Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  For three days — the Friday, the Saturday and the Sunday — the bargaining went on; the treasure fleet lying outside the harbour and Hawkins’ ships inside against the parapet of the mole. Hawkins, however, was as uneasy as the Viceroy. He was in a serious quandary. He put not one minute atom of faith in all the fair words of Don Martin Enriquez. Once the Spanish fleet was within that small harbour, if treachery could win the game, treachery would be tried. On the other hand, as long as the fleet remained outside, it was in constant danger. A gale from the north, a hurricane — every ship of that fleet would be driven ashore and its great treasure lost. Hawkins would have committed a real breach of the peace for which he must answer to Queen Elizabeth. He feared, and feared justly, her indignation in so weighty a matter. Up till now, except for the one attack by Drake upon the despatch boat from San Domingo, there had been no incident which could stir Spain even to a protest. Such preliminaries to trade as were made up of a landing in force, a volley which hurt no one, a flight into the hills and a return when darkness had fallen, were well understood. They were a conventional face-saving. But the deliberate wreckage of a great fleet, owing to the refusal of Hawkins to allow it to pass into its own harbour, could not but have been looked upon, whether by Elizabeth and her prudent counsellors like Burghley or by Philip of Spain, as a definite act of war.

  On the morning of Monday the 20th, however, the Viceroy agreed to Hawkins’ conditions. Hawkins went on board the Spanish Admiral’s ship, the conditions were drawn up, signed and sealed, the hostages, reduced to six a side, were exchanged, trumpets were blown, and with much firing and many salutes and courtesies the fleet sailed in.

  Their ships were moored alongside the English ships. The captains were very amiable and polite, but the Viceroy had already begun to practise those treacheries which Hawkins expected. He had sent secretly a messenger by a boat to the Governor of the port asking that one thousand soldiers should be gathered secretly about the port and hold themselves ready. And although Hawkins had, according to his word, sent him six gentlemen of credit, Don Martin dressed up six of the basest of his company in the costliest dress and sent them in exchange.

  From Monday to Thursday the two fleets lay side by side, but by Thursday the thousand men on land had been gathered together, and Hawkins noticed that a great merchant ship of six hundred tons had been brought up during the night and moored between the two fleets. There was so little space along that quay that the Minion, the outermost ship of Hawkins’ fleet, actually touched this big hulk. It was noticeable, too, that from the Spanish ships many men were going on board the hulk. Hawkins sent a protest and an enquiry to the Viceroy. The Viceroy answered that he was sending a command to stop all suspicious arrangements and that he, on his faith as a Viceroy, would be the English defence against all villainies. Yet the men still streamed on board the hulk. There were port-holes being cut and cannon being fitted into them, so that once more Hawkins was minded to make a protest. He was at his dinner in his cabin with his guest and hostage, Augustin de Villa Nueva, when his body-servant, John Chamberlayne, snatched at the Spaniard’s sleeve and took from it a poniard with which he had meant to assassinate Hawkins. Hawkins locked him up in the steward’s room and sent Robert Barrett, the Master of the Jesus, who spoke Spanish very well, with a second protest on board the Viceroy’s ship. By this time, however, the Viceroy realized that the secret was out. He clapped Robert Barrett into the bilboes and ran on deck waving a white scarf: a trumpet was sounded, and at once a stream of men poured down over the hulk’s side on to the deck of the Minion. At the other side of the Minion was the Jesus, and Hawkins cried out in a loud, fierce voice to the men upon the Minion, “God and Saint George, upon those traitorous villains, and rescue the Minion! I trust in God the day shall be ours.” And with that soldiers and sailors sprang out of the Jesus on to the Minion, laid a gun upon the Vice-Admiral’s ship and fired a shot which pierced her side and set fire to the magazine. The decks of the “Vice-Admiral” exploded and three hundred men were killed.

