Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  During the first day and the next, a safe anchorage was sought amongst the islands and, being found, the ships were appointed to their stations. On the 22nd, Drake, taking with him Thomas Drake his brother, John Brewer his young bugler, Robert Winterhey one of the gentlemen adventurers, Oliver his master gunner, and Thomas Flood, John Thomas and Thomas Hood, seamen, was rowed to the mainland. Some Patagonians, tall men, so tall that the Spaniards of Magellan’s expedition had called them giants, came from the woods and met them on the beach. They were young and friendly, and they accepted with pleasure the presents which Drake made to them. Winterhey had a particular skill with the bow, and since the Patagonians were also armed with bows, he made a match with them and in the flight of his arrow outdistanced them all. Again, to their pleasure and admiration.

  But they were now joined by older men of a quite different disposition. It was thought afterwards that these men when children, or their parents, had suffered at the hands of Magellan’s crew the cruelties and. outrages which were the cargo of the Spanish adventurers. Whatever the cause, these older men were quarrelsome and violent, and by their angry gestures — for they spoke no language which any of Drake’s party understood — ordered the landing party back to their ships. Winterhey thought that once more his skill might be of use in turning away their wrath. He fitted another arrow to his bow, but as he drew the feather to his ear the bow’s string broke. No accident could have been more untimely. It led the Patagonians to believe that the white men were badly armed. They drew off, and before Winterhey had time to restring his bow one of them shot an arrow which pierced his lung. Winterhey’s fall was taken as a signal for battle, and had not Drake understood the danger in which his small company stood against so many and rapped out his orders on the instant, neither he nor any of his sailors would have got back to their ships. He commanded his men to spread, those who were without shields taking cover behind those who had them and to break in half every arrow which fell on the ground near to them. Oliver, the gunner, had brought a fowling-piece ashore with him. He levelled it at the ringleader of their enemies, but the powder at the touch-hole was damp and it would not fire. He was killed outright by a shaft which drove its point through his heart and a good foot out beyond his back between the shoulders. The Patagonians, however, had come to the end of their arrows, and Drake, seizing the fowling-piece, shot the leader in the belly and to their astonished eyes seemed to blow the man to bits. The noise of the explosion and the screams of the dying man put an end to the conflict. The natives fled back into their woods. Winterhey was still breathing, and Drake, more concerned to get his wounded follower to a surgeon than to pursue his military advantage, had Winterhey carried on board the boat and returned to the Pelican. Within a few hours, however, Winterhey died, and on the next morning he was buried side by side with Oliver on the shore of Port Saint Julian. That was the end of Drake’s troubles, so far as the native Patagonians were concerned. He was for the best part of two months lying in that harbour. His men had the run of the coast. They got the cramp out of their limbs and the clean air into their lungs. None of those friendly relationships which Drake as a rule was so quick to establish between his ships and the inhabitants of the various harbours to which he put in were in this case contracted. But he was never molested again.

  A more grievous peril, however, awaited the General upon his own ships, and in this Port of Saint Julian it was dealt with and discharged. Nuño da Silva, the Portuguese pilot who was captured off Cape Verde on the prize now called the Mary and was taken along to Guatulco in Guatemala, kept a brief log throughout the voyage. On June 30th he entered into it one line:

  On the thirtieth day of this month they passed sentence that he was to die;

  and on the 2nd of July another line:

  They cut off his head.

  He gave no name to the man whose trial and execution he thus records; nor does he mention the crime for which he was punished. But partly because of some honest doubt, not so much of the justice of the verdict as of the conduct of the trial; and partly because no company of people lacks some jealous ones eager to bring a great man down to their own level by setting a gloss upon his actions; the trial and death of Thomas Doughty have come to such a notoriety that if Mr. Pelman says “Drake,” you say “Doughty.”

