Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  The island off which they moored was the summer retreat for the townspeople of Nombre de Dios — Isla de Bastimentos, the Isle of Good Food. Big gardens spread branches heavy with fruit. Chickens abounded, and other birds new and delicate to the palate. The crews of the pinnaces stanched their wounds in this paradise without any reprisals from the town.

  But in a day or two there came an elegant gentleman from the Governor, with words smooth as honey dropping from his lips. It was incredible that Drake should have dared so much with so small a force. In Nombre de Dios they had feared at the first that they had to deal with Frenchmen, but their fears were assuaged when they learned that the raiders were English. They might lose their treasure, but there would be no cruelty. Drake, recovering from his wound, took this officer very correctly to be a spy, and received him with great courtesy. He asked to what reason he owed the honour of the visit. The soldier answered that his affection gave him cause enough to visit those whose virtues he so honoured. But, in addition, the Governor had sent him on the authority of certain inhabitants of the town who knew that a Captain Drake had been often upon this coast during the last two years and had used everybody whom he captured or came across very well. The Governor wished to know whether this Captain Drake whom he saw was the same Captain Drake of whom they already knew. Drake answered: “I am the same Drake.” The officer then desired to know, since many of his men had been wounded with the English arrows, whether those arrows were poisoned or not and by what treatment the wounds might be cured. Thirdly, the Governor wished to be informed whether Drake and his men wanted food or other necessaries; if so, he was prepared to supply them as largely as he could afford.

  Drake answered that it was never his manner to poison his arrows and that ordinary surgery was all that was needed to cure the wounds. As for his needs, the island of Bastimentos would furnish them except in one respect. And at this moment his manner changed:

  “I advise the Governor to keep his eyes open. For before I depart, if God lend me life and leave, I mean to reap some of your harvest which you get out of the earth and send into Spain to trouble all the earth.”

  The gracious gentleman was taken aback by this reply and said:

  “If I may without offence move such a question, what was the cause then of your departing from the town when there was three hundred and sixty tons of silver in the Governor’s store and much more gold in iron chests in the King’s Treasure House?”

  Drake explained that he had been wounded and that his men had carried him off. The officer replied politely that they had been as wise then as they had been brave before. Nombre de Dios, he added, sought no revenge, but was now provided with a sure defence.

  This odd interview, characteristic of its age, was brought then to its natural conclusion. The elegant officer from Nombre de Dios stayed to dinner, and Drake now had his opportunity of playing the fine gentleman. He had a liking for magnificence, and at the end of dinner he made him a handsome present from a prize. The officer was then politely dismissed, and protested on his return to Nombre de Dios that “he was never so much honoured of any in his life.”

  But Drake held more important interviews at the island of Bastimentos with Diego, the runaway slave. There was already gathering in his mind during these days of his convalescence the first outlines of a new plan which, with the help of the Cimaroons, was to repair the defeat of Nombre de Dios. In a survey made by Baptista Antonio for King Philip in the year 1587, the River Chagres is described. It has its mouth on the North Seas (that is the Caribbean), eighteen leagues from Nombre de Dios and thirteen from Puerto Bello. Merchandise from Spain intended for Panama was carried up the Chagres in small frigates of sixteen tons as far as Venta Cruz, where the river ceased to be navigable. Venta Cruz was eighteen leagues from the river mouth and five only from Panama. From Venta Cruz “the commodities” were carried on mule-back. The frigates then picked up the treasure from the mines of Peru and brought it down to Nombre de Dios. This operation was only possible in winter when the river was full. During the summer months the treasure must either wait in store at Panama or come all the way by land.

  It seemed to Drake that the Chagres River would be well worth exploring, and he sent his brother John, with one Ellis Hixom as his second officer, in one of the pinnaces to explore it. With the other three pinnaces he returned to his ships at the Isles of Pines. The island of Bastimentos was a little too near a reinforced Nombre de Dios to be comfortable to a man who put very little faith in his elegant visitor’s assurances.

