I’ the shipman’s card.
I will drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary sev’n-nights, nine times nine,
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d.”
And the man forbid, upon these lonely and tempestuous seas of the South Atlantic, Drake, might well have set down the constant dispersal of his ships to the machinations of the one whom he now knew to be his jealous enemy. For, if Ned Bright is to be believed, Doughty boasted of his possession of these supernatural powers. “John Doughty told me,” he said, speaking of a conversation which had taken place on board the Pelican, “that he and his brother could conjure as well as any man, and that they could raise the devil and make him to meet any man in the likeness of a bear, a lion or a man in harness.” Also they could poison any man with a diamond in such a way that he should die a year after he had been poisoned. However, whatever storms he could raise, he had the same limitations to his powers as the witches in the Tragedy of Macbeth. “No ship was lost,” not even the flyboat.
But there can have been little comfort upon board of her. Thomas Doughty, now that Drake was no longer deceived by the smooth surface of his friendship, strove to make a fine background for himself and undermine the General’s authority. He was the first man to secure a good credit for Drake with the Earl of Essex. Drake had fled into Ireland to escape punishment at the hands of the Lord Admiral and the Council for his wrongdoings to the Spaniards on his voyage to Nombre de Dios. Thomas Doughty obtained for him the Queen’s pay there, just as afterwards in London Thomas Doughty put up money of his own and pestered his important friends to secure support for the expedition. Drake would have found himself in sad difficulties but for his staunch support. Drake knew that the Lord Treasurer of England sent for Thomas Doughty two or three times and asked him to be his secretary, but he would not, no, he had promised Drake to come upon this voyage and would keep his promise.
There was an actual element of truth in some of this braggadocio. It was true, for instance, that he had promised to invest some money in the expedition — the amount varies in his talk from one thousand marks to one thousand five hundred pounds. It was true that for a short while he was Sir Christopher Hatton’s secretary. It was possible that Drake was sent to patrol the east coast of Ireland so that he might be out of the way of charges against him for his attacks and depredations upon a Power with which England was nominally at peace. But the statements were all mixed up with hints and momentous nods of the head. He knew secrets about the General which the General would be very unwilling to have told. Unwilling? Perhaps ashamed was the better word. Yes, secrets the uttering of which would touch the General very much. At the next harbour they would see that the General would call him back into his own company. His enemies might well be afraid lest he should again have authority enough to plague them, as he certainly would do, let them look to it. Drake knew, none better, that Thomas Doughty could not be accused of stealing even so much as the paring of a nail, but he dared not say so since he had too many lying knaves and traitors about him.
Doughty was talking in this style across the table one day when dinner was over, and John Sarocold, one of the ship’s officers, answered:
“The General might do well to deal with traitors as Magellanus did, that is, hang them up to be an example to the rest.”
“Nay,” replied Doughty, “softly! His authority is none such as Magellanus’ was. For I know his authority as well as he himself does. And for hanging, it is for dogs not for men.”
It must have been on some such occasion that Gregory, the Master of the Swan, according to John Cooke, Doughty’s champion, rose up and said that he would mess with the ordinary seamen in the future, since he preferred their company; and this he did, using his position to increase the sailors’ bill of fare at the expense, of that of the gentlemen and the officers. Food, of course, is always important even to vegetarians and the most rarefied of intellectuals. But it is nowhere so important as on a deep-sea sailing ship bound out upon a long voyage. For there are no amusements and few distractions. Thomas Doughty made quite a song about his restricted diet. First of all he approached John Chester, the Captain.
“I marvel, Mr. Chester, that you will take it at his hands to be thus used, considering you were here authorized by the General.”
John Chester, however, stood apart from the dispute, and Doughty took his complaint to Gregory himself, accusing him of partiality. It was against reason, he said, that he and his mates should be so plentifully fed and others be left at the point of starvation. For since they had lost the rest of the fleet they were likely, for want of victuals, to fall into a dire extremity. Gregory, the Master, replied with unkindness. Villains like Doughty should be glad to eat the thole-pins of the rowing-boats if they could get them. Doughty argued that his share in the adventure entitled him to be used as well as any other man. Gregory scoffed at Doughty’s share in the adventure.
“When thou comest home to enjoy any adventure, I’ll be hanged,” he said, and he added words too impolite even in these frank days for print.
Doughty went back to the Captain.
“Master Chester, let us not be thus used at this knave’s hand....If you will, we will put the sword again into your hands and you shall have the government.”
Chester had only to let himself be ruled by him, Doughty declared, and he would make the company ready to cut one another’s throats.
This, of course, was the very stuff of mutiny, and it is not to be wondered at that the Captain took a note of these words and got Francis Fletcher, the chaplain, John Sarocold and yet another man, Emanuel Wattkyns, to add their names to his as witnesses that the words were spoken.