  Thomas Doughty was that subtle Italianate man with the English yeoman-name who in the year 1574 was setting Lord Essex and Lord Leicester by the ears, and thereafter, in the matter of this very expedition, double-dealing with Drake himself. The fruits of that double-dealing were overripe when the General led his ships into Port Saint Julian.

  Here are the facts, with such interpretations and corrections as the friends of Thomas Doughty and the enemies of Francis Drake put upon them.

  Dissension showed itself even before Drake had left English waters. To Lydye or Stydye — the name is spelt either way in different chronicles — a man living at Plymouth, had been entrusted the fitting out and provisioning of the small fleet. Drake led his five ships out of Plymouth Sound at five o’clock on the afternoon of November 15th, carrying Lydye or Stydye as Master and Captain of the flyboat Swan. On the next morning the fleet was abreast of the Lizard and there encountered a south-westerly wind, that most prevalent of all the winds upon the coasts of England. Drake, aware that no progress could be made until the wind abated, ran back into the wide and safe anchorage of Falmouth Harbour. But the wind, so far from abating, strengthened to a gale, and blew with so much fury during the forenoon of the 18th, that on Drake’s own ship, the Admiral, the men had to cut the mainmast by the board, whilst the Marigold was driven ashore, and to save herself from wreckage must sacrifice her mainmast too. Drake was forced to return to Plymouth as soon as the storm died away. He arrived there on November 28th, and after making good the damage done to his ships, put to sea again on December 13th.

  But he had lost a month and he discharged Lydye as incompetent — a natural and indeed a necessary step to take by the leader of a long and hazardous expedition. Incompetents were not tolerable on such a voyage, and ships which could not ride out even the most furious gale in the excellent protection of Falmouth Harbour had been without a doubt incompetently prepared. Lydye, however, had been recommended to Drake by Thomas Doughty, who took great offence at the man’s summary discharge. Doughty made no complaint to Drake himself. But privately, and especially to one Ned Bright in Drake’s garden in Plymouth where the ships were being repaired, he maintained not merely that James Lydye was a necessary man for the voyage but that Drake had no right thus to dismiss him. He, Thomas Doughty, he declared, had been given by the Queen’s Majesty in person equal authority with Drake in the conduct of the expedition. There was never produced a shred of evidence for this claim beyond Doughty’s own word, not a scrap of writing by Sir Christopher Hatton or Lord Leicester, or any of those great courtiers with whose names Doughty tried to dazzle the eyes of Ned Bright on that evening in Drake’s garden in Plymouth. He was wise enough not to put that claim directly to the General. Ten years later Drake was willing without a protest to take the second place when achievement and knowledge would have awarded him the first. But that was so that his country might live in its own way and with its own faith and under its own Queen. There was, however, no such compulsion here, and it is safe to say that Drake would set out upon his voyage of circumnavigation at all had he been limited to a partial and divided authority. No man was so ready as he to listen to advice, no one ever took less of it. Sitting at dinner in his cabin with his page behind his chair, he would call for it, even upon any of the gentlemen adventurers who might be his guests. But when all of them had spoken he was silent, and the thing to be done was afterwards announced but not debated.

  However, nothing more was heard of this claim for a time, nor of many overweening pretensions which Doughty advanced both to Bright and to such as would listen to him on board the Pelican. For he sailed with his brother John Doughty on board the Pelican so far as the islands of Cape Verde. The
re, it will be remembered, in the month of January, 1578, Drake captured a Portuguese prize which was renamed Mary, and so confident was he of Doughty’s loyalty that he gave him the command of it and sent with him on board his own brother Thomas Drake. It was at some time during the long voyage of sixty-three days from the Cape Verde Islands to the coast of Brazil that an accident led to the discovery of how misplaced Drake’s confidence had been.

