by J. D. Davies
‘Well done, lads!’ cried Tom. ‘Let’s show ’em more of what Englishmen can do, shall we?’
In truth, the exchange of fire between the two English ships and the small Spanish garrison was brief and ineffective on both sides. The Spanish weapons were too small to do any serious damage, while the English could bring too few guns to bear to destroy the town. As the sun began to sink and the shadows lengthened, Drake gave the signal for the ships to move further out, beyond the range of the Spanish guns. There they dropped anchor and waited for Hawkins and the rest of the fleet to complete their leisurely passage from Borboruta.
* * *
Hawkins and the main body of the fleet arrived in the outer anchorage of Rio de la Hacha five days later. The following morning Tom Stannard found himself standing in the bow of the Jennet’s pinnace, one part of a small flotilla of English craft making for the shore to the west of the town, well out of the range of the Spanish cannon. Hawkins was confident that he could get Castellanos to back down by making a show of force, and the small army that formed up on the beach amply fitted the bill. Two hundred heavily armed men, sailors, gentlemen volunteers and the remnants of the late Edward Dudley’s old troop assembled together in as military a manner as they could manage under a large flag bearing St George’s cross, for they knew Spanish scouts were watching them from a little way inland, somewhere within the short, thick trees and cacti that covered the sandy terrain. Then, with Hawkins, Tom, Drake, Barrett and several of the other officers at their head, they set off to march towards the town.
They had not gone far before Tom saw, dead ahead, a makeshift rampart of sand, rocks and old carts, from which flew the red and yellow banner of Spain. The number of heads bobbing above the palisade, and the number of weapons from which the bright sun glinted, indicated that Castellanos had deployed his entire force, equal to or slightly larger than their own.
Hawkins called a halt. He turned to his officers, smiled, then nodded to one of the young boys from the Jesus, who at once held high a tall flagstaff and began to wave it, unfurling the large plain blue flag that it bore.
* * *
Jack Stannard, aboard the Jennet a little way offshore, saw the flag. He turned, noted that all the ships near him had seen it too, and nodded with satisfaction.
‘Well, then, lads,’ he cried to the gun crews along the starboard side of the ship, ‘time to give King Philip a warm kiss from Dunwich!’
The men cheered, Jack checked the bearing and the situation ashore one final time, then gave the command.
‘Give fire!’
The guns of the Jennet spat flame and roared, followed at once by those of Drake’s Judith and the Hawkins-owned William and John. But even this barrage was overshadowed moments later as the batteries of the royal warships the Jesus and the Minion, anchored slightly further out, opened up. Smoke rolled over the entire English fleet, but the men of the Jennet had already reloaded their guns and were ready to fire once again.
* * *
Tom and the rest of the English force watched as the vicious thunderstorm of cannonballs poured down onto the Spanish defences. Several balls landed in the water, sending up great spouts, which showered spray over the men on the beach, but then the gunners on the ships got their range and balls began to strike unremittingly against the rampart itself. Shattered timber, sand, stones and human limbs exploded into the air. Wounded men screamed, and King Philip’s flag was ripped in half.
Hawkins watched impassively for several minutes. Then he signalled to the same boy to wave his blue flag once again, and the fleet ceased fire.
Hawkins drew his sword, pointed it toward the shattered rampart, and yelled, ‘God and the queen!’
The cry was echoed throughout the little army as it advanced. The arquebusiers and crossbowmen were in the van, firing at will into the broken and confused ranks of the Spaniards. Tom waited for the signal from the admiral, then moved forward with the pikemen and halberdiers, his sword drawn and ready. The response from the remains of the Spanish rampart was feeble, barely more than two or three arquebus shots. Some of the defenders were already fleeing back towards the town. Then Hawkins turned and shouted the order.
‘Charge!’
Tom broke into a run. The sand was hot beneath his feet, the sun relentless upon his back, but strangely, he felt cold, intent only upon the enemy ahead. He had a curious thought of his half-brother Harry; so proud, as was his mother, of being one of the queen’s soldiers, yet even before this day, he had seen much less action than Tom. The elder brother hoped he lived to tell the story, and to see the envy on his sibling’s face.
