Battle’s Flood

by J. D. Davies

Meg went over to the huddle of serpents that was nominally her family, now joined by Ned, who clearly wished to be somewhere else. But she ignored them, particularly Mary’s furious gaze, and instead stood before Hugh Ebbes.

  ‘Oh, Hugh,’ she said, simply.

  He continued to stare at his feet.

  ‘He’s no better than me,’ he mumbled.

  His words struck Meg like an arrow to the heart. Poor, faithful Hugh had not betrayed her and the Doom for money, nor for the favour of Jennet, Mary or Ned Stannard. He had betrayed her out of jealousy of Philip Grimes.

  She turned away and saw that Cowper had commanded a lad to bring a blazing torch to light the pyre. Fate decreed that it should be Francis Birkes, who stared at Meg with an expression of utter misery on his face.

  William James raised his hands and looked heavenward.

  ‘Genesis Chapter Nineteen tells us that the Lord rained fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah,’ he declaimed. ‘Today, we bring fire here to cleanse this relic of ungodliness and superstition from Dunwich, for as the Book of Hebrews tells us, our God is a consuming fire. No more shall the people here fear or venerate this graven image, this unholy abomination that offends our Lord and all His righteous believers. Let this be an end to the Doom of Dunwich!’

  He signalled to Francis Birkes, who handed him the burning brand. James stared exultantly at Meg, then thrust the flame into the pyre. It had been a dry week, the wind was fresh and south-easterly, and the fire caught at once.

  The sight of flames starting to lick at the face of the Devil of the Doom brought a strange response from Meg. Her defiance evaporated. She could sense her stepmother and half-sister willing her to break down, to wail and weep and scream, perhaps even, in what they might have thought the best case, to fling herself onto the pyre to perish with the image that had meant so much to her. She knew that Mary would be exulting in this revenge for the affair of the Blackfriars, even if it was a petty triumph in comparison. But Meg would not give her sister the satisfaction of tears. Instead, she sank to her knees and began to pray.

  Neither the Reverend James, nor the bailiffs, nor the Stannards, nor almost anyone else standing upon Hen Hill could hear her prayers, for she said them in her quietest murmur, and the crackling of the blaze before her ensured that her words did not carry beyond Francis Birkes, who was too young and too much a child of the new dispensation to know what she was saying. The Reverend James undoubtedly and rightly suspected that her prayers were in Latin, but they were not the ones he might have expected her to recite; say, the act of contrition, or the litanies of the Virgin Mary.

  Instead, as the pyre bearing the Doom painting burned, sending a pall of smoke out over Dunwich river towards Southwold, Margaret de Andrade thought of her father and her brother, of Luis and Philip Grimes.

  As she did so, she smiled to herself and quietly murmured the Te Deum, the great hymn of victory.

  Twenty-Four

  Jack Stannard could see the dead.

  They were there in front of him, on the storm-lashed deck of the Jennet as yet another vicious wave smashed into her stern. There were his father and mother, there his dead brother Adam, there Thomas Ryman, and there, at the head of them all, his dear Alice.

  ‘Come to us,’ they were saying. ‘Join us.’

  He wanted nothing more. It was the depth of the night, he was secured to the mizzenmast by a lifeline, and he was sodden through with rain and sweat. The ship was pitching and rolling like a shot horse in its death throes. Jack had not slept at all in three days, and not properly for three weeks.

  ‘Come to us. Join us.’

  He rubbed his eyes, and the vision disappeared. It was replaced by the very real presence of Tom, who came on deck, waited a moment to adjust to the pitch of the hull, then staggered his way over to where his father stood.

  ‘My watch,’ he said.

  ‘Not time,’ said Jack, shaking his head. ‘Near a full glass to go.’

  Tom grinned. ‘Ship’s captain’s the only judge of when the watch changes. It was you who told me that, long ago. And it’s you who tells me I’m the ship’s captain now.’

  Jack wanted to argue the case, but he was too exhausted.

  ‘Aye, aye, then, Cap’n Stannard. You have the ship.’

  ‘I have the ship.’

