No doubt Drake went on shore and himself saw this King during the few days which he spent at Ternate. Dumas, a Portuguese spy whom Gonzalo Ronquillo de Peñalosa, Governor of the Philippines, sent dressed as a Chinaman to Ternate afterwards, declared that trouble did arise between Drake and Barber because Barber wished to enforce his law that over and above the price agreed for what spices were bought, an extra ten per cent, should be paid to him. It will be remembered that Hawkins, on the expedition which ended so tragically at St. John de Ulua, had resisted a similar demand at Rio de la Hacha. It is not likely that Drake, his voyage “made” and little cargo room to spare, would have conceded so high a rake-off to the King of Ternate. Dumas suggested, too, that Barber tried to persuade Drake to join him in an attack on Tidore. Barber had driven the Portuguese out from the other three islands of the Moluccas. It would be only natural that he should try to use Drake’s English sailors and Drake’s heavy artillery to dislodge them from Tidore. But even if Drake’s heart had not been set towards home, there was the useless and foolish tragedy of Magellan to warn him of what came of meddling in the politics of these island kings.
But he did trade with Barber. He bought six tons of cloves for which he paid with silks and linen taken from the ships between Lima and Guatulco, and he made a treaty with him for the furtherance of trade with England. It is probable that the building of a factory in Ternate by some future expedition such as Fenton’s was agreed upon. Drake brought home no written covenant, but the Drake family possess a cup on which the Golden Hind is seen towed by Barber’s four big canoes, and tradition reports that this cup was given to Drake by Queen Elizabeth in the year 1580. If tradition is correct, the gift must have commemorated some service to the realm of a special importance. The East India Company certainly founded claims upon a treaty made by Drake; and it may well have provided a greater impulse towards the creation of the British Empire than the submission of the Hioh and the setting up of the big brass plate on the shore of San Francisco.
It was quick work. For though he arrived on the 4th of November, he was off again on the 9th. He was in search of a secluded isle where he could clean and repair his ship for the last long stage of his voyage; and on November 14th he found it. By general consent it has been located in the Bangaya Peninsula, but since John Drake places it at 4° north latitude and “The World Encompassed” at 1° 40ʹ south latitude, and the Bangaya Archipelago is at neither, there is no certainty whatever. It was the very island for his purpose — deep-wooded, uninhabited, with a good harbour. Water was got at another island quite near, and from a third Indians paddled over in their canoes and bartered provisions for pieces of linen and silk. For neither here nor at Ternate was a hint whispered of the gold and silver hidden away in the hold. Provisions also were at hand’s reach, great robber-crabs, each one of them a meal for four sailors, were caught on the beach or dug out of their sand-warrens. We are told that in their efforts to escape they climbed the trees. A fable of the South Seas? Perhaps. But any reasonable crab might be expected at all events to try, if he had a batch of Drake’s hungry mariners after him. At night the fireflies danced in the air and went out like sparks and flashed again in crescents of greenish light, or swarmed upon the boughs, “as if every twig on every tree had become a lighted candle.” It was an island such as Ballantyne and Stevenson would have loved, and the life lived upon it for twenty-six days just the life with which they would have blessed the characters in the tale.
The crew was put on shore, a fort built and entrenched, the artillery mounted to protect it. Then the precious cargo was stowed in the fort. Drake carried a forge, and this was set up on the beach and charcoal burnt since all the ship’s coal had long since been consumed. Meanwhile stocks and legs were set up at a convenient spot and the Golden Hind was hauled out of the water. The barnacles were scrubbed off her bottom and her seams were caulked and her tender spots made sound. Afterwards, with the help of the forge, new iron bands were hooped about the casks. The crew were divided into watches, so that whilst some worked others rested, and for the inside of a month the woods rang with the noise of hammers and the cheerful cries of men at play. In twenty-six days the work was done and the Golden Hind riding the water again, spruce and trim as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. The crew came on board, their wearied bodies refreshed, the sickly grown lusty and all conscious of “a rare experience of God’s wonderful wisdom in many rare and admirable creatures which here we saw.” They called the island Crab Island, and the two negroes brought from Nicaragua with the negress Maria who, according to a “Short Abstract of the Present Voyage” by an anonymous writer, was great with child, were left behind on it with rice and seeds for planting and the means of making fire. It is to this “Short Abstract” that we owe the accusation that Drake took Maria from Zárate’s galleon; and yet the statement is so vague and so obviously written by an enemy of Drake that it is astonishing that a charge so definite and audacious should have been built upon it. Here is the statement. “Drake took out of the ship a pilot to carry him into the haven of Guatulco and also a proper negro wench called Maria which was afterwards gotten with child between the Captain and his men pirates and set on a small island to take her adventure as shall be hereafter shewed.”