Tom and Hawkins reached the rampart almost simultaneously, with Drake and Barrett just a step or two behind. A Spanish pikeman attempted a thrust at Tom’s chest, but it was an easy matter to deflect it, leaving the man defenceless. He wore a breastplate, so Tom thrust his sword at the man’s groin, and a dreadful scream told him that he had struck home. Next, there was a man with a sword but wearing no armour, just behind and to the right of the pikeman. Tom swung at him, but the Spaniard deflected the thrust and attempted a counterattack of his own. Tom took a formal guard, a position taught him by his father, who had learned it in turn from the erstwhile friar Thomas Ryman. The Spaniard must have realised he faced a trained swordsman in the same moment that he saw the half-dozen Dunwich men from the Jennet, five armed with half-pikes and one with an upended arquebus that he was wielding as a club, charging across the remains of the rampart to come to their captain’s assistance. The fellow turned and ran, with the Suffolk men screaming contempt after him.
Tom paused to take a breath, and looked around. The English already commanded the rampart, and the Spanish were in full flight.
‘After them, my lads!’ shouted Hawkins. ‘On to the town!’
There was no attempt to regroup and take up a proper formation. The Englishmen ran forward like a mob pursuing a football from one village to another, howling obscenities as they did so. Ahead of them, the retreating Spaniards did not try to man the defensive palisade around the town, nor even to shut the gates. Instead, they simply ran straight through the town and out the other side, fleeing into the countryside beyond.
The English reached the town square, where Hawkins gave the signal to halt. The men gathered in the shade under the walls of the church and Castellanos’ own house. Some slumped to the ground, some joked and laughed with friends, and some refreshed themselves from the fountain in the middle of the square. Tom took a few mouthfuls of water, then lay down on the dirt of Rio de la Hacha and fell asleep at once.
He was wakened by the sound of Hawkins’ voice. The admiral was standing on the steps of the church, addressing a crowd of several dozen Spaniards, presumably the merchants and ordinary residents of the town, using Robert Barrett as his interpreter.
‘My friends,’ he said in a mild tone and with a smile on his face, ‘I want nothing more than to trade with you in peace. Aboard my ships, we have many things that you lack – wool, cloth, ivory, slaves, spices, cutlery. We are argosies, my friends, and we want nothing more than to provide you with the things you crave. The things Spain does not send out to you.
‘Now, I have sent messages back and forth to Treasurer Castellanos, who skulks out there beyond your rampart. He stands upon the letter of the law, saying that even if I set the entire Indies on fire, he would not grant me a licence to trade here.’ When Barrett’s translation reached those words, Tom saw many of the Spaniards shake their heads and murmur discontentedly to each other. ‘My friends, we all know there are good laws and there are bad laws, and I say that this is a bad law. Is Spain aware of your needs, here in this place, when it sends so few ships to you? Do those in Spain really know anything about you, here in this town?’ More murmuring. ‘My friends, I was a servant of your noble King Philip. No man respects His Majesty more than I do. So think upon what I have said, and if you then think as I do, tell Treasurer Castellanos that you wish to trade with the English. We have your inter
ests at heart, my friends—’
Hawkins’ peroration was interrupted by a sudden cry of ‘Fuego!’
Tom turned, and saw smoke rising from the other side of the town.
Rio de la Hacha was ablaze.
* * *
The cause of the fire was apparent at once. A small group of a dozen or so exceptionally drunken Devon men staggered into the town square and prostrated themselves before Hawkins, then began to accuse each other of knocking over the candle that had started the blaze. As the town’s residents rushed to try and save their properties, Hawkins flew into a temper.
‘How, pray, did a candle come to be knocked over, when I gave strict orders that no man was to enter any building in this place? Fuckwits. Captain Drake, take their names. We’ll deal with them once this is over. All hands to suppressing the fire!’
Tom got to his feet. ‘Jennets, to me!’ he cried.
The Suffolk men gathered around him, and together they began to run through the streets toward the heart of the blaze.