  With that, Jack untied himself from his lifeline, went below, and fell onto his sea-bed. He was asleep in an instant. It was not the sleep of dreams, but in that briefest moment before his head struck the canvas sack that served for a pillow, Jack saw and heard the dead again.

  ‘Come to us. Join us.’

  * * *

  Cape St Anthony, a low promontory that constituted the westernmost point of Cuba, was in sight when the first storms struck the English fleet. The winds suddenly blew hard from the south-east, whipping up turbulent seas that hammered against the hulls. The accompanying rain was warm, but vicious and unremitting. The Stannards, like all the other captains in the fleet, knew from their charts that the lee shore of Florida was somewhere away to the north, so they had no choice but to beat up against the wind for as long as the storm lasted, praying for a change in the weather that would allow them to finally proceed through the Florida channel and then out into the open ocean.

  Under minimal sail, most of the canvas having been reefed, the Jennet tacked continually into the wind, that being the only course of action that would keep the ship roughly in position. All the while, the timbers groaned like the cries of a great sea creature, the shrouds and sails made strange discordant music, and water sought out every tiny crack and hole that would allow it to enter the body of the ship. Below decks, men sat or lay braced against knee timbers, barrels and guns, awaiting their turn to go above and adjust sail at the next tack, or take their shift at the pumps, which worked constantly. As the hours of the storm stretched into days, and men were unable to go to the heads to relieve themselves, the stench within the lower decks grew ever more foul.

  From time to time, a brief break in the driving rain permitted a glimpse of one or more of the other ships of the fleet. Somehow, Hawkins and his crew were keeping the vast and ancient Jesus afloat. The Stannards and the more experienced men in their crew wondered at this, for they knew that if things were bad aboard the Jennet, they would be far worse aboard the great royal man-of-war; they had all heard the tales of how terribly the huge ship had coped with the storm they had encountered on the outward voyage. Seams that had been patched up after that onslaught of the elements would have come apart again, and God knew how hard the men of the Jesus were having to work her pumps.

  The answer, albeit an indirect one, came at dusk, when the flagship signalled for the fleet to bear up. Tom was on watch, and ordered up men from below to take the ship through the change of course. The Jennet turned away and now ran before the wind, her lookouts struggling to keep in sight the stern lantern of the Jesus. Dawn was another leaden grey affair, revealing nothing but the loss in the night of one ship, Hawkins’ own William and John. Jack and Tom debated her disappearance. The sea was bad, but not bad enough to overwhelm a ship; if any vessel in the fleet was to be lost that way, it would surely be the lumbering Jesus, not one of the more nimble hulls like the William and John. She could hardly have run onto the Florida coast, for if one ship did so, then all the rest would follow. Perhaps some great rock had done for her, Tom suggested. Perhaps, his father agreed; but he thought it more likely that the lookouts had simply failed to see the signal from the flagship, so the William and John was probably still where the fleet had been until the previous evening, still trying to hold position against the wind off the coast of Cuba. Whether she would ever make it home was now in the hands of her captain, her crew, and God.

  ‘By the mark, eight!’

  The leadsman’s cry gave the Stannards their first indication that they were almost upon the feared lee shore of Florida. Not long afterwards, young Battlebridge, up in the crow’s nest on the mainmast, yelled, ‘Land ho!’ and within a ha
lf-glass or so, the Stannards themselves could see the low, featureless shore.

  For two days, the bedraggled fleet edged along the alien coast, ever watchful for hidden reefs, hoping against hope that they would stumble across some deep, commodious, and unguarded anchorage where the ships could be repaired, and stock could be taken of their situation. Above all, if the sun or stars finally deigned to appear in the skies above them, they might even finally be able to establish where they were. But when the skies did lighten a little, presaging a change in the weather, the hopes of the Englishmen were swiftly disabused. Within the space of a few hours, the wind swung around from south-east to north-east, and although the air was fresher, it was also markedly colder.

  ‘We must furl sails and batten down again,’ said Jack.

  ‘Why, in God’s name?’ said Tom. ‘Look yonder, Father, the clouds are breaking. And we’ve barely had time to air the ship – it still stinks below decks.’

