There were no Straits of Magellan, then, between two continents. There were waterways between the south point of the Americas and an archipelago of islands. There was no Terra Australis nondum cognita stretching round the base of the world. There were Cape Horn and the clash of two oceans.
It was by an accident that Magellan discovered his Straits. For he believed the way through to the South Sea was by the River Plate, and it was only in obstinacy and fear that he went forward thereafter on a blind chance. It was by the accident of this stupendous protracted gale — unless you take Drake’s view that accident had nothing whatever to do with it — that Drake discovered Cape Horn and disabused the world of its age-old dream of a vast and unknown territory peopled by monsters.
“We,” Parson Fletcher jests— “we taking our farewell from the southernmost part of the world known, or as we think to be known here, we altered the name of those Southernly islands from Terra Incognita (for so it was before our coming thither and so should have remained still with our good wills) to Terra Nunc Bene Cognita, that is, Broken Islands.”
Suggestions, of course, have been made that the Spaniards knew the truth all along but concealed it just to hinder privateers and profiteers like Francis Drake from pushing their noses in where they were far from being wanted; and that the gale drove him too far to the west to recover Cape Horn. There never was a swan but someone would strip him of his plumes and cry “Why, it’s only a goose after all.” But he of “The World Encompassed” and Fletcher the chaplain are precise. There is an error in the latitude given by “The World Encompassed,” it is true. 56° says the narrative; 55° 58ʹ 40ʺ is the real position of Cape Horn. But it is too slight to discredit the narrative. And if Drake did not sight Cape Horn, why then he invented a true story and swore every man-jack of his company hi so binding a conspiracy that no rumour of his duplicity ever reached the world. The map by Ortelius of the year 1570 was superseded by the map of Edward Wright in the year 1599; and in the map itself there was to be read the inscription:
“By the discoverie of Sr Francis Drake made in the year 1577, the streights of Magellane as they are commonly called seem to be nothing else but broken land and Ilands and the Southwest coast of America called Chili was found not to trend to the north-westwards, as it hath been described but to the eastwards of the north as it is here set down, which is also confirmed by the voyages and discoveries of Pedro Sarmiento and Mr. Thos. Cavendish. A° 1587.”
Parson Fletcher landed with his bag on the southernmost island, where some sort of wild grape was growing, and walked to its southernmost point, where he set up a big stone. He had brought in his bag the necessary tools and he engraved upon the stone Her Majesty’s name, her kingdom, the year of Christ and the day of the month. The General had already given to the group the name of Elizabethides. Mr. Fletcher says no more about their stay except that they departed after two days. Nor does the author of “The World Encompassed” add what all must want to hear who hold the memory of Drake deep in their love and would grieve if he had missed a moment of exaltation and delight which was his due. But he did not miss it. He told Sir Richard Hawkins upon his return that he had gone ashore carrying a compass with him to make sure of the thing he was about. He sought out with the help of his compass the “most southernmost part of the island, cast himself down upon the uttermost point of it, grovelling, and so reached out his body over it.” When he returned on board, he told the whole company “that he had been upon the southernmost known land in the world and even further to the southward upon it than any of them, yea or any man as yet known.” It is pleasant, after all, to know that Drake by so much as the measurement from his waist to the crown of his head had been further south than Parson Fletcher.
The Golden Hind rose and dipped in a calm swell for two days, and Drake once more hoisted his anchor. He had a strong hope that the Elizabeth had survived the hurricane, and was anxious to reach the rendezvous at 30° south latitude. He set his course north-west, relying still upon his huge Portuguese map, and on the next day put in at two islands which he found to be storehouses of birds and eggs. There were enough to provision not merely the Golden Hind but his whole fleet were it still in being.