  It is almost as difficult to disentangle the details of this sharp sea-fight in a small and crowded harbour as it must have been for the fighters themselves amidst the flash and smoke of their cannon to know what was happening, except in their immediate neighbourhood. It is clear, however, that had Hawkins been able to retain the island mole a complete victory would have been his, and what was left of the Spanish fleets a lawful prize with all their treasure; but the thousand men whom Martin Enriquez had hidden on land about the harbour were rowed across the narrow strip of water and fell, with the advantage of a complete surprise as well as of their numbers, upon the small crews left about the guns. These, except for a few who managed to climb up on to the bowsprits of the Minion and the Jesus, were massacred, and the guns were thereupon turned upon the English ships. Captain Hampton of the Minion cut his bow cables and hauled himself away on his stern anchors. The Jesus set about the same manœuvre, but she was heavier and clumsier to handle. The big hulk swung in upon her before she could free her forward cables, firing from its new port-holes, while the brass ordnance on the island poured out her volleys. Five shots passed through the mainmast of the Jesus, and her foremast was cut through with a chain shot. None the less she managed to haul herself clear alongside the Minion, from which position she was able with her heavy battery to set the “Admiral” of the Spaniards on fire.

  The General, Hawkins, throughout displayed complete calm. He stood on the deck and called to Samuel, his page, to bring him a flagon of beer. Samuel brought it to him in a silver cup and Hawkins drank it, calling upon his gunners to stand to their cannon lustily like men. As he set down the silver cup upon a chest by the mainmast, a big cannonball from a demi-culverin carried it away; upon which the General cried to his men with a ready word: “Feare nothing, for God, who hath preserved me from this shot, will also deliver us from these traitours and Villaines.”

  Captain Bland on the Grace of God had his mainmast shot overboard by a gun on the island; whereupon, seeing that his ship was of no more use now than a hulk, he set fire to it heroically and, letting it drift down upon the Spaniards, embarked with all his men on a pinnace and came aboard the Jesus of Lübeck. For a moment John Hawkins mistook his man, under some notion that he had been trying to sail out of the harbour and get away; but Bland answered that he had gotten way upon his ship so that he might go about, lay himself alongside the weathermost of the Spanish fleet and then set fire to the Grace of God, by which manœuvre he had hoped to destroy the whole fleet. “If I had done so,” he said, “I had done well.”

  The Swallow was sunk; the Angel was sunk; and four big ships of the Spanish fleet. Throughout that afternoon the battle was continued at these desperate odds. As night fell, Hawkins commanded the Minion to be brought under the lee of the Jesus of Lübeck, so that her masts might be saved, and Drake on the Judith to lay aboard the Minion, take in what men, ammunition and victuals he could from the Jesus, and then stand out of the harbour in the darkness. It was at this time that the men engaged upon the work saw two fire ships which the Spaniards had prepared bearing down upon them ablaze.

  The day was lost. The Judith, as the off-shore wind sprang up, made her way from the harbour. The Jesus had no means now of avoiding the fire ships, and the Minion’s only chance was to hoist her sails and follow the Judith. Apparently the men waited for no order from the Captain or Master, but hoisted their sails so quickly that Hawkins had only just time with a few men to jump from the Jesus on board before she drew away and made for the entrance. There were thus those two ships only left out of all Hawkins’ fleet, and although he had done throughout the day a great execution, he had lost all the profit of his voyage. The Minion sailed out of the harbour overloaded with men, and cast anchor for the night under the shelter of a small island called Sacrifice Island.

  The battle at St. John de Ulua was a victory won by the grossest treachery, but it was a victory which marked a new stage in the strife between England and Spain f
or the mastery of the sea. Up till now, the English had claimed the right to trade with the colonies of the New World. They refused to be bound by Pope Alexander VI’s division of the world between Portugal and Spain, but they traded fairly. From now on this rivalry took on a new violence. The English waged war, though no war had been declared, and the stories that came home of the cruelties practised by the Spaniards on their prisoners set that flame alight which burnt to its triumph twenty years later.