  ‘Hawkins told me of this weather. It’s what he feared most, Tom – we have tarried too long in the Carib after all. A day or two less at Cartagena… but it is no matter now. When the wind comes into this quarter, and the great clouds of birds fly south across the sea, then a hurricano is coming. Naught we can then do, Tom, but to run before it.’

  ‘A hurricano, though, Father? A winter storm? God in heaven, it’s only just past the first week of September.’

  ‘And God in heaven has decreed against us, son. Best make the ship ready.’

  Once again, the sails were reefed and furled, the hatches battened down, the casks and all other large movable items lashed securely. Thus when the frightful new storm struck, the Jennet was ready for it. This time, there was no need for tacking, nor, indeed, for much manoeuvring at all. The ships of the English fleet could only run before the bitterly cold, howling north wind and pray that it flung them out into the broad, open waters of the Carib Sea, and not onto the shore of Cuba.

  For three more days, the men largely huddled below decks, trying to keep warm and dry in the intervals between the back-breaking shifts on the pumps and the whipstaff, or assisting the carpenter to plug the leaks that sprang open everywhere. Jack or Tom went through the entire ship every hour or two, trying to keep spirits up and sometimes praying with the downhearted. Jack even led the men through the entire repertoire of favourite songs from the Dunwich alehouses, his soaring tenor voice a strange counterpoint to the endless wailing of the wind and the roar of the waves as they smashed against the hull. Only a few joined in the choruses of the old songs about Robin Hood and Chevy Chase, and their voices were feeble alongside Jack’s, but at least some of the men who were too cold or disheartened to sing smiled at the familiar old tunes.

  However lustily he sang, though, and however hard he tried to cheer the men, Jack knew full well that every single one of them understood the desperate truth. They were no longer on course for the ocean, and then home to dear England. Instead, they were being blown in the exact opposite direction, far into the Carib Sea, towards unknown shores where not even John Hawkins had ever sailed before. One thing was certain, though: those shores, wherever they were, would be ruled by the Spanish, and hostile.

  * * *

  All storms finally blow themselves out, and towards the end of the third day, the northerly tempest that had driven the English fleet far into the Gulf of Mexico finally subsided. There was no land in sight, only an extensive series of reefs over which the waves broke relentlessly, and not one man in the fleet, not even John Hawkins, had the faintest idea where they were. But the fleet hove to, and as the stars came up, both Jack and Tom took out their cross-staffs, made their fixes, and then consulted the charts left them by Bruno Cabral. Finally, Jack looked at Tom, willing him to give the right answer.

  ‘Nineteen degrees of latitude by observation,’ said the younger Stannard.

  ‘I concur,’ said Jack. ‘And we know from our dead reckoning that we can’t have gone back through the channel between Cuba and the mainland, not with the current running at near three knots, so we must be west of the Yucatan.’

  Tom studied the chart laid out before them. There was the great peninsula, sticking up from Mexico like a giant thumb. There lay the coast of Mexico itself, sweeping all the way around to Florida, which had been so tantalisingly close just a few days before. This was an unknown sea. Few ships, let alone English ones, ever came into these waters. Yet somehow, the fleet had to find a port. Even assuming that the weather held for a few precious days, it would be impossible for the Jennet and the others simply to turn and head for England once again. The ships cried out for repair – God alone knew what state the Jesus was in by now – while the water casks had to be replenished and the men needed rest.

  The answer to their prayers came the next day in the shape of two local merchantmen, sailing downwind away from Yucatan. Hawkins sent Drake off to intercept them, and although one put on sail and got away, the slower vessel proved easy prey. Soon afterwards, Tom and the other captains of the fleet received a summons to attend the admiral aboard the Jesus.

  As he went aboard her, Tom saw that the great ship was in a dire state indeed. He exchanged greetings with the once fastidiously elegant gentleman volunteer George Fitzwilliam, Edward Dudley’s old foe from Tenerife, now as hirsute, bronzed, pungent and cynical as the hardiest foretopman. Fitzwilliam told him that during the latest storms, the gaps between the great ship’s planks grew so wide that fish came in through them and thrashed out the last of their lives in the bilges.