It was not a great inferno; Rio de la Hacha was too small for any such thing. But the houses were simple structures, with baked mud walls and straw roofs, kept deliberately rudimentary because of the endless cycles of tropical storms, earthquakes and French raids that forced the townspeople to rebuild every few years, sometimes even after a few months.
As he organised one of the lines of men relaying buckets of water from the harbour, Tom realised that the actual damage to the town was not what mattered to Hawkins, who was striding about barking orders like a man possessed; it was all about the message. Castellanos had suggested Hawkins sought to fire the entire Indies, and now Rio de la Hacha burned. Hawkins was rightly furious that all his hard work to convince the townspeople to overturn Castellanos’ ban on trade might be undone by a few clumsy sailors searching buildings for wine.
Taking their cue from the furious admiral, the Englishmen worked like demons to put out the fire. Officers and men took their places in the human chains bringing water to the blaze, with Tom himself battling to save one house, truly no more than a hut, with the same determination as if it was his own home. As he and two other men of the Jennet dampened down the last flames, he turned and saw three tiny figures standing at the door, staring at him with great round eyes. For one fleeting moment, as he breathed hard and wiped the sweat from his eyes, he thought that two of them were his Adam and Peter; but if that was so, who was the third? Then he could see properly again, but just as he beckoned to the children to come to him, their mother ran forward, scowled at Tom, and shepherded them away.
When the English reassembled in the town square, perhaps one third of Rio de la Hacha lay in ruins. Hawkins called his officers together for a conference upon the steps of the church, but just as Tom joined them, a delegation of prominent citizens of the town appeared, bearing a message from Castellanos in which he claimed that he was pleased the English had burned the town, for King Philip would rebuild it and he, Castellanos, had plans in hand that would lead to the destruction of the English heretics. Hawkins made a great play of reading this with a stern expression on his face, then climbed a couple of steps and assumed a stance reminiscent of the famous pose of Harry the Eighth of famous memory, his arms akimbo. Tom smiled, for he had seen his wife’s kinsman do this many times. Hawkins should have been an actor in one of the old mystery plays in the time before they were banned.
‘My friends,’ he began in familiar fashion. ‘My fellow loyal subjects of His Majesty King Philip.’
Barrett translated, but Tom heard Hawkins’ sharp aside to his interpreter: ‘Name of God, Rob, put a smile on your face. We want these people to believe they really are our friends.’
Barrett complied, and Hawkins continued, berating Castellanos for expressing pleasure at the destruction of so many houses, suggesting that the reconstruction would merely be an opportunity for the treasurer to line his own pockets, and promising the rather more immediate prospect of compensation from Hawkins himself, here and now. All the English wanted was a licence to trade, which was also surely what the good citizens of Rio de la Hacha wished for.
Tom could see several of the Spaniards turning to each other and nodding; Hawkins was winning the argument. The admiral pressed home his case by going down into the body of the Spaniards, shaking hands, bestowing gifts, and escorting them back to the gate. But it remained to be seen whether friendly persuasion would be enough, and whether the citizens of the town would now be able to persuade Castellanos to back down.
* * *
In the end, it took a stroke of good fortune to resolve the matter once and for all. Jack and Tom were dining together aboard the Jennet when news came that one of Castellanos’ personal slaves had deserted and presented himself before Hawkins, claiming to know where the treasurer had concealed the town’s store of gold. A strongly armed expedition was sent into the forest that night and found the treasure exactly where the slave said it was. The next day, the Stannards watched from Jennet as the large wooden chests were hauled aboard the Jesus.
Jack observed the scene with mixed feelings. God willing, it would resolve the deadlock between Hawkins and Castellanos; and so it proved, with the treasurer of Rio de la Hacha accepting with unalloyed bad grace the English admiral’s proposal that the gold would be handed back in return for a licence to trade, which led in the days that followed to the sale of a substantial number of slaves, many of them, strange to say, to Treasurer Castellanos himself.
