Meanwhile negotiations for the ransom of the city tarried. Drake took to quicken them those drastic measures which the Germans were said to have prepared for Paris in 1915 if France did not surrender. He burnt it quarter by quarter. A ruthless procedure, no doubt. But Drake had no reason to be gentle with Philip of Spain. Drake only burnt houses. Philip burnt men, and men of the West Country too, and all because they preferred their church service in their native tongue and recognized no apostolic succession in the Papacy. The houses, however, “being built very magnificently of stone gave us no small travail to ruin them. And albeit for divers days together we ordained each morning by daybreak until the heat began at nine of the clock that two hundred Mariners did nought else but labour to fire and burn the said houses without our trenches, whilst the soldiers in a like proportion stood forth for their guard: yet did we not or could not in this time (that is, a month) consume so much as one third part of the town.”
The work was hard, and not as profitable as had been expected. There was not so much silver and plate as had been the pride and glory of the towns of Peru. Many of the householders had used the one night of reprieve when Drake was landing his soldiers, to decamp to villas in the hills with the best of their treasures. Moreover, in towns as hot as San Domingo, porcelain was superseding silver for the dishes, and glass the chased and valuable goblets. At the same time, these demolishers of houses had no reason to complain. Sometimes a well was discovered in which pearls were hidden, or a chest heavy with money; and there were always the churches. These, of course, were sacked as a religious duty. Their images were destroyed as idolatrous, and the rich vessels of their ceremonies carried off to decorate in due course the sideboard of a gentleman in England.
The great ransom, however, was not obtained, was not indeed obtainable. San Domingo, like so much of Philip’s Empire, was a glittering façade and emptiness behind. It should have been more opulent than any city on this side of Panama. Hispaniola was an island of gold and silver, and San Domingo was its only port. But the Spaniard was an ignorant fellow. His first act when he founded a colony was to kill the natives off and deprive himself of that manual labour which it was beyond his strength and beneath his dignity to do. The mines of San Domingo were wholly given over, and the splendid town must do its buying and selling with the cumbrous help of a copper coinage. The city lived actually upon its export of sugar, ginger and hides — especially hides. For it held large herds of oxen which attained on the good pasture of the island a quite unusual size.
It became clear to Drake that a great ransom in gold was not to be secured either by negotiation or destruction. His men were tired with their exertions, and his ships well supplied with provisions brought out of Spain, wine, cloth, vinegar, oil and wheat-meal. He accepted, then, a sum of twenty-five thousand ducats, which at the present rate of money amounts to nearly sixty-nine thousand pounds, and packing away the heavy guns of the castle in the Flagship, the Grand Guy and one or two smaller galleons, he put out with them over the bar on the next stage of his journey.
He had been a month at San Domingo and he brought away from it less than the Lords and merchants at his back would expect. On the other hand, he had struck the hardest blow so far delivered at the prestige and might of Spain. The capital city of the West Indies had lain helpless in his hands. After one short battle he had been its unmolested master. He had taken what there was to take, he had burnt a third of its fine buildings and only ceased because he and his crew were tired of the labour which it involved. And he had sailed away in his own good time.
In a gallery of the King’s House at the head of the great staircase there hung a scutcheon with the arms of Spain painted upon it. It was so hung that as you entered the hall through the main door you could not but see it. It was right over against you. Below the arms was painted the globe of the earth with its lands and seas; and inside the globe stood a horse rampant on its hind legs. The forelegs had broken through the globe as though it was an egg and the horse was about to spring out of the shell altogether. And the horse held between its teeth a scroll on which was written: Non sufficit orbis. This arrogant claim that the whole world was not large enough to contain the might and reach of Spain was a great joy to Drake, Frobisher and their officers. For the negotiations over the ransom took place in the King’s House, and now one, now another would detain a Spanish Councillor and ask him politely to explain the meaning of the strange emblem. Did the horse really represent Spain? And did the scroll mean that the world was not large enough to content it! The Councillor would “turn aside his countenance in some smiling sort, without answering anything, as greatly ashamed thereof.” But he wouldn’t escape as easily as all that. His tormentor used to continue with a puzzled forehead, and still politely, that if the Queen of England continued to make war upon him he had better — had he not? — erase that boast from the scutcheon. For one could see by merely looking at San Domingo that Spain had more than enough to do to keep what it had already.