  Captain Ranee came aboard upon Drake’s return and was told the story of the failure. He was told it with every detail likely to discourage him, and having heard it, Captain Ranee dissolved the temporary partnership and departed, as he was meant to do. Drake waited for the return of his brother, who had been making friends with the Cimaroons on the River Chagres, and then he went too. Swift raids and swift disappearances were the heart and kernel of his policy. He would come flaming out of the blue, seize or destroy what he could, and the next day he would be gone, so that all along the Spanish Main the townsfolk lived in alarm, wondering when the topsails of his ships would catch the sun on the horizon’s edge. Nombre de Dios must be left now to relapse into its familiar indolence. With the Pasha and the Swan and his three pinnaces, he streaked straight across the Gulf of Darien to the town of Cartagena.

  It is not to be thought that Drake had any intention to attack the town of Cartagena. The capital of the Spanish Main, with its two harbours, its cannon and its garrison, was far too heavy for the Pasha and the Swan. It must wait for a later expedition, as the description of it may. Drake anchored on the 13th of August off the island of San Barnardo outside the harbour. He then embarked on the first of his three pinnaces and boldly led the way inside through the Boca Grande. A small ship was lying just within the mouth of the harbour, Drake hailed it and found only one old sailor on board, who explained that the crew had all gone into the town to fight about a mistress. He added that a ship lying nearer to the land was from Seville and due to sail to San Domingo the next morning. Drake rowed towards this ship, and being hailed as to whence he had come, replied from Nombre de Dios. His answer was received with abuse and oaths. The story of that unfortunate attempt was already out. Drake’s answer was a swift attack. She was a large bark of two hundred and forty tons, and the sides were, because of her height, difficult to scale. He and his lads reached the deck without loss. The Spaniards took shelter in the hold. Drake cut the cables and towed the big ship right away to the island outside the port.

  The town meanwhile took alarm, rang its bells, shot off thirty great guns and, mustering horsemen and footmen, marched down to the point of land at the harbour’s mouth and discharged all their rifles. Unmoved by this manifestation, Drake took two more frigates on the following morning — one of them carrying official letters of advice from Nombre de Dios to warn Cartagena that Drake was on the coast. He followed his usual practice of treating everybody with a good-humoured civility, put the crews of the frigates on shore with the bearer of the letter of advice, and retired again to his island anchorage.

  That night he came to a bold and remarkable decision. He had worked out roughly his new plan, in which his pinnaces were to play a necessary part. But he could not man both his pinnaces and his ships. He determined, therefore, to sink at once his smaller vessel, the Swan, and rely upon capturing a Spaniard for the homeward voyage. It was a ruthless, audacious decision, and he went warily about it. The Swan was a good stout sea-boat and her crew was fond of her, as sailors are fond of a ship which has kept them warm and dry through a long service. The mutterings which he heard in the pinnaces off the point of Nombre de Dios and under the veranda of the King’s Treasure House would be renewed, and might even swell to a mutiny. He decided not to take into his confidence even his brother, the Captain, or John Oxenham, the mate. He sent for Thomas Moone, the Swan’s carpenter, late at night, and took him privately into his cabin. Moone stared at his General with
consternation as his intention was explained, but Drake drove his argument home. He meant to hide the Pasha in some new hidden corner like Port Pheasant and use her as a store-ship. The work would be done by the pinnaces. They were the necessity. They must be manned. The Swan was in the way. Moone was persuaded in the end to descend into the well of the ship in the middle of the second watch and “with a spike-gimlet to bore three holes, as near the keel as he could,” and so to cover them that the force of the water entering might make no great noise. Drake promised Moone that his share in the sinking of the ship should never be known; and on the same night Thomas Moone carried out his orders.

  The water around the island of San Barnardo was well known for the good fishing which it offered. So, early the next morning, Drake came alongside the Swan in his pinnace and called to his brother to come and catch some fish with him. John Drake answered that he would follow presently, for he had still to make out the orders of the day.

  Drake answered: “Very well.” And as his pinnace pulled away he called out on an accent of mere curiosity:

  “Why is your ship so low down by the head?”

  The question puzzled John Drake, who sent a hand below to ask whether there was any water in the hold. In a few minutes the steward came running up and cried out:

  “The ship is full of water.”