But Jack could remember Thomas Ryman teaching him the notion of a pyrrhic victory, and as he heard the cheers from the Jesus as the gold was hauled aboard, he could not help but feel that this was one such. For one thing, once the English fleet sailed away, Castellanos was bound to rewrite the history of what had happened at Rio de la Hacha, recasting it to his own advantage. And when the news finally reached him, King Philip would hardly be indifferent to what would be portrayed as the deliberate burning of his town, and the subsequent capture of his gold, by men he undoubtedly regarded as English pirates. Jack recalled Francis Walsingham’s words about how little it might take to trigger a war between England and Spain, then offered up a silent prayer to the Virgin.
Twenty-Two
Jennet in the bay of Cartagena upon the coast of New Andaluce
This twentieth day of August
My sweet, my Catherine, my love,
I write this with no present prospect of sending it. There are no ships here sailing for England, and we intend for that blessed shore ourselves, so it may be that this letter will return with me. If God so wills it, though, then perhaps it will return instead of me.
We have continued to sail along the coast, calling at ports where Hawkins believes he might sell the remainder of the slaves. He says that time is short. The season of the great winds called hurricanoes will soon be upon us, while a Spanish fleet may arrive in these seas at any time. Thus we have put in to a roadstead called Santa Marta, a small and miserable place backed by great mountains that the local people call the Sierra Nevadas. Here I went ashore with our little army of one and a half hundred men, our advance bringing about the immediate surrender of the town. But it was all a sham, the governor having agreed privately with Hawkins that he would give the pretence of surrendering to overwhelming odds and then granting a licence to trade under duress. Our next port of call, Cartagena, where we lie now, is much bigger, with stronger defences and a large garrison. We have eschewed the inner harbour and so lie far out, well beyond the range of the Spaniards’ guns. The governor refuses to entertain us, even denying us the simple right to take on fresh water. We have sent out scouting parties, though, and have found undefended wells in the midst of dense forest on an island south of the town. From these we have replenished our casks, so that, at least, is a blessed relief.
You will be gladdened to know that we eat well. The beef of these parts is abundant beyond all measure, and at least the equal of the meat that we eat in England. I have also tried some of the foods native to these la
nds. The fruits and vegetables of the Indies are strange beyond measure, but some refresh the throat better than anything I have ever tasted. I bring you one of them for curiosity’s sake. I expect it will be rotten within by the time we return to England, but at least you will be able to see its singular appearance. For some reason, God alone knows why, it is named a pineapple, although it looks like no apple that I have ever seen.
We have sold all but a handful of our living cargo. I thank God for it – both that we have finally made a profit to make the entire enterprise worthwhile, and that these creatures may now have some sort of lives ashore, rather than being herded below decks. As the last of them left the ship, I recalled Cabral’s words, that he was not the same as these people. His dire fate, which I recall every night in my dreams, suggests otherwise. At any rate, those who killed him so horribly thought he was the same as them, or rather worse, and I do not doubt that they would have done likewise to me if events had gone differently. These are not thoughts to dwell upon, my love. My father could unburden himself of such painful imaginings in a confessional, should the governor of Cartagena relent and he be able to find a church ashore, but for us good Protestants, there is only prayer and the burden of our own thoughts. Amen.
I beseech you, dear wife, don’t let Adam spend all his time looking at the images in Foxe’s book. They are too terrible for a boy of his years, and children should be running and laughing before the cares of this world crowd in upon them. I have no doubt that his brother Peter will be doing that in full measure. I know you will have done your best to curb the lad’s impudence, but do not spare the rod in that regard.
I pray for you and the boys many times each day. I pray that I will return soon, and I vow never to go upon another voyage such as this. These new worlds are not what fools in England claim them to be, with great cities paved with gold and rivers of silver. They are desperate places for desperate men, and in that I count those in our fleet who revel in being here, Frank Drake foremost among them. I am also minded to retire from the sea and manage affairs from on shore, as Hawkins’ brother does. I have not said this to my father, for he would find it unaccountable. He will continue to go to sea until his dying day, for it is in his blood as it is not in mine. I worry for him, though. He has seemed much older of late, and I pray he is not weakening.