Rude and uncultivated, no doubt, they were, but they were friendly, and that is more than can be said of their descendants four hundred years afterwards. The name of Joshua Slocum is nowadays probably forgotten, but in the last decade of the nineteenth century he made some little stir. An old sailor of the Newfoundland banks, poor and out of work, he built a sloop of nine tons burden in his back garden at Fairhaven, Mass., zigzagged across the Atlantics single-handed and sailed through the Straits of Magellan to Australia. In order to sleep, he tied up his little sloop at night to any convenient rock, and in order to save himself from being murdered whilst he slept, he covered his deck with tin-tacks. The cries of the barefooted marauders waked him in his cabin, and a double-barrelled shot-gun which he kept loaded by his side sent them leaping back on shore.
Drake stayed for two days at the island of Elizabeth, and on the 26th he set off again. Now began the most dangerous part of the passage. For though the Strait was wider, it twisted and turned so sharply that he had never a true wind, and though it blew amiss, never long from the same quarter. Each icy cleft of the high rocks seemed to be keeping a gust of especial malice against the coming of the English ships; and sometimes, if it smote them from ahead, they lost in an hour the whole advance of yesterday. Their plight was the more grievous because of the depth of the channel. It was very seldom that they could ride to an anchor, and only then in some narrow creek where, if the anchor dragged, the ship must go ashore. Still they sailed on in those harsh grey solitudes. Once, to the south, they sighted a volcano far away, and now and then fires were lit by the savages on the banks as if to celebrate their passage. From a single strait they sailed into an archipelago of islands where all the broad waterways led to the south. Under the lee of one of these islands they anchored, whilst Drake in a rowing-boat searched for an outlet to the north. He found it. The channel opened, and on the 6th day of September Drake passed through that iron gateway into the South Sea of his dreams, the first of all the English. It had been his intention to land on Cape Deseado, the great headland on the north side of the Straits, hold a service there, preach a sermon, and set up a metal statue of Her Majesty for a perpetual remembrance of the voyage. He had noted with his flair for the dramatic detail that Cape Deseado was 52° south of the Line, whereas England was 52° north of it, and no doubt meant to draw a moral from that fact in his homily. But this was one of the sermons never to be delivered. He had the wind astern and there was no likely anchorage to be observed. He held on into the open sea and set his course north-west.
North-west for Peru! It was an extraordinary mistake. Abraham Ortelius had published his map in Antwerp in the year 1570, and it quickly became the standard map in England. It would seem impossible that Drake, setting out from an English port in November of the year 1577, should not have carried this map with him. Yet Ortelius was almost right in his outline of the western coast of South America. He missed the easterly inclination of the land below the great shoulder of Peru, but no sailor with even a smattering of knowledge and Ortelius’ map upon his table could have laid his course north-west. A point or half a point to the west of north perhaps, but to steer north-west was to make for the emptiness of the South Sea. Certainly, then, Drake had not this map, but he had others, for more than one of the prisoners he made along that coast spoke of seeing them, and San Juan de Anton, the Master and owner of Nuestra Señora de la Concepcion — a ship of which a good deal will later be said — deposed before the Royal Court of Panama ten days after his release that Drake showed him a huge chart of more than eleven yards in length which had been made for him in Lisbon. Parson Fletcher suggests that the Spanish deliberately falsified their maps so that any expedition which succeeded in passing through the Straits might be lured away to those islands where Magellan met his death. But Lisbon was not yet the possession of Spain. The Cardinal-King of Portugal was still alive, and he whose share of the world was the East had no interest in the seaboard of Chile and Peru. The big Portuguese chart which Drake used may have misled him through the error of a geographer rather than through a piece of political cunning. In any case, he was misled, and for seventy leagues he sailed forth into the emptiness of the South Sea. At that point he met with a gale, “the like whereof its to be supposed no traveller hath felt, neither hath there ever been such a tempest so violent and of such continuance, since Noah’s flood; for it lasted from September 7th to October 28th, full fifty-two days.”