In that way the Swan, an unhappy ship if ever there was one, sailed across the South Atlantic and down the coast of South America. Fortunately for her, her Captain kept her in sight of land, and on the 16th of May she fell in with the Marigold and the canter Christopher, which ships between them had discovered a safe harbour in 47° 45ʹ. On the 17th they were caught up by the Pelican with the General on board, and the Elizabeth under Captain Winter. The only ship missing now was the Portuguese prize Mary, and Drake, troubled by the constant dispersal of his vessels and the time lost in recovering them, made up his mind to diminish their number. In this safe harbour, to which he gave the name of Port Desire, he began with the flyboat. She was brought alongside the Pelican, and her freight discharged. Her iron-work was saved for the future repair of the remaining ships, her crew was partitioned, and Thomas Doughty and his brother found themselves once more on board the Admiral, but in the position of passengers in disgrace.
His truculence grew with this return to his first ship, and it seemed that he went out of his way to make his condition still more lamentable. At one time he accosted the General as the representative of several of the company. All men are mortal, he declared, and it was desirable to know whom the General proposed to appoint as his successor if God should do His will upon him. There is no record of Drake’s reply to a piece of insolence as exasperating as could be imagined. But a swift answer came to a further recrimination. Thomas Doughty actually commissioned one John Martin and Gregory, the Master of the flyboat, to carry his good wishes to the General and to tell him that the time would come when the General would have more need of him than of any reward from this voyage. He supplemented the message by a statement made to Drake’s face that the worst word which ever came out of his own mouth was to be believed sooner than three oaths out of the General’s.
Doughty’s champion, Mr. John Cooke, admits that this was one of a number of “unkind speeches” which Doughty made on the Pelican after he had been delivered from the flyboat; and Drake cannot be expected to have found them tolerable. He ordered Doughty to be bound to the mast — a for
m of disciplinary punishment not uncommon on ships. We shall see, for example, that Francis Fletcher, the chaplain, endured at a later date the same affront to his pride and infringement on his ease. But since in the case of Thomas Doughty the actual manipulation was entrusted to his old enemy Mr. Gregory of the flyboat, there was no more kindness shown to him than he by his speeches had shown to Drake.
The restraint, however, was a temporary matter. The canter Christopher was lying alongside the Pelican, taking in stores; and to the canter Thomas Doughty and his brother were now consigned. Gregory and other enemies of Doughty— “desperate and unhonest people” he called them — were now serving upon the canter, and so strongly did Doughty resist this new order on the ground that his life would not be safe, that Drake ordered the boat tackle to be rigged to lower him over the side. Then only did Doughty consent to be transferred, and he and his brother climbed over the side on to the deck of the Christopher.
From this harbour, having killed a great many seals and birds for the provisioning of his ships, Drake set out on June 3rd, and almost at once parted company with the canter. He sailed southwards in some distress of mind. He was now little more than one degree north of the entrance of the Straits of Magellan, and to enter that channel of swift currents and intricate passages and rocky banks commanded by cannibals with his ships straggling and many a day’s journey apart was to invite disaster. Here was the canter recovered, but the Marigold had been missing for many days. Drake made up his mind to get rid of the Christopher and the Mary as he had already got rid of the Swan, run back towards the Line until he found the Marigold, and with the three ships alone, Pelican, Elizabeth and Marigold, break for the fourth time in the history of the world into the Pacific Ocean from the East. He found a bay convenient to his purpose, and, gutting there the canter Christopher of all that she had of value, distributed her crew between the Elizabeth and the Pelican and left her to drift whithersoever she would.
But the two Doughtys were on board the Christopher and Drake was of no mind to house them on board his Admiral again. Heaven only knew what tornadoes those two might, in the wickedness of their black hearts, concoct to overwhelm him. He went on board the Elizabeth, and calling all the crew together into the waist of the ship, told them that he was committing to their charge a couple of very bad men, one Thomas Doughty, a conjurer and a very seditious lewd fellow, and the other his brother John Doughty, a witch and a poisoner and, he must think, the Devil’s own offspring. No one was to speak with them, unless he wished Drake to look upon him as his enemy and an enemy of the expedition. They were not to be allowed to write or even to read. And he pronounced that if these orders were carried out there was not a cabin-boy on board who would have to go to sea again for his living at the end of this voyage. There would be as much gold as there was wood in the ship, and the youngest of them would be able to live in England as a gentleman.
It is possible that this speech, since its only reporter was John Cooke, was never made at all. It is probable that if made, it was made in terms less harsh and violent. But the Doughtys were undoubtedly transferred at this point from the canter Christopher to the Elizabeth; and it is clear that so open and violent had become their quarrel with the General that the whole expedition must have driven upon ruin and catastrophe unless the question had been publicly asked and answered, who led and who rebelled.