  Young Drake set the company to the pumps and ran below himself. On returning he bawled out to the General that whereas he had never need to pump his ship out twice in six weeks before, she had now six feet of water in the hold. He therefore begged leave from joining his brother in order that he might locate the leak and stop it.

  Francis Drake shouted: “Shall we come and help you?” And a cheerful answer was returned to him that there were men enough aboard the Swan, and that he would be pleased if his brother went on with his fishing and kept a part of his catch for the Swan. At the end of this comedy Francis Drake rowed away, and the crew of the Swan pumped until three o’clock in the afternoon, when, as the narrative by the Rev. P. Nichols called “Sir Francis Drake Revived” puts it, in spite of their love of the bark, they had, after all those hours of pumping, a less liking of her than before.

  Drake, upon his return from his fishing expedition, found them willing to abandon her. He proposed then to transfer himself to one of the pinnaces until such time as he could pick up a handsome frigate, and to make his brother and Oxenham meanwhile Captain and Master of the Pasha. As for the Swan, he would make sure that she should never be sailed by other hands. During that evening the pinnaces transferred to the Pasha the possessions of the Swan’s crew, and when that was done, Drake set fire to the little ship which had been his home for so much of the last three years.

  With the Pasha and the pinnaces he left the island of San Barnardo during the night and once more disappeared. He sailed straight back to the Sound of Darien, and within five days had discovered a harbour out of the way of all traffic and well hidden from the sea.

  The time had come to reset his pinnaces. He cleared a large plot of ground, and on that plot, with the help of Diego, he built houses sufficient to lodge all his men on shore, and a hall as a club-room. The company was divided into two, so that half worked and half played on alternate days. Butts were set up so that the men might practise their archery. Drake carried a fletcher to keep the bows and arrows in order. There were bowls, quoits, a harbour teeming with fish, and woods full of fowl, deer, hogs and conies. Drake set up his forges on the shore, and for a fortnight that little corner of the tropics was noisy with anvils and the laughter of the young crews.

  Then, on the 5th of September, John Drake with the negro Diego was sent forward in one pinnace to renew his contacts with the Cimaroons. Drake himself with the other two sailed to the east, partly to secure fresh food and partly to suggest that he was on his way home.

  It is extraordinary to note the distances covered by these pinnaces. The Pasha was, after all, only seventy tons and she carried three of them. It is true that they had been built in sections, but they must have been tiny boats when put together. Yet Drake sailed with them from the coast of Darien, keeping well out of sight of land, to the mouth of the River Magdalena at what is now Puerto Colombia. He rowed up the river for a day and reached a settlement full of provisions for the replenishment of the Spanish fleets on their homeward voyage. Drake filled his pinnaces with rusks, dried bacon, sugar, sweetmeats, conserves and special country cheeses, rather like Dutch cheeses but much more delicate to taste, which were reserved for despatch into Spain as special presents. That season the great men at Seville and Madrid went without their special dainties, and the knowledge that the marauder Drake was enjoying them instead must have sharpened their indignation.

  The pinnaces got away on the 10th of September, just in time to escape from an attack from a combined force of Spaniards and Indians. He picked up six frigates laden with live hogs, hens and Guinea wheat on the high sea, and keeping two of the frigates with him, sailed three days after into his new port, which he named very suitably Port Plenty.

  John Drake had already returned abrim with good news. The Cimaroons would do everything they could to help them against the Spaniards. He had exchanged hostages with them and had arranged a conference between Francis and Pedro the Cimaroon King at the mouth of a little river which he had named the Rio Diego in honour of the faithful runaway. In addition, he had discovered the perfect harbour. It was nearer than Port Plenty to Nombre de Dios; it was hidden away in an archipelago behind shoals and winding channels; and it was surrounded by fertile country.