Thus “The World Encompassed” and Drake’s seamanship and endurance were never put to a sterner trial. The storm came up out of the north and drove the fleet far south to degree 57. On the 15th of September occurred an eclipse of the moon which lasted for two hours. When the shadow passed from the moon, the crews, perished with cold and want of sleep and the sting of the sea, hoped that it would pass from them too. “But an eclipse continued still in its full force,” and though Drake was able in some abatement of the tempest to bring his ships about and head north-eastwards for the coast, he lost the Marigold. That little ship may well have been overwhelmed in the dangerous moment of going about in the enormous sea. We don’t know. But Fletcher, the chaplain, had another reason. Ned Bright was on board of her, the accuser of Doughty, her Captain. Fletcher is wrong there. It is definitely stated that when Drake at Port Saint Julian gave back to his officers their commands, he made John Thomas, the clerk of his assize, once more Captain of the Marigold. But it is very likely that he promoted Ned Bright from ship’s carpenter on the Pelican, as the Golden Hind still was named, to Master on the Marigold. He was certainly on board. The catastrophe happened in the second watch of the night, which John Brewer and Fletcher himself kept on the Golden Hind, the storm being outrageous. The Marigold was sailing close to the Admiral when “the hand of God came upon them,” so close that both Fletcher and Brewer heard above the storm the cries of their drowning comrades. “Twenty-eight souls,” apart from Ned Bright, were swallowed up in those mountainous seas, and Chaplain Fletcher was able to write in the margin of his manuscript: “Marked judgement against a false witness.” Twenty-eight souls must be sacrificed in the horror of a dark night and a boiling sea, so that Ned Bright might be duly punished for his testimony against Doughty; and who shall deny that Parson Fletcher’s pious edification was another man’s blasphemy?
The Marigold had foundered with all hands, though men of less piety than the chaplain were loath to believe it. She was well provisioned and had a crew large enough and competent enough to handle her. The General had appointed a rendezvous at 30° upon the coast of Chile, should the ships part company. She was waited for at the appointed place, but waited for in vain.
On October 7th, one calendar month after the storm broke upon them, the Golden Hind and the Elizabeth had thrust their way back within sight of land. They must find a harbour if they could where they might rest till “God in mercy gave them more safe sailing at the seas.” The wind had gone round to the west now, and the ships were driving on to a lee-shore a little north of the big cape at the sally-port of the Straits of Magellan. There, though the winds were pouring down from the mountains “with that horror that they made the bottom of the seas to be dry land” and the billows rose mountain-high, a narrow channel between the rocks was discovered; and through it, as “through the eye of a needle,” with darkness falling, the two ships raced into a great bay and dropped their anchors. At last the adventurers hoped to enjoy some freedom and ease till the storm was ended. But the malice of the high mountains was repeated by the foot-hills under which they lay, and a few hours afterwards the storm found them in their shelter. “Our cables broke, our anchors came home, and our spirits fainted as with the last gasp unto death.” By some miracle of seamanship, Drake led his ships in the night back through the needle’s eye to the open sea. There they parted company, Winter with his ship the Elizabeth being forced under the Cape into the Straits, and Drake scudding under bare poles southwards to Cape Horn. The Admiral was persuaded that the Vice-Admiral had perished, the Vice-Admiral had t
he like opinion of the Golden Hind. They were not to meet at the thirtieth degree of latitude off the coast of Chile, and it was not until Drake sailed into Plymouth Sound in an autumn month two years afterwards that he knew what had happened to his consort. For, “the Lord set both our ships from perishing.”
2
Whilst the General is running without a strip of canvas on his yards before the mountainous seas to make a great discovery and demolish a great legend, it would be as well to follow Captain Winter and the Elizabeth. For Captain Winter, if he did not demolish a legend, gave to one still too lively its coup de grâce.