The passage is hostile, as the word “pirates” discloses. Drake’s ill-wishers adopted the phrases of Spain to describe him. It is sly too. For the writer could always protest that he brought no actual charge against Drake himself. He defames safely; he slanders by equivocation.
There the matter must be left. Camden, in his short summary of Drake’s life, seems inclined to accept the charge, and he was of Drake’s friends. On the other hand, nothing else in the conduct of his life bears it out. That he left the negress with the two negroes on Crab Island is true, but why is a matter of mere guess-work. To save his food on the voyage home, says one; to free the negroes from captivity, says another; to found a settlement, says a third. You can make your choice of these reasons or invent another, as you will. Nobody will gainsay you. But he did leave them behind on an uninhabited island, and the fact that he had left them behind did him more than a little harm when he returned to England.
The north-east monsoon began now to blow, and on December 12th the General sailed away to the west. He proposed to round the north of Celebes and come south by the Macassar Strait, but he drove by mistake into the Bay of Tomori and took three days to escape from it. It was evident now that with the wind in this quarter he could not make the Northern passage; so he went about and ran to the South. This change of direction was made on December 19th, and from that day until January 9th the Golden Hind must pick her way between islands and shoals as daintily as a fastidious lady in a muddy street. But on the 9th it seemed that their danger was over. The islands bent away to the westward, the sea was open in front and the monsoon astern freshened to a strong breeze. Drake clapped on full sail, and the galleon went roaring on her course until at the beginning of the first watch of the night, without a warning, she ran hard upon a reef and stuck. It may have been the Masepi reef hard by the Greyhound Strait. It was in any case a long reef lying in the line of the ship’s course and not athwart it. Fortunately for the Golden Hind, for had she struck in crossing the ridge nothing could have saved her. As it was, such was the violence of the shock that the crew gave itself up for lost. They lowered the sails and then, falling upon their knees, commended their souls to God.
This was just the occasion to show Drake at his full stature and to explain the adoration for him of his crew. Of the grief and disappointment which beset him he betrayed no sign. Five minutes ago he, the deckhand on the little Zeeland tramp, was rich, was sure of the enjoyment of high fame, and saw with his expectant eyes the doors opening upon a world of great affairs, and the Queen’s favour. Now all that was lost, and besides, death stood at his elbow. But he went amongst his crew, led them in their prayers, made them comforting speeches, and then whilst assuring them that their first thought must be of their immort
al souls, still bade them not tempt God by leaving untried those means for their earthly salvation which he had provided. The pumps, for instance. He ordered the pumps to be manned, and according to his custom in a crisis where total energy was demanded, he set the example by joining in the manual work. They pumped the ship dry and found that they had opened no new seams. For a little while all hopes were raised. A boat was lowered, and the General went in it himself to discover whether by dropping an anchor on the seaward side of the reef they could warp the galleon off the ledge. But even as near to her side as a boat’s length, the lead on their longest sounding-line could not reach the bottom. Drake managed to conceal from his men the full meaning of this calamity. But as the night wore on despair laid hold of them again. A storm, and the ship would break up where she lay. The nearest land was eighteen miles away. The long voyage across the Pacific and the three subsequent months in the archipelago had taken a heavy toll of the crew. There were no more than fifty-eight men now on board the Golden Hind, but the single large cutter which was carried could hold only twenty of them; and those twenty would have a strong head-wind to meet. Moreover, if they reached land, what prospect of security or comfort was before them? They would be used as slaves if they escaped the sword and imperil their souls amongst the idolatries of the heathen.