Anyone who has sailed on a deep-sea ship knows what infinite harm can be done by one man alone with a jealous and ill-conditioned mind. He poisons the ship. He sets one hand against another. To use the language of the Communists, he creates cancer-cells which shall so corrupt the little world crowded within the little island of planks and beams that the necessary service for the safety of all will be done half-heartedly, if done at all. And the sea has no pity for half-hearted work. A ship with a crew at sixes and sevens is headed for the rocks. I who write this book have known what injury can be done by one even in a small crew of six, how sailors who have served contentedly for years imagine grievances, cease to bring them to the person who can right them, and live brooding, dissatisfied lives which are each day ripening to rebellion at the moment when rebellion means disaster to the ship. Captains of great cruisers with a thousand hands bear the same testimony. One man, give him time, can split a ship from its yards to its keel so that there are no comrades, but instead little groups of partisans. And here were the two Doughtys, now offering to Thomas Cuttill one hundred pounds at the end of the voyage “if they found him the same man then as they did now,” and to Henry Spindelay, the gunner of the flyboat, forty pounds on the same terms, and the same sums to various others with the promise that they would set them to cutting their enemies’ throats; and these promises were borne witness to not merely by men like John Chester, Captain of the flyboat, but by Francis Fletcher, the chaplain, who when all was over wrote such an epitome of Thomas Doughty as made him out the sans-pareil Sainted Gentleman of his age. It is not to be believed that Drake sailed away from the bay where he had cast off the canter without the firm intention of bringing this growing trouble to an issue before he turned westward into the dangers of the Straits of Magellan.
He must find the Marigold first and gather her under his wing. Then, to use a modern idiom, must come the showdown between Thomas Doughty and himself.
On the 19th day of June he came up, to his great joy, with his missing ship, and on Whit Monday, the 20th, he led the way into Port Saint Julian.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRIAL OF DOUGHTY
A COURT WAS set up on one of the islands in the harbour, and on the last day of June Drake ordered the company of all the ships, officers, crew and gentlemen to assemble there Thomas Doughty was brought to it, a prisoner upon his trial, and Drake himself sat in the seat of judgment with John Thomas at his elbow to act as clerk.
It is to be kept in mind that, apart from certain memoranda in the handwriting of the Elizabethan age found in the Harleian manuscripts, the details of the trial are to be read only in the two narratives which are unfavourable to Drake — that of Francis Fletcher and that told by John Cooke and written out by Stow the historian. For the most part, references to the affair are almost as brief as the entries in Nuño da Silva’s log. Lopez Vaz, the author of “A Discourse on the West Indies and South Sea,” wrote: “...and there also (i.e. Port Saint Julian) he put to death a gentleman of his company because he would have returned home,” and having thrown this new explanation of Doughty’s execution into a debate already confused enough, added not another word. Edward Cliffe who wrote Captain Winter’s account of the voyage of the Elizabeth, states that “the last of June Mr. Thomas Doughty was brought to his answer and convicted of certain articles and by Master Drake condemned.” John Drake, a cousin of Francis, who sailed on this expedition as his cousin’s page being then a boy of fourteen, made a reference of a like brevity to the trial. He made a declaration six years afterwards when a prisoner in the hands of Captain Alonso da Vera y Aragon at Buenos Aires. “In the said bay (of Saint Julian) because a gentleman Master Doughty wished to mutiny with the men the said Captain Francis had him beheaded.” It is treated in fact, as just such an incident as might be expected to occur now and then on a crowded ship bound on a long voyage; and but for the smear upon Drake’s good name which these two members of his expedition set their pens to make, we should have heard very little about it. One notable difference, though upon a trivial point, between Drake’s friends and his accusers warns us to weigh the story, as it is to be now related, very warily. According to Sir Francis Drake, the nephew of the great navigator, who, basing his account on the manuscript of Francis Fletcher, published in 1628 his narrative of the voyage, under the title of “The World Encompassed,” the island upon which the trial took place was named, in memory of it, “the Island of True Justice and Judgement.” According to Francis Fletcher, “at our departure we named the Iland, the Iland of blood in respect of us and Magilanus.” The difference between those two titles is the difference between the s
tories — and the difference, too, between the portraits of Drake.
Drake began the trial with a harangue to Doughty. Doughty had sought to discredit him, to the great hindrance and overthrow of the voyage. There were other big matters, too, wherewith he had to charge him. If Doughty could clear himself of them, well and good, “you and I shall be very good friends.” But if he could not, he deserved death. Thomas Doughty answered that it could never be proved that he had meditated any villainy towards him.
“By whom,” Drake asked, “will you be tried?”
“Why, good General,” answered Doughty, “let me live to come into my own country and I will be there tried by Her Majesty’s laws.”
But that was the one proposal to which the General could not agree. If he were to accept it, he must then and there say finis to the work and plans of years. He must turn back from Port Saint Julian, must never pass through the Straits, must abandon all hope of being the first Englishman to sail the Pacific. He could never expect a second time the high favour which had wafted him on this voyage; and he could not continue it with mutiny whispering behind him in the dark.
“Nay, Thomas Doughty,” he said, “I will impanel a jury to enquire into these charges.”
“Why, General,” quoth Doughty, “I hope you will see your commission be good enough.”
The answer came.
“I warrant you my commission is good enough.”
“I pray you let us then see it. It is necessary that it should be here shown.”
One can see the Italianate gentleman with the yeoman’s name smoothly smiling as he put forward his reasonable plea. It was, as we have seen, the half of Doughty’s complaint that he and Drake had equal authority. But it is not necessary to accept that unlikely claim unless it could be proved that Drake had a written commission giving him the right of life and death. It is on the whole improbable that he had any such written powers. Sir Francis Drake, the nephew, declared that Her Majesty before the General’s departure committed to him her sword to use for his safety with this word:
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 867