He sailed back through the Straits of Magellan from west to east. An impossible proceeding, said many, and above all the Spanish, so violent a current ran and such strong winds blew from the Atlantic. Once in the Straits of Magellan, you must come out in the South Sea, if you were to come out at all, and seek your roundabout way home by the Moluccas and the Cape of Good Hope. It is possible, no doubt, that the theory owes its origin, with the false map of the Chilean coast, to the deliberate mendacity of the Spaniard nursing his vain dream that he could keep inviolate his rich empire in the Pacific. But it may have sprung from the general belief in a vast continent to the south, that Terra Australis incognita, through which there was no passage or outlet. The Atlantic heaped itself under Cape Virgin Maria and raced through the narrow channel in front of the east wind with so impetuous a compulsion that, once in, there was no going about or coming back.
The legend was not accepted in England even before this expedition. There is a manuscript of three pages in the British Museum mutilated by fire, which is nothing less than the draft plan of Drake’s voyage; and on the third page it is stated that the ships are to go and return by Magellan’s Straits. The going proved that they could have returned had they wished. For, in the first place, they encountered the regular change of the tides with a rise and fall of five fathoms, and in the second, the ships were from time to time blown back by contrary winds so fierce that they lost a full day’s advance in less than a short afternoon. Then the Elizabeth did return and scotched the tale altogether.
Winter anchored first of all in an open bay close to the mouth of the Straits and lit great fires upon the shore, in the hope that Drake might rejoin him. When two days had passed and there was still no sign of the General, Winter took his ship deeper in and, finding a sound, anchored there for three weeks. He named the harbour The Port of Health, for his men, who were worn out by long watches, cold and wet and bad feeding, “did here, God be thanked, wonderfully recover their health in short space. Here” — the account is written by Edward Cliffe, a sailor on the Elizabeth— “we had very pleasant great muscles, some being twenty inches long, very pleasant meat, and many of them full of seed-pearls.”
But Captain John Winter did very much more than recover his health and eat fine mussels. On the day of his return to England he wrote to his father, George Winter, and his uncle, Sir William Winter, an account of how he spent some part of the time. He read to his ship’s company the story of Magellan’s voyage to prepare them for what lay ahead of them; and, after hearing it, he wrote, the Master refused to steer in the wake of Magellan, whereas head-winds would have prevented them from reaching Chile. So Winter reluctantly turned towards home.
Edward Cliffe, however, says bluntly: “We came out of this harbour the first of November, giving over our voyage by Master Winter’s compulsion (full sore against the mariners’ minds).” For he despaired of finding a wind which would serve his turn for Chile, just as he despaired also of Drake’s safety.
Of these two contradictory reasons for the Elizabeth’s return to England, Edward Cliffe’s is the more probable. For had Winter seriously wished to continue the voyage, he would hardly have regaled his convalescent crew with a recital of Magellan’s voyage. There can rarely have been a voyage, even in those days of hard adventuring, on which so much misery was endured. From Cape Deseado or, as it now is called, Cape Pillar, Magellan sailed for a hundred days without sight of land, under a tropical sun. The food decayed, the water got rotten, scurvy was rife amongst the crew and the ship became one stench from bows to stern. With Drake and the Golden Hind sunk, as John Winter had good excuse to believe, he had no stomach to go on with the enterprise.
Before a Court of Admiralty held on June 3rd, 1580, after the Elizabeth had reached England, Winter made a deposition which might be held to throw a different light upon his return alone. The Court was held at the instance of the Portuguese owners of the Mary, who claimed the return of that portion of the Mary’s cargo which was stored in the hold of the Elizabeth. Winter, on giving a list of the Portuguese property which he was carrying, declared that he was utterly opposed to the capture of the Mary, but that he did not dare to open his mouth, lest Drake should put him to death, as indeed in another case he did. “With the said Drake, no justice would be heard”: a piece of evidence which, if accepted on its plain meaning, suggests that Winter persuaded or compelled his crew to give up the voyage, not for any of the reasons which he had given them but because he jumped at the opportunity of freeing himself from the tyranny of Drake.