As soon as day broke a second attempt was made to find holding ground for an anchor, but it failed in the daylight as the first had failed in the darkness. A general demand was made that their case should be commended to God alone, “leaving ourselves wholly in His hand, to spill or save us as seemed best to His gracious wisdom.” So in that lonely ship, lifted high on a reef in a lonely southern sea beneath a tropic sky, a communion service was held in which all partook of the Sacrament and a sermon was preached. We have to mark that a sermon was preached. It would be the chaplain, Fletcher, who preached it; and when the sermon was ended, Drake took, and no doubt with the deepest reluctance, the last measure and remedy which remained. He began to jettison his cargo, his provisions and his guns. Three tons of cloves went overboard onto the reef, a small fortune, for the spices which were in great demand in Europe and England fetched high prices in those days. As a rule they were taken in ships up the Red Sea, carried overland and embarked again in the Mediterranean. The cargoes passed next to Venice, where the Venetian merchants had the handling of them, and thence they were distributed to the richer amongst the communities of the civilized world. These embarkations and discharges, to say nothing of the sums levied by the Venetians, added enormously to the price of them; and here there were six tons of them being brought home by Drake at no higher cost than the silks and the linens which he had bartered for them at Ternate. Three tons, then, went overboard, and a great bronze cannon and seven other pieces of ordnance and bags of meal and beans — whatever, in fact, was near to hand. But the galleon remained upon its shelf, held upright against the reef by the wind blowing from the north-east on its starboard quarter. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and low water. A lead swung on the port side showed a depth of six feet only and the Golden Hind drew thirteen, so high was she perched at the mercy of the winds. But it was the wind which saved her. It swung suddenly round half the compass. It had been blowing from the right or starboard side. Now with a swift inconstancy it blew from the left. But there was no rock ridge on the right-hand side to prop the galleon up. Under the force of the sudden gust she heeled over and downwards to the deep waters. That she must capsize seemed certain — without a miracle. But the miracle occurred. Her keel slid off the ledge and in a second she was riding free. The ordeal had endured for twenty desperate hours. Drake got some sail set and drew off to a safe distance from the reef. Seldom had a prayer been answered with a mercy so complete. It is no wonder that the mariners of the Golden Hind looked upon themselves as men protected by the special favour of God.
The salvage of the ship was followed on the next day by an incident as fantastic as any recorded in that fantastic age. After the night of suspense the crew, led by Drake, had partaken of the Sacrament, and the chaplain, Fletcher, had preached a sermon. Of the character of that sermon there is no evidence. He preached, and his congregation listened and went about its business of lightening the galleon. But a writer two hundred years afterwards gave an account of this sermon. Whether he had some private document or whether he drew a bow at a venture, no one can say. But it was after all easy enough to guess. Long before, when the Marigold went down off the western end of the Straits of Magellan, carrying Ned Bright with it, Fletcher had written in the margin of his manuscript: “Marked judgement against a false witness.” And again when John Brewer, Drake’s trumpeter, was suddenly tossed overboard by a sudden gust of wind on a windless day and only with difficulty recovered, Fletcher annotated his manuscript again, “His judgement worth noteing.” John Brewer’s complaint had started the trouble with Doughty. Ned Bright had been the chief witness against Doughty. And Fletcher was Doughty’s champion — that sweet orator and Christian gentleman whom Drake the tyrant had condemned to death. It was perhaps inevitable that Fletcher should find in this shipwreck of their lives and fortunes another judgment and thunder it out like some prophet of old. Or, to put it on a lower plane, it was no more than natural that Fletcher, being Drake’s enemy, and having been forced throughout more than a year to conceal his dislike and keep a strong curb upon his tongue, should seize this safe occasion to get a little of his own back. But the Golden Hind did not break up and all on board of it were freed from their peril. Drake had made no protest when the sermon was ended. There was too much work to be done. But he had time now, and on the very next morning his protest took the shape of an excommunication.