  Hawkins was in his usual place, behind his table in the great cabin. Tom had not seen him since Cartagena, but thought he seemed to have aged in that short time. If this was indeed so, then the cause of his worries was obvious: Hawkins knew, as did every man in the room, that they had almost no options left. The only positive, determined face in that company belonged to Francis Drake, still seeming supremely confident that the Protestant God of Elizabeth’s England would ultimately smile upon them once again. There was no indication that the admiral and his acolyte had heard of the affair with young Bradlow at Cartagena; nor, come to that, had Tom and his father spoken of it again.

  The captured Spanish captain was a glum-faced fellow of about Hawkins’ age. The cause of his anxieties was equally obvious: he would undoubtedly be convinced that his cargo of wine from the Carib islands, and probably his ship, too, was about to be stolen from him by these perfidious English pirates.

  Gradually, though, Robert Barrett, acting as always as Hawkins’ interpreter, coaxed more and more information out of the fellow, who swiftly became markedly garrulous.

  ‘He says that all the ports of the gulf to westward, bar one, are small – too small for a fleet such as this, at any rate. There’s a good port to windward, Campeche on Yucatán, whence he himself has just sailed, but…’

  Barrett had no need to say any more in a company of seamen. After their travails in recent weeks, the last thing the Englishmen needed was to have to beat back against the wind, constantly tacking as they did so and further draining the bodies and wills of shattered men who were already in the blackest pits of exhaustion.

  ‘And the “bar one” to westward?’ said Hawkins, irritably.

  Barrett asked the Spaniard another question, and the fellow launched into a lengthy and animated speech. Tom, who had picked up a few words of Spanish from his erstwhile brother-in-law Luis de Andrade, as well as visits over the years to several Iberian harbours, could make out a little of what he was saying, and noted the frequency of two words that he certainly knew: armada and flota. Thus when Barrett finally translated, he already had a fair sense of what he would say.

  ‘There is one good harbour, and only one,’ said Barrett. ‘San Juan de Ulúa, the port for the city of Veracruz. It has all we need – ample space and facilities for repair, all the provisions we could wish for, and it is only four days’ sail from here.’

  The captains, Tom included, looked at each other with satisfaction. Tom smiled broadly, but Hawkins raised a
hand.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I have heard of this place. It is the principal port on the entire gulf, is it not? The chief port of Mexico? If that is so, how heavily defended is it?’

  ‘That is what he went on to say, Admiral,’ said Barrett. ‘It is not a strong place. True, there are new fortifications, and a garrison, but this fellow reckons none of that will be able to offer us much resistance. But sometime this month, the incoming flota will arrive there. If it has had favourable winds across the ocean, it might already be there, for all he knows. And it will be even more formidable than usual, for he says it is bringing over the new viceroy of New Spain.’

  Even Francis Drake was taken aback by this news. The defences of San Juan were one thing, but the entire flota was another. The great fleets were legendary throughout Europe. Once a year, huge galleons sailed from Spain, taking out whatever Mexico needed – and, in this case, bringing over its new ruler. But far more important than what it took out was what it took back. All the gold and silver from the mines of the Americas was loaded aboard this one fleet, then shipped back to Old Spain. The treasure of the annual flota was a byword throughout Europe. It made King Philip by far the richest monarch in the world, able to set out vast armies and fleets simultaneously across the globe. The Duke of Alba’s army in the Netherlands was funded by the bullion from the flota, as were fortresses and garrisons far to the west and south of where the English fleet lay, all the way to the borders with the Ottoman Turks. Some even said that treasure from the flota secretly subsidised those in England who wished to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and set up a second papist Queen Mary in her place.

  Tom had a sudden thought of his sister Meg.

  Mariners of England, France, and every other nation that wished Spain ill dreamed of somehow capturing an entire homeward-bound flota, and laying those untold riches before their own sovereign – naturally, after they had secured their own entirely justified percentage of the proceeds. More immediately, though, the problem facing Hawkins and his captains was not how to capture the flota, but how to avoid it.