  Ned Bright and John Brewer, a lad who was Drake’s trumpeter, brought a charge against Doughty that he had purloined some things of value on board the Mary. It is to be understood, of course, that all the spoil taken on a voyage of this kind was the joint property of the crews, their officers and the backers who financed the voyage in England; the whole to be divided when the home port was made, according to the arranged proportions. There were few crimes more dangerous to the concord necessary for success than private thefts which would give one man an advantage over his neighbour. It was incumbent upon Drake to take immediate notice of the charge and — we must suppose that it was during one of those calms which so prolonged the fleet’s traverse of the South Atlantic to Brazil — he came himself on board the Mary. He discovered quickly enough that there was no truth in the charge at all. All that Doughty was found possessed of amounted to a few pairs of Portuguese gloves, a ring and some foreign coins of small value. And these had been given to him by one of the Portuguese.

  Doughty’s friends, on the other hand, had a different story. They said that it was Drake’s brother Thomas who had stolen these trifles; that Doughty, being in command of the ship, had found himself reluctantly forced to bring the theft before the General; and that the General, coming on board in a great rage, had accused Doughty of trying to discredit him through his brother by trumping up a false accusation.

  There is one plain and simple fact which gives the lie to this story. When the charge was disposed of as of no account, Drake transferred Doughty as Captain to the Pelican and himself remained with his brother Thomas in command of the Mary. Drake’s good name, his fortune, were both bound up in the success of the expedition. He had planned and prepared for it through many months; the Queen herself, and no doubt Walsingham, had invested money in it; he schemed not merely to raid King Philip’s shipping in the Pacific, but to found there colonies to the glory of his country and the undoing of Spain. To return successful meant wealth and all those circumstances of high prestige and great consideration which he valued as much as any man. To return defeated meant the frowns of those great ones amongst whom he had just begun to move, poverty and, if he was lucky, permission to end his days in the obscurity of his native town. To believe that he would entrust the command of the Pelican, his biggest ship, the Admiral of his fleet, to a man who was going about to discredit him is to believe the incredible. He must have looked upon Doughty still as his loyal friend and lieutenant. He must have thought that since some bad blood had been made between Doughty and his brother, it would be wise to separate them and at the same time to prove to the former of the pair that his friendship for him was in no particle diminished.

  But see how Doughty was led on by that preferment! He became arbitrary and tyrannical to the mass of the men under his command and, worse, made special favourites of a few — notably Leonard Vicary, one of the gentlemen, and Thomas Cuttill, the boatswain, to whom he promised a hundred pounds at the end of the voyage and to hide him in his own lodging in the Temple from the anger of even the Lord High Admiral of England. A strange and extravagant pledge. Grudges fermenting, jealousies festering, a witches’ cauldron of them, until in the smoke there showed a Doughty swollen to such power that he could protect his friends from the highest of the Queen’s Officers? Who shall say?

  The end of that brief authority on the Pelican came with a startling suddenness. From the Mary, Drake sent his trumpeter John Brewer upon some errand to the Pelican — what errand is a detail unknown even in the story as told by Doughty’s friends. A quarrel broke out between the lad and the acting-Captain which was due to an unpleasant familiarity by the older man. John Brewer, thereupon, turned upon Doughty: “God’s wounds, Doughty, what dost thou mean to use this familiarity with me, considering thou art not the General’s friend.”

  Doughty’s reply was astonishing, so that one hesitates whether to think it a contemptuous sarcasm or an expression of fear. He said:

  “What, fellow John, what moves you to use these words to me that am as good and sure a friend to my good General as any in this fleet, and I defy him that shall say to the contrary? But is the matter thus, why yet, fellow John, I pray thee let me live until I come into England.”

  John Brewer returned to the Portuguese prize, and after he had talked for a few minutes with the General the boat was sent straight away back to the Pelican to fetch Thomas Doughty. Drake was on deck when it came again alongside, and holding a religious service. But he stood up, and as Doughty laid his hands upon the Mary’s bulwarks, to hoist himself on board, he cried:

  “Stay there, Thomas Doughty, for I must send you to another place, and he bade the oarsmen to row him to the provision ship, the Swan, as being a ship more fit for him than the Pelican.