Philip read, with the application natural in that laborious man, the reports sent to him by the vicegerents of his dominions; and the margins are inscribed in his handwriting with exclamations like little cries of pain. “Ojo Achines!” for instance, when one of the Hawkins family was unpleasantly busy in the waters of which he claimed the monopoly. I think that when he read the story of the disrespect shown by the English officers to his scutcheon on the landing of the King’s House in San Domingo he cannot have been content to “turn aside his countenance in some smiling sort.” I see him dipping his pen in the ink and writing in a tiny hand a little squeal of anguish— “Ojo el Draque!”
CHAPTER XV
THE ATTACK UPON CARTAGENA. ITS SURRENDER. THE FINANCIAL FAILURE OF THE EXPEDITION. SHOULD DRAKE HAVE KEPT CARTAGENA? THE VALUE TO ENGLAND OF HIS NAME.
“WE HEARD,” BURGHLEY wrote to Leicester on March 31st of this year, “that Sir Francis Drake is a fearful man to the King of Spain and that the King could have been content that Sir Francis had taken the last year’s fleet so as he had not gone forward to the Indies.” It was not only to the King of Spain that Drake was now a fearful man. Agitated correspondents of the Fugger House at Augsburg sent letter after letter recording the havoc and destruction which he was supposed to be dealing out through the Indies and along the Main. Already he had marched across the Isthmus to Panama and given it to the flames. He had left a rubble of stones where once Havana had stood. It is curious to note that these exaggerations, related as things done in the News-Letters, were actually intentions set out in the plot of the voyage before it began. But they were not carried out.
Drake on sailing out of San Domingo struck across the Caribbean Sea to the Main. He meant to destroy Santa Marta and loot the pearl island of Margarita. No doubt, too, since he had an enduring memory of past injuries, he proposed to exact from Rio de la Hacha a full recompense for the misfortune which befell him when he made his first voyage to these waters under Captain Lovell. But the trade-wind and the Caribbean Sea between them prevented him. He could only make the land to the west of those two places, and since the hot weather was close upon him he pressed on to the next item in his plot, the capture of Cartagena.
It is said in one account of the expedition that he sent Frobisher inshore to pick up if he could a local pilot; and it may have been so. For, as his voyage of circumnavigation proved again and again, no navigator was ever more careful to secure the particular knowledge of coastal waters which only a resident could have. Audacious in his designs and intrepid in fulfilling them, he pared the cost to the last man. In a day when the wastage of life at sea was enormous, Drake stood quite apart in his care for his crews. Camden notes his skill as a doctor. We have had good proof of it in the rapid recovery of the sailors who were wounded at La Mocha. Santiago and San Domingo both had learned the unwisdom of killing even a boy, even a negro who was carried on the books of a ship under his command. He has been upbraided as a braggart and an upstart, and no doubt he boasted, no doubt he revell
ed in his title and his high favour with the Queen and her great Lords. But he never forgot that he himself had served before the mast and that the mariners were his kith and kin. He would work by their sides with his hands if there were need, and woe betide the people who thought that they could maltreat with impunity even the meanest straggler from his company. He had sailed up and down this coastline of the Spanish Main in his small pinnace during the two years of his expedition to Nombre de Dios and knew from his experience the dangers of its currents and its “sinkers,” as the West Country names the rocks just hidden in the wash of the seas. But he sought for a pilot none the less, so that a ship might not be needlessly lost or a life thrown away. The old gaiety and camaraderie of the Nombre de Dios days had gone. He was the Queen’s Admiral with a fleet under his orders, he was aloof as such men must be, but thought for his mariners’ safety and well-being remained with him constantly.
Frobisher found no one who could be of service, and Drake in consequence did his own pilotage. He arrived off Cartagena, the capital city of the Main, early in February and at four in the afternoon.
Cartagena, though second in official importance to San Domingo, far surpassed that island town in commercial prosperity. Baptista Antonio, King Philip’s surveyor, thus describes it in a report made in the year 1587. “This city hath great trade out of Spain and out of the new kingdom of Granada and out of the islands there adjoining, from Peru and from all the coast of this firm land and of the fishing of the pearls of Rio de la Hacha and of Margarita: it is a very sound country.”