This deposition has to be considered, since it endorses the descriptions of their leader given by Fletcher and Cooke. But its worth is not to be overrated. Winter was the foreman of the jury which passed its verdict upon Doughty, and there is not to be found in any history of the trial a word which suggests that he disagreed with it or that he was too terrified of Drake to speak what was in his mind. Indeed, when Drake, to make it clear to all that his was the supreme authority, dispossessed his officers of their powers, Winter and John Thomas alone stood up to him and asked him why. Winter, on his return to England, must have found himself in an equivocal position: the same position, in fact, as that in which Drake stood when he came back alone from St. John de Ulua. He may well have thought to strengthen his case in the eyes of important people like Burghley if he now expressed a horror of Drake’s lawlessness in capturing the Portuguese prize.
3
The Marigold was sunk, the Elizabeth had disappeared. So that now our Admiral, if she had retained her old name of Pelican, writes the author of “The World Encompassed,” would have been indeed a Pelican in the wilderness — a wilderness of smothering seas and intolerable winds which no traveller had ever endured. The Golden Hind was driven south again, and as low as the fifty-fifth parallel. The storm still blew out of the north-west, but in its first cycle the ship had lain two hundred miles to the west of her present position. Now she was on a lee-shore, and she ran for shelter amongst those islands to the south of the Straits which they had already recognized as islands rather than promontories of that unknown continent which was supposed to encompass the two hemispheres and hold up the world as an egg-cup holds up an egg. Amongst them they found an anchorage. They found, too, as if to increase their doubts whether the Straits of Magellan were straits at all, that the waters “had their indraught and free passage.” The tides ran through, and not by “small guts or narrow channels” but by waterways as wide as the Straits themselves.
Here for a little while the storm took up. The crew went ashore and collected “divers good and wholesome herbs, and especially one not much unlike that which we commonly call Pennyleaf,” of which they stood in great need. They found fresh water, and their wearied and sickly bodies began to receive good comfort. But the break in the gale was the mere abatement, not the end of it, and after two days they must put out again and into a greater peril than they had known before. For now the wind blew in fierce sudden gusts, now from one quarter, now from another. The heavy rollers, natural to those seas, curled over like the edges of a parchment in the fire, and the spindrift was blown from them mountain-high like flakes of snow. The sailors “were rather to look for present death than hope of any delivery if God Almighty should not make the way for them.” Ship and men were tossed like a ball by a racket. “Notwithstanding,” the narrative continues, “the same God of mercy which delivered Jonas ou
t of the whale’s belly, beheld our tears and heard our humble petitions.” Their General once more with a supreme seamanship brought them in amongst the islands but a few leagues to the south of their former anchorage. And again the storm abated, so much that they found the nomad savages transferring themselves in their canoes from one island to another and held some traffic with them.
This time their respite lasted for three days, and then the hurricane chased them for a third time from their refuge. “Their anchor, as a false friend, gave over its holdfast”: they were granted no time for a seemly putting to sea; Drake cut his cable once more and barely succeeded in beating out into the open sea. But he had probably sought his shelter in Londonderry Island where the coast bends towards the east, and would thus have a screen of towering rocks to break the full force of a north-west gale as he emerged. But once out, his ship was hurled along, as it had been for two months, and buffeted incessantly from every quarter. Drake, however, was soon to recognize that God had a special purpose in visiting him with this inexorable gale, for it drove him down to “the uttermost part of land towards the South Pole,” and there died altogether away. “The uttermost cape or headland of all these islands stands near in 56 degrees, without which there is no main or island to be seen to the southwards but that the Atlantic Ocean and the South Sea meet in a most large and free scope.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 870