twelve galleons of Portugal but they were poorly armed, for the guns that had been promised had not yet appeared, and he had neither gunners nor soldiers and no more than skeleton crews aboard. Lisbon was the most secure and formidably defended harbour in the world and even if Drake succeeded in passing the castles guarding the approaches, he still had to run the gauntlet of the fortress of Belém, a series of shore batteries and the guns of Lisbon Castle. Yet such was his reputation that an attack was widely expected. As word spread of his approach, troops from Recalde’s ships and the arquebusiers from Lisbon Castle were sent to Sesimbra—felt to be the likeliest point for an English attack— and seven galleys of the Lisbon Harbour Guard, under the command of Santa Cruz’s brother, Don Alonso de Bazan, put to sea to keep watch. However, Drake ignored Sesimbra and instead came to anchor in Cascais Bay, midway between the guns of Cascais Castle, protecting the fishing village at the westward end, and Castle St. Julian, an even more formidable fortress at the other tip of the bay, guarding the North Channel, one of the two difficult and dangerous approaches to Lisbon. The South Channel was guarded by the less intimidating guns of the Torre Viejo, but it was even more tortuous, so difficult that there were different specialist pilots for each section of the river as ships sailed upstream.

  Santa Cruz rushed more men and guns to defend Castle St. Julian and had his galleys ready to attack the small boats in the shallow waters if the English attempted a landing, but Drake had no intention of doing so. While his pinnaces wreaked havoc among the coastal shipping, seizing them, sinking them or driving them onto the rocks, he first tried to lure the galleys into a deep-water battle, but “the Marquis of Santa Cruz, seeing us chase his ships ashore, was content to suffer us quietly to tarry and never charged us with one shot.” Drake then offered an exchange of his prisoners for Englishmen held in Lisbon. “The Marquis sent word that, as a gentleman, he had none.” It was a lie; Drake knew from English agents that there were several Englishmen languishing in the galleys and prisons of Lisbon. He therefore resolved “that all such Spaniards as it shall please God to send under our hands, shall be sold unto the Moors, and the money reserved for the redeeming of our countrymen.” He also issued a challenge to Santa Cruz to bring his ships out to do battle, but as the wind freshened northerly he broke off negotiations and sailed south again, back to the Cape.

  For the next ten days he remained at Sagres, once more replenishing provisions and water, pumping the bilges and careening his ships. The sick men were put ashore to rest and recover. Meanwhile Drake’s pinnaces—fast, manoeuvrable and sufficiently heavily armed for the task—patrolled the coast, sinking or capturing every ship that crossed their path. Well over a hundred were sunk or burned at sea, in harbour or on the beaches flanking the Cape. More than half were tunnyfishing boats and Drake’s men destroyed not only the boats but even the nets drying on the beaches. The Spanish fishing fleets in the North Sea and on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland had already been destroyed or driven off by English ships and this assault sorely depleted the other prime source of salt-fish for the Armada. The remainder of Drake’s prizes were barques and caravels bearing stores and provisions along the coast and into Lisbon. Some were laden with barrel staves—“hoops and pipe staithes, above sixteen or seventeen hundred ton in weight, which cannot be less than 25 or 30,000 ton [of supplies] if it had been made in cask ready for liquor, all of which I commanded to be consumed into smoke and ashes by fire, which will be unto the King no small waste of his provision beside the want of his barques.” The bonfires of barrel staves represented a serious loss to the Armada; barrels made of seasoned oak were essential for the storage of wine, water, salt-fish, salt-beef, oil and ship’s biscuit, the provisions upon which it would depend when at sea. Drake’s men also “brought away and burnt seven hundred tons of bread [ship’s biscuit].” 11

  While he remained at Cape St. Vincent, Drake also paralysed the movement of Spanish supply and warships. Four great galleasses from Naples, the Sicilian galleys and the armed merchantmen of the Levant squadron all made port at Malaga, Cartagena or Gibraltar, and a few even ventured as far as Cadiz, but none dared sail further. With them were merchantmen, barques and caravels carrying the battle-hardened soldiers of the Naples regiment, ships’ crews scoured from a score of Mediterranean ports, and the foodstuffs, wine and warlike provisions for the Armada. Helpless in Lisbon, Santa Cruz could only wait, lacking both the men and the armaments with which to put to sea. Philip received daily communications about Drake’s movements and bombarded his commanders with fresh instructions, often contradicting those he had issued the day before. His galleys were ordered out of port, then summoned back; his battle troops told to embark, then to disembark and march overland. Drake “merely had to shift his position now and again, and to every centre orders came tripping up each other’s heels till the whole system of the enemy was in tangled confusion.” Philip also sent panic-stricken dispatches to the governors of his New World territories ordering the flota to keep as far south as possible on its easterly voyage to Spain, avoiding the waters habitually used by Drake. His ships bearing these orders were instructed to carry false dispatches to mislead Drake if they fell into his hands.

  Captain Fenner, Drake’s second-in-command, was well aware of the value of the position they had seized. “We hold this Cape so greatly to our benefit and so much to their disadvantage, as a great blessing was the attaining thereof, for the rendezvous is at Lisbon, where we understand of some 25 ships and seven galleys. The rest, we lie between home and them, so as the body is without the members and they cannot come together by reason that they are unfurnished of their provisions in every degree . . . As there has been a happy beginning, so we doubt not that God will have the sequel . . . that it is not the multitude that shall prevail when it pleases him to stretch out his hand.” On the same day, 24 May, Drake wrote to Walsingham, “As long as it shall please God to give us provisions to eat and drink, and that our ships and wind and weather will permit us, you shall surely hear of us near this Cape of St. Vincent where we do and will expect daily what Her Majesty and Your Honours will further command. God make us all thankful that Her Majesty sent out these few ships in time. If there were six more of Her Majesty’s good ships of the second sort, we should be the better able to keep their forces from joining and happily take or impeach his fleets from all places in the next month or so, after which is the chiefest time of their re
turns home [i.e., the end of the good sailing weather] . . . There must be a beginning of any good matter, but the continuing to the end until it be fully finished yields of the true glory . . . God made us all thankful again and again that we have, although it be little, made a beginning on the coast of Spain.”12

  Although the destruction of Spanish fishing boats and barrel staves and the disruption of Spanish shipping making for Lisbon was valuable in strategic terms, it earned no profit for Drake’s fleet of privateers and armed merchantmen, and there must have been discontented rumblings from captains whose first priority was always the profit of themselves and their backers, not the interests of their country. Drake may have seemed the absolute ruler of his fleet, as William Borough could testify, but in fact he required the support or at least the acquiescence of his other commanders, and they were free to desert him and make for home if they felt his chosen course was unlikely to bring them rewards. Drake himself faced commercial pressures, not least from the Queen, whose insistence on receiving a return on her investment was unshakeable, even when her ships were engaged in the protection of her throne.

  Perhaps as a result of these pressures, on 1 June Drake sent home a few prize ships and others carrying the sick and wounded, and the loot from Cadiz and the raids along the coast. He also sent a further note to Walsingham, suggesting that the ship he had sent with his dispatch should be returned to him with other reinforcements. As a result of this appeal, “four of Her Majesty’s ships with six sail of the merchants” were duly readied to join Drake at Cape St. Vincent, but by then he had already changed his plans. His fleet escorted the homeward-bound vessels well to the west of the Cape, but as they shifted course to the north, he held on due west into the Atlantic, setting a course for the Azores on the track of the San Felipe, a carrack reported to be returning from Goa with a rich cargo of goods and spices.