  It would have been pleasant if one could have ended the account of the battle of St. John de Ulua with a statement that the two ships alone left out of that little company which had set sail from Plymouth on the 2nd of October, 1567, foregathered on Friday, September 24th, 1568, and sailed in company across the Atlantic home. But that cannot be said. The Judith reached Plymouth on January 20th, 1569, alone. Drake told the story of the disaster to William Hawkins, John’s brother and now head of the firm. William at once prepared letters to the Queen in which he asked for permission to recoup himself upon the Spaniards, and sent Drake off post-haste with them to London. But, to everybody’s astonishment, five days after Drake had reached Plymouth, John Hawkins with the Minion struggled into Mount’s Bay. He had dropped his anchor — he had no more than one left — in the lee of the little island of Sacrifice just outside the port of St. John de Ulua, and had managed to ride out the storm. Don Francisco de Luxan’s ships were in no condition to come out and attack him. He made such repairs as he could, was forced to land some of his men, and got safely home with the rest.

  A month later a third vessel of this little fleet, the William and John, put in at a port on the west coast of Ireland. But she had been separated from her consorts by a storm before St. John de Ulua was reached, and was not present at that engagement. She must be left out altogether from the awkward question which now arose.

  Miles Philips, a sailor who escaped from the Jesus on to the Minion, wrote of the Judith: “the said barke lost us.” But that vague word “lost” is too vague. Miles Philips wrote his account of the events at St. John de Ulua in 1591, when he had returned to England after many years of hardship and suffering as a prisoner of Spain. His memory may have grown dim. In 1591 Drake was a personage of great renown and Philips may well have thought it wise to speak softly when he spoke of him at all. Hawkins, on the other hand, wrote a short account of his voyage immediately upon his arrival home, and made in a few reproachful words an uncompromising accusation against his young kinsman.

  “So with the Minion only and the Judith (a small barke of fifty tunne) we escaped, which barke the same night forsooke us in our great miserie.”

  The passage has always been a stumbling-block to those who must paint their hero as a man without a lapse, an inhuman creature, white from his birth to the day of his death. And they bark their shins in the effort to get round it. It was Hawkins’ business, we are told, with his ship almost sinking under his feet, and so crowded that he must put men ashore on that inhospitable coast or perish altogether, to search for the Judith, rather than for the undamaged Judith, which was well enough provisioned to carry her without a stop from September 24th, 1568, to January 20th, 1569, when she reached Plymouth Sound, to wait and seek for the commander of the expedition. Or again, it is argued that the duty of the Judith’s Captain was, first and last, to bring his own ship home safe, and that Drake behaved as a good sailor should.

  There are facts which make any hasty conclusion improper. For instance, Hawkins, once having made his statement, never, so far as is known, repeated, and certainly never embroidered it. In after years he served with Drake and under Drake, without reluctance. Nor at the time did he hold it as a serious reproach against Drake. It is impossible to believe that the remarkable expedition which Drake made to Nombre de Dios in 1572, a private affair, undertaken from Plymouth, very quietly, and the two secret voyages of preparation which preceded it, were made without the backing and approval of the Hawkins family. On the other hand, Drake made no reply to the accusation; and it cannot but have done him, as a record of the conduct of a young sailor in his first position of authority, a very great deal of harm. It was remembered and brought up against him years afterwards by both Frobisher and Borough. At the actual time, in his home town of Plymouth, it is remarkable indeed that he lived it down. Nor can it be without significance in this respect that, although an Admiralty investigation was held into the losses suffered by the Spanish treachery at St. John de Ulua, the Captain of the Judith, the first of the two ships to arrive home from that port, was never called as a witness. Captains, supercargoes, stewards, even trumpeters were summoned to make their depositions before the Court of Admiralty in March of 1569, but not Francis Drake. It is possible, of course, to hold that the intention of this Court of Admiralty was solely to make out a schedule of the losses sustained by the treachery of the Spaniards, and that Drake, having returned with his ship undamaged, would be only regarded as one whose share in any ultimate redress must be determined by independent witnesses.