Drake departed on November 1st, still on his north-west course. The weather was fine, but after sailing for four days over an empty sea, the General altered his course to northeast and kept to it until the 7th of the month, when he set his bows to the north-west once more. These changes of direction may have been due to Drake’s hope to pick up his consort by covering a wide tract of ocean, or he may have already become suspicious that his chart was wrong. Whatever his reason, he now sailed steadily north-west until November 14th. Still no land was visible, still no ship was seen, and Drake, now convinced that his maps had misled him, bore away yet again to the north-east and steered on that point of the compass for eleven days. The mountains of Chile at last rose above the rim of the sea, and on November 25th he dropped his anchor off an island at the height of 39°. La Mocha, or Mocho as some would have it, was the name of the island. It was inhabited by Indians naturally peaceful, who had been driven off the mainland by the abominable cruelty of the Spaniards and here maintained a little kingdom of their own by sheer force of arms. It was Drake’s policy always to make friends and keep faith with the natives, whether he found them in Darien or Patagonia; and the policy had stood him in good stead. But it was now utterly to deceive him and so jeopardize the landing party that it was a miracle that any one of them escaped. The whole enterprise was as near to foundering on the island of Mocha as the Golden Hind had been off the islands of Tierra del Fuego.
Drake knew nothing whatever of the hatred which the cruelties of the Spaniards had inspired in these once simple and kindly refugees. He followed his usual practice. He went ashore on the evening of his arrival with some of his gentlemen and sailors. The natives came down to meet him with every show of welcome and friendliness. They brought with them fruit and a couple of fat sheep which they presented to the General. The General made them presents in return and stated that his only object was to traffic with them for what they had to spare of their maize, potatoes and cattle. And especially he needed fresh water. The natives, all smiles and good humour, promised to show him the next morning a spring whence he could get all the fresh water he wanted.
Early the next morning, therefore, in a rowing-boat with twelve men, Drake went to a creek which was pointed out to him. Of these, two, Thomas Brewer and Thomas Flood, were put ashore with the water-breakers. They were still in sight on their way to the spring when they were set upon and captured. At the same time, men on the shore seized the boat’s painter and made it fast. The creek was lined with tall reeds and rocks, behind which there were many bowmen hidden; the rowing-boat held now ten men and, deceived by the friendliness shown to them the evening before, they had come with no other arms than their shields and swords. They were, moreover, so closely packed that they could make little use even of their shields. In this helpless condition they were assailed by shower upon shower of arrows. The shafts of the arrows were made of cane and the heads of sharpened stones, so loosely fitted into the shafts that they remained in the wounds. “The World Encompassed” sets the number of their assailants as five hundred, and the author of “The Short Abstract of the Present Voyage” as one hundred. One hundred indeed was more than enough for this bloody business, for Drake’s men were so crowded together in the boat and so unprovided with any weapon which could reply that they were no better than “butts to every arrow at the pleasure of the shooter.” There was not one man in the boat who was unhurt. John Brewer, Drake’s young trumpeter, had seventeen wounds, Great Nele, the Danish gunner, twenty, and the planks of the boat were studded with arrows as though they had been so many nails not driven home. Drake himself was shot in the face, the arrow penetrating just below the right eye and close to his nose. Under the protection of the arrows some of the Indians rushed into the water and snatched all the oars away but two, whilst othe
rs, taking hold of the painter, began to pull the boat ashore. But for “one of the simplest of the company,” to use the words of Fletcher, they would have been killed to the last man. Simple he may have been, but he was quick-witted enough on that occasion. He drew his sword and cut the painter. A heavy surf was running and the receding wave carried the boat back. They got the two remaining oars at work, and pursued by flights of arrows “as thick as gnats in the sun” they pulled away to their ship.
When they were got on board, covered with blood, a second boat was manned with a crew armed with muskets and hurried off to the rescue of Flood and Thomas Brewer. But there were now two thousand of the natives, and those who had not bows carried spears and long darts which glittered in the sun like silver. In the midst of them on the beach lay the two unhappy sailors bound hand and foot. Some of the savages danced hand in hand in a ring about them, singing as they danced, whilst others, bending over them, cut lumps of flesh away from their bodies “in gobbets” and tossed them into the air. The dancers caught the lumps and devoured them like dogs.
The boat crew fired a volley again and again, but they could not get nearer to the shore than the distance covered by a bow-shot; and after lying on their oars for a little while they returned miserably to their ship. They prayed the General to allow them to clear the beach with a broadside of the big guns, but he would not. The natives had taken them all for their persecutors, the Spaniards, he said, and had bestowed upon them a Spaniard’s reward. The Spaniards were the only white race of which they knew, and no doubt Drake’s explanation of the attack was right. Certainly more than one of the men who had gone ashore on the previous day had, in spite of strict orders, used the word “agua” when they asked where they could find fresh water. And without firing a shot in revenge the Golden Hind raised her anchor and sailed off along the coast.