  This account of Thomas Doughty’s disgrace is in the handwriting of Stow the historian and is signed by one John Cooke, whose name appears in the list of witnesses at Doughty’s trial. We know nothing more of the man than his narrative tells us, and we must assume that he sailed in some capacity upon this voyage. It certainly is not probable that Stow would have taken it down from John Cooke’s lips unless he had reason to believe that John Cooke was speaking of things which he had seen and words which he had heard. John Cooke is the complete partisan. There are no shades in his pictures. His heroes are white and his villains are black. Thomas Doughty was the hero, a fine loyal Christian gentleman, a good soldier too, for did he not at Capo Blanco spend the four days of the fleet’s stay in training the men in the ways of war so that they might not be unskilful in time of need? Drake, on the other hand, was a false friend, always seeking evidence against Doughty, who “in wisdom and honest government as far passed him, as he in tyranny excelled all men.” Drake was a man of violent temper, who spewed out his venom and in the end murdered a better friend than ever Pythias was to Damon. According to John Cooke, Drake already knew that so far back as the evening in the garden at Plymouth Doughty was sapping Drake’s authority and claiming as part of his own contribution the patronage of Sir Christopher Hatton and the share taken by the Queen herself. All through these months Drake had been seeking an occasion to use his knowledge for Doughty’s destruction. But the charge will not fit with the fact that Drake did make Doughty the Captain of his Admiral the Pelican. If he placed in that high position not merely a man of ill-will but one whom he knew to be questioning his authority and setting up rival claims, he was hazarding, as he had no right to do and no reason for doing, the very safety of his ships and the men in his charge. For out of just those elements mutiny is made. The natural explanation must carry the day. To prove that his friend had lost none of his confidence, Drake gave him the first position under himself in the fleet. He found from complaints that his friend was exceeding his powers. The quarrel with the lad John Brewer set Doughty in a still more unsavoury circumstance; and he was sent away in disgrace upon the Swan. And after him went his brother John Doughty; and though Thomas pleaded for an interview with Drake it was not granted.

  Thus for many weeks Thomas Doughty sailed upon the flyboat, as the Swan was called. The fleet sighted the coast of Brazil upon April 7th, and the River Plate on April 20th, when the ships rode in fresh water and filled their breakers alongside. The fleet sailed from the River Plate on April 27th, and almost at once the Swan was lost to view. What with bad weather at one time, foul anchorages at another, light winds at a third, ships were continually straying during this part of the voyage; and much time was lost whilst they were being searched for and recovered. Thus the Christopher, the canter of forty tons exchanged for the Benedict off the coast of Mor
occo, was lost on the 7th of April and overhauled again on the 22nd off a headland which Drake named Cape Joy to commemorate her retrieval. She disappeared for a second time in another storm on May 8th and was not sighted again until the 17th. The Portuguese prize was driven out to sea by a tempest from Cape Hope, the name which Drake gave to the point known now as Cabo de Tres Puntas in latitude 47° 6ʹ. A mist separated her altogether from the rest of the fleet and she only got into touch with it again thirty-eight days afterwards off Port Saint Julian. Such dispersals and recoveries were nothing out of the way in those wintry seas of storm and mist, but Drake found an explanation of them which certainly did Master Thomas Doughty no good service. Doughty was a magician and conjurer. He could raise storms, he could bedevil the fleet with mists and fogs. Let a black gale beset them: that, said Drake, comes out of Master Doughty’s capcase. There was, of course, no discredit to a man of intelligence in such a belief. Doctors and ecclesiastics, Dunstan and Michael Scot, Roger Bacon and Paracelsus, all in common repute had dealt with the devil.

  “A sound magician is a mighty God,” says Faustus, and in the raising of storms such a one was particularly at home.

  “I’ll give them a wind,” the second witch promises in the Tragedy of Macbeth.

  “And I another,” says the third witch.

  “I myself have all the other,” the first witch declares comprehensively.

  “And the very ports they blow.

  All the quarters that they know