  But the charge remained unanswered, and for two years Drake disappeared from the public view. What he did during those two years is known. He made two voyages to the coast of Darien, voyages of discovery rather than of profit; the first with two tiny barks, the Swan and the Dragon, and the second with the Swan alone. He was seeking harbours along that unknown coast where he could lie perdu. He had surely in his mind the great expedition against the gold train from Panama which should redeem all the failure of St. John de Ulua and make at one stroke a great name and a great fortune wherewith to sustain it.

  One cannot but repeat that in estimating the life of a man who did great service to his country and earned justly a fame which increases with the years, peremptory judgments are not lightly to be made. Is it not possible to hold that those few words of sharp reproof written by Hawkins, and such disparagement as inevitably followed from them, marked a definite stage in Drake’s career — made him sit up and think, to use a colloquial phrase? He had had a rough, hard, penurious life, first on that old Medway hulk, then on the little bark which beat its way to the Zeeland ports and back. That Boanerges of a father, sailor turned revivalist, was hardly the man to introduce his son to the more scrupulous and fastidious lines of conduct. The failure at Rio de la Hacha had undoubtedly embittered him. It is probable that the first gentleman of fine spirit and delicate behaviour whom Drake had ever met was John Hawkins. For many months Drake, an acute observer, had enjoyed the opportunity to study him and his ways, the care with which he avoided open strife, his politeness, his patience. When the Jesus was left behind in the harbour of St. John de Ulua, a wreck, the hostages which Hawkins had received from Don Martin Enriquez were found unhurt, although by all the laws of war he had the right to put them to death if he had chosen so to do. Drake’s own conduct in seizing the despatch boat of the Viceroy of the Indies at Rio de la Hacha stands in contrast as something useless, violent and unhelpful. But when he sailed to Nombre de Dios, and perhaps still more when he sailed round the world, he had acquired a tact, a fellowship, a kindliness, which made his way smooth. It is likely that Hawkins’ words— “which forsooke us in our great miserie” — brought him up sharp and set him to reconsider through the long months of silent effort the way by which great and honourable reputations could be gained as well as great fortunes earned.

  CHAPTER III

  ODDS AND ENDS. PHILIPS AND HARTOP. THE ADMIRALTY COURT ON THE AFFAIR OF ST. JOHN DE ULUA. DRAKE’S MARRIAGE AND PREPARATION FOR THE EXPEDITION TO NOMBRE DE DIOS.

  1

  JOHN HAWKINS was forced to put on shore from the overcrowded Minion those whom he could not carry without ensuring the loss of all. There were a hundred of them, and, after losing many in attacks by Indians, the survivors fell into Spanish hands. Two of them were able after many years to escape home, Miles Philips and Job Hartop, a powder-maker of Bourne. Both these men told the stories of the enslavement to which they had been condemned, the humiliations to which the Inquisition had subjected them, th
e cruelties of the galleys. They are interspersed with moments of kindness shown to them by good-natured masters or by charitable nuns. But they are grim reading, and they are to be found in the ninth volume of Hakluyt’s “Principal Navigations.” They have no place in a book limited to the life of Drake. But they should be read if the temper of England in those days is to be understood. For from time to time men like these two men did come home at last somehow to the West Country, to the Medway, and to the coast towns of England. They told of comrades who had died under the rack or amongst the faggots of the Inquisition. Mothers and wives learnt of the agonies of men dear to them. A very few received back into their homes victims crippled by years in the galleys and the black prisons of Seville. Along the coast of England the hatred of Spain grew. In taverns and wherever poor men gathered, such stories were told and retold, and though the great Catholic overlords might look upon the reign of Elizabeth as an interruption of their authority, another class of men, free from the feudal authority, was growing up with a stern determination to have done once and for all with the enemies of their new and treasured freedom.

  2

  But for the actual damage which the treachery of that great gentleman Don Martin Enriquez inflicted upon John Hawkins and his partners, Spain began to pay almost on the nail. For by a happy coincidence, within two months of the catastrophe at Ulua, and before a hint of it had reached England, Philip was asking of Queen Elizabeth protection for a rich fleet of his own which had been forced to seek the shelter of English harbours.