It was the oddest form of excommunication that ever was known. First he had a staple knocked into the hatches in the forecastle and Fletcher made fast to it by a chain and a fetter round his leg. Then the crew was mustered and Drake, sitting cross-legged on a chest with a pair of pantouffles on his hands, pronounced the sentence.
“Francis Fletcher, I do here excommunicate thee out of the Church of God and from all the benefits and graces thereof, and I denounce thee to the devil and all his angels.”
Next he forbade him to come ever before the mast under pain of a hanging if he disobeyed. Finally he had a “posy” bound about Fletcher’s arm with this description of him written upon it, “Francis Fletcher, the falsest knave that liveth.” And if he took that off he would be hanged.
Imagination boggles over the meaning to be given to this scene. Was Drake mimicking one of those island kings, like the King of Ternate? Was he giving a ludicrous parody of the Pope? Who shall say? The one thing clear in the performance is that Drake, by making Fletcher ridiculous and the whole ceremony a pantomime, was in a rather subtle way destroying any influence which the sermon might have exercised upon his crew. Fletcher might have denounced the General for murder and lust, as the writer of two hundred years afterwards declared, in the tones of Luther himself, but the denunciation must have been smothered in laughter when the prophet was seen hopping about on a chain with the absurd posy on his arm. Across the centuries one can hear the guffaws and the jests of the mariners of the Golden Hind.
There was still a month of baffling winds and dangerous shoals to be coped with before Drake passed through the Ombay channel and shook himself clear of the islands. It was on September 30th of the year 1579 that Drake sighted the first of the islands after his long run across the Pacific. It was on March 11th, 1580, that he dropped his anchor at Java. He had been more than five months on this intricate section of his voyage. Gradually the currents, the seasons of the winds, the positions of the shoals and the geography of the islands were made known and charted, chiefly by the surveys of the British Navy. Three hundred years after Drake’s voyage of circumnavigation, in the great days of sail, the fast tea-clippers like the Thermopylae and the Cutty Sark could make the passage from China through the Straits of Sundra to the Port of London in twenty-eight days.
Drake pas
sed a pleasant fortnight amongst the Rajahs of Java, and, departing on March 26th, rounded the Cape of Good Hope on June 15th and stopped for two days on June 22nd at Sierra Leone. This was the first time that the Golden Hind anchored after she left Java, and the reason was the old one — the need of fresh water; and this was the last time that she anchored until an autumn day came when, a ship full of “joyful minds and thankful hearts,” she sailed into Plymouth, having spent “two years and ten months and some few odd days beside in passing round about the world.”
CHAPTER XIII
DIFFICULTIES ON HIS RETURN. THE QUEEN KNIGHTS HIM AT DEPTFORD. DRAKE BUYS BUCKLAND ABBEY AND BECOMES MAYOR OF PLYMOUTH. THE PROPOSED EXPEDITION TO THE AZORES. QUESTIONS OF NAVAL STRATEGY. DRAKE IN GOVERNMENT SERVICE. BECOMES MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT. HIS SECOND MARRIAGE.
THE ACTUAL DAY upon which Drake sailed into Plymouth Sound at the end of his voyage round the world is as doubtful as the year of his birth. John Drake, four years afterwards in the month of March, declared that it was on a day of October. The compiler of “The World Encompassed” makes it the 26th of September. “The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea,” which is attributed to Francis Pretty, puts it as late as the 3rd day of November. But that must be wrong, for the Queen wrote to Edmund Tremayne, a magistrate of Plymouth and a former Member of Parliament for the Borough, on October 22nd to arrange for the disposition of the Golden Hind’s treasure. There is no exactitude where it would be pleasant to be exact. For the return of the Golden Hind, ballasted with the treasure of Peru, was a matter of great importance to the realm. News of Drake’s progress had been twittered through to England by the English merchants in Seville a year before. They were nervous of reprisals and demanded that he should be disavowed. But reprisals had not been made, and of Drake there was no further word. The vast spaces of the South Seas enshrouded him. He might have been lost with his ship and all his fellow-adventurers, and many hoped that he had been. Then, on a day of autumn in the year 1580, he came up out of the sea into Plymouth Sound.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 877