  Francis led his force off towards the new anchorage on the next day, and received on board the Pasha Pedro and his Chiefs. Drake, Pedro said, had shown them such friendship as, between white man and black, passed all understanding. How could they repay it? By helping him to gold, Drake replied. It was the first time that he had revealed to them his real purpose; and the Cimaroons were disconcerted. They could have understood his need for iron. You made arrowheads out of iron and all sorts of useful utensils. But gold! If only they had known! They often took gold from the Spaniards just to spite them, and buried it deep in river-banks. But the rainy season was beginning, rivers were in flood. Worse still, so long as the rains lasted, no gold train crossed the isthmus from Panama to Nombre de Dios. How long must he wait? Drake asked, and the answer was distressing. Five months.

  It was not merely the waste of time which troubled Drake. That was bad enough to be sure. But he had to find five months’ employment for his men.

  “Our Captain,” the narrative relates, “would not, in the meantime, suffer this edge and forwardness of his men to be dulled or rebated by lying still idly unemployed, as knowing right well by continual experience, that no sickness was more noisome to impeach any enterprise than delay and idleness.”

  Let us see what he did. He brought the Pasha, his pinnaces, and his little flotilla of captured frigates into the new harbour, landed the guns and sent John to fetch the planks from a big caravel which had driven ashore, and build up gun emplacements. Meanwhile, taking two of the pinnaces, he sailed away again to Cartagena.

  It is interesting to note that he named the pinnace in which he sailed himself the Minion. The Minion was the name of that ship which, according to John Hawkins, he had forsaken in its extremity. Was his choice of the name a challenge? A piece of bravado? The sort of bold confrontation which he was the very man to set up? Or was it that he had forgotten the terrible sentence in Hawkins’ report on the disaster of St. John de Ulua? It may have been that he was insensible. One cannot say more than that it was the oddest choice of a name which he could possibly have made.

  He sailed with a fair wind, and five days later anchored once more off the island of San Barnardo. There he cleaned his pinnaces and then sailed right in to the outer harbour of Cartagena by the Boca Grande. For a fortnight he remained there, running in and out to loot ships and then let them go, as if the port belonged to him. He was not attacked, but all sorts of devices were used
to lure him and his men on shore — flags of truce, messengers who swam out to him. But Drake was too wary to fall into the traps. He did once jump ashore outside the harbour, although he knew that soldiers were planted in an ambush to take him, but he was back again on his pinnace before they could reach him. “They are like to have little rest if by fair means they will not traffic with me,” he told a boy who had swum out with the Governor’s refusal to trade with him. He gave the boy a new shirt, and on November 3rd he was off again — to the Magdalena River, and thence in spite of a head wind to Santa Marta. Here this impudent little expedition almost came to an end. The Spaniards, warned of his coming, had hidden some culverins in the brushwood under the western headland, where was the best anchorage; and as his pinnaces came up into the wind they let him have a salvo. One big shot fell between the two boats, and he had counted forty rounds fired at him before he was out of range.

  But he had relied upon Santa Marta. He had rifled no ships since leaving Cartagena. His crews were starving and his pinnaces leaking. He followed his usual practice on these occasions. He called a conference of his officers, meaning to hear patiently everybody’s opinion, and then do exactly as he wished. His officers wanted to land further to the east and trust to the countrymen. Drake was for bearing up to Curaçao. The officers of the second pinnace were aghast. They would follow Drake through the world, but how could their pinnaces live in the big seas, or they themselves who had only one gammon of bacon and thirty pounds of biscuit among eighteen men? Drake replied that they were better off than he himself was, for he had but one gammon of bacon and forty pounds of biscuit among twenty-four men. He doubted not that they would take such part as he did, “and willingly depend upon God’s Almighty providence, which never faileth them that trust in Him.”

  Drake thereupon hoisted his foresail and steered for Curaçao, being followed sorrowfully by the second pinnace; and, as if in answer to his prayer, six or seven miles away they sighted a big ship of ninety tons beating up into the wind. She took no notice of Drake’s summons to surrender, and indeed fired a cannon at him. The sea was too high for Drake to lay himself alongside, but he kept company with her, and then it pleased God to send a calm, so that he could use his own guns and take her. He found her laden with well-salted food, and they all looked upon that ship as a special example of God’s great mercy. He put the crew of that ship ashore the next day, and finding her to be sound and swift, he put a prize crew on board and sailed back to Fort Diego, as he had named his harbour amongst the islands.