Drake had enough upon his hands in all conscience. The fleet’s surgeon had died; his assistant was upon the Elizabeth; and upon the Golden Hind there was only an apprentice, a boy of much goodwill but less surgery. However, Drake himself was that master of all arts, trades and professions, a deep-sea Captain. With his knowledge and the ready help of all who were able to help, the wounded made a good recovery with the exception of two men: Great Nele, the Danish gunner, who came aboard with twenty wounds, and a negro, an old friend of ours, Diego the Cimaroon from Darien. Until this moment of that faithful servant’s death there is no mention of him in any history of the voyage. Drake had brought him away from Nombre de Dios and kept him as his body-servant ever since. Readers may remember that there was gossip in England of a blackamoor page whom he had presented to Queen Elizabeth after that tremendous adventure. Gossip in which there was no truth; for at that time the General was small fry, and small fry were not honoured with that great Lady’s attention. But the legend may well have grown from Diego’s attendance on his heels.
It was on the 26th of November that the Golden Hind moved away from Mocha, the Vectis of Valdivia, as Fletcher describes it. The island, mountainous in the centre but surrounded by most fertile plains, lies close to 39°. Drake from now on clung to the coast. He was making for his rendezvous at 30°, and looking out at the same time for the treasure ships which were to pay for the voyage and add handsomely to the coffers of the merchant-adventurers, the noblemen and the Queen’s Majesty who had their shares in it. He was come to his fishing-ground, as it were, and he caught the first of his big fish ten days later.
But before the story of this exploit and of those which followed it is told, it would be well to see into what manner of man Francis Drake had grown with increasing years and increased authority; how he looked; how he lived; how he bore himself; and what was the domestic economy of his ship.
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He was now thirty-four years old, of middling height and sturdy build, and on his ruddy face he wore a small brown beard neatly trimmed. Throughout the expedition to Nombre de Dios he had been the Captain, but a Captain close to the devoted and joyful band of youngsters who made up his officers and crew. He had been primus inter pares. But that phase of his life had passed. He was aloof now, as men in high authority at sea needs must be. He carried the Queen’s commission and was never for a moment unaware of it. Of the many prisoners whom he held as hostages for a day or two on his voyage up the coasts of Peru and Mexico, there was hardly one who did not bear testimony to his insistence. To one, indeed, who by reason of his high birth stood apart from the ordinary run of his captives, Don Francisco de Zárate, a cousin of the Duke of Medina, “He showed me the commissions that he had received from her and carried.”
Drake was on a mission of dignity. He had a higher object than that of despoiling the King of Spain, though despoiling the King of Spain was a part of his errand. He had to obtain restitution for great wrongs done, and he had to force Philip by this drastic form of persuasion to allow the English to trade freely in the Indies and to live there according to their own faith. But his mission was to found settlements on good lands as yet unoccupied by the Spaniards, and to carry through to a successful end a voyage of exploration which would add to the fame of England and its Queen. He carried himself accordingly. He punished his sailors for their least fault, but he respected them, and he made no favourites. Their feelings towards him were summarized notably by Francisco de Zárate. “I managed to ascertain whether the General was well liked, and all said that they adored him.” They were not allowed to loot on their own account; they were drilled; each man was taught to take a pride in keeping his arquebus clean, and in saluting his officers and his General. The Golden Hind, since it had left the unfriendly harbour of Saint Julian, had the discipline of a ship of the Royal Navy.
Drake’s responsibility weighed heavily upon him. Those despairing cries at Port Saint Julian, “I have taken that in hand that I know not in the world how to go through with all, it passeth my capacity, it hath even bereaved me of my wits to think on it,” did not so much spring from the bitter treachery of a friend whom he loved, as from the wider fear that “mutinies and discords” would bring all the high purposes of this voyage to nothing. But in the interval he had re-established his authority. No doubt his brilliant handling of the Golden Hind through those fifty-two days of appalling storm off the coast of Patagonia helped him. The Marigold was at the bottom of the sea, the Elizabeth had vanished, the Golden Hind alone, with a pleasant south-west wind astern, was running over summer seas on her appointed way. He was unquestioned now, and he lived in the state which consorted with his pre-eminence. Trumpets announced his dinner and his supper hour. He ate with his gentlemen, and Nuño da Silva, his pilot, and perhaps one or two of his prisoners were his guests. Viols made music for him; he had his young cousin, John Drake, to stand behind his chair as his page; no one, not even of the gentlemen, wore his hat until Drake bid him to cover himself. He was served on silver dishes with gold borders and gilded garlands, within which his arms were engraved. Delicate accessories such as perfumed waters graced the meal. He was wont to say that the Queen herself had given them to him with his arms. Those arms were engraved, too, upon his cannon, the globe of the world with a North Star upon it. That the Queen had given him either the one or the other is unlikely. She had seen him but the once, and she was not so lavish of her gifts as to make them before they were earned. His arms were granted to him when he received a knighthood on his return to England. Drake’s passion for magnificence, the good cheer, the flattery of his viols, the pleasure of playing host on his own ship to some Spanish gentleman of race, and perhaps the recollection of old days when he had been the deck-hand of a little tramp on the Dogger Bank — all carried him, no doubt, away beyond the truth. He was a very human person. Indeed, these little vapourings might lead to a doubt whether, after all, he did hold the Queen’s commission, but for the sobriety of Don Francisco de Zárate’s letter to the Viceroy of New Spain. That is the work of an observant and truthful man set down in language carefully free from hysteria or spite.
At dinner Drake would ta
lk openly of his plans, asking the gentlemen for their advice. The question was not a mere politeness. He listened without impatience, giving to their answers their due weight in his thoughts. But not in his speech. After they had spoken, he was silent. He came privately to his own decisions.
Twice every day, before dinner and before supper, he himself conducted a religious service. A table was set out upon the deck at the poop, and on the floor in front of it an embroidered cushion. Drake struck the table twice with the palm of his hand, and at once those of the crew who were off duty took their places on seats about the table. He kneeled, he read the psalms for the day, and the crew spoke the responses; and at times he read from a book with pictures. On such an occasion, the vicar Miranda of Guatulco and Rengifo, the factor in that port, asked him unwisely what the book was. It was Fox’s “Book of Martyrs.” “It is a very good book,” Drake told them. “Look at it. You can see here those who were martyred in Castille”; and he showed them a picture of a man burning at the stake. He turned over some more pages and stopped at another picture — probably that which portrayed the Emperors kissing the Pope’s feet. “Conjecturing,” the Dean of the Cathedral of Guatulco continues naïvely, “from what Rengifo the witness understood and from Drake’s tone and mien, it seemed to him that Francis Drake did not think rightly about all this.”
On Sundays Drake dressed his ship with flags and himself in fine clothes, and Chaplain Fletcher preached a sermon. At the end of the service, when the ship was anchored at Guatulco, the boy John Drake danced a hornpipe or some specially English dance. The Spaniard who describes this, thought that the dance was an item of the religious service; and the mistake was natural enough. For it was Holy Week, and the visitor to Seville can to this day see boys dance before the altar in the Cathedral during that week. It is worthy of notice that Drake was careful to arrange that his prisoners should not be present at these ceremonies unless they wished to be. They would have incurred the gravest risks had they been compelled either by the General’s order or their own curiosity to offer this disloyalty to their own Church; and in all the examinations to which the Inquisition subjected them on their release no question was more consistently pressed than this: Had they taken any part in the Lutheran services whilst they were on board? The machines of torture were ready for any whose replies admitted a shadow of doubt, as the luckless Nuño da Silva had discovered to his cost. But no one had been compelled. The prisoners had been ordered to go forward into the bows or aft on the poop until the service was ended. They were at liberty to tell their beads if they wanted to. All that was demanded of them was silence whilst Drake prayed or Fletcher preached. They had but one complaint; they were given meat to eat although it was Lent. For the rest, they were well treated.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 871