San Domingo was the city of “lawyers and brave gentlemen,” to quote the words of Captain Biggs, the seat of justice and government, set decently apart from the roar and traffic of the markets. Cartagena, with its admirable harbour, was the centre of the Indian trade. Moreover, it was so protected by the barricades of nature that to the armaments of that day it was almost impregnable. Almost but not quite.
The end of the town faced the sea to the west, and there was no access on this side. A great marsh just to the north of it and a high sea wall made it secure. From this butt of the town, a long broad sandy and wooded spit ran for eight miles to the south, leaving a narrow and dangerous channel between the end of the spit and the mainland, the Boca Chica. One other entrance, five miles nearer to the city, was made by a wide break in the spit — the Boca Grande, and this was the harbour mouth in general use. The harbour itself was a great lagoon with anchorage for many ships, and from the spit and at a right angle to it an arm of land stretched out across the south front of the city and reached so near to the mainland that a great chain could be slung across the interval. This chain was guarded by a strong fort on the mainland.
There were thus two harbours, the outer where the visiting ships anchored, and the inner, within the barrier of the chain, where two galleys and a big galleasse of the naval command and a few pinnaces belonging to the citizens had their stations. From this inner harbour a broad inlet ran back at the eastern end of Cartagena, and curving round the buildings poured into the marsh which bordered the sea. Thus the city stood behind its harbours on an island, and the only path to it was a broad stone causeway of three hundred yards in length and twelve yards in breadth. This causeway had the additional safety of a drawbridge at the mainland end of it, and a fort with heavy ordnance to command it.
Past the marsh and the west end and the long spit, Drake, with his twenty-one ships, sailed in full view on the afternoon of February 9th, drawing a salvo from the guns on the town wall and not deigning to reply. His capture of San Domingo and the destruction he had wrought there were, of course, known in every corner of the Main, and many a sigh of relief must have been breathed in Cartagena when his great fleet streamed past the Boca Grande and never altered its course. He was bound then for Nombre de Dios? He would go about and steer for Mexico? Or for Havana? Cartagena was too big a nut for him to crack. He was leaving it alone. The fleet disappeared from the sight of the town. But at four o’clock in the afternoon Drake was abreast of the Boca Chica, and through that difficult channel of no greater width than two hundred yards, with the land doubling in and out and sunken rocks on either side, he piloted his ships. An act of bravado? No. Drake kept bravado for the supper-table. It has been suggested that he hoped to deceive the Cartagenians to a belief that he meant to make his attack by a march over the mainland on his right hand and a rush over the stone causeway into the town. It may be so, but a simpler explanation is offered. He had suffered before when he sailed into the harbour with his pinnaces from fire directed from the point of the spit at the mouth of the Boca Grande. He could not doubt that the news of his capture of San Domingo and of his presence in those waters was known throughout the Indies. There had been ample time to mount some heavy ordnance on the same spot which could rake his ships from stern to stern at close range if he hauled in his sails and beat up against the wind through that passage.
Once he had cleared the channel he deployed his fleet across the surface of the lagoon and anchored facing the inner harbour, but before he had reached the line of the Boca Grande. There he waited until darkness fell. Then he lowered quietly into the water his pinnaces and boats, and landed without mishap on the sandy spit at a point near to the sea what was thought a sufficient force. This long arm of scrub and wood was the weak joint in the armour of the town. It ran straight and level for three miles to the openings of the streets. There were no natural obstacles beyond a couple of lakes which were easy to avoid, and for the greater part of the way it had a width of not less than five hundred yards. Close to the town, however, it narrowed to something like a hundred and thirty yards, and across the neck a high barrier of stone had been built and armed with six great cannon, demi-culverins and sakers. To make the defence still more formidable, a deep trench had been made in front of it from the sea to the lagoon.
Properly manned, this barrier would have been impregnable except at an enormous cost of life. But at the western end of it between the sea and the edge of the wall an open space had been left by which horsemen could ride out and goods unloaded on the beach of the lagoon pass in. This space had been blocked up with great wine-barrels packed full of earth and set on end side by side. To strengthen this defect, the two galleys had been moored in the lagoon in a position whence they could sweep the necks of land with canister. Nearer to the spit where Carleill’s soldiers were landed, a troop of horse patrolled the scrub ready to sound the alarm; and close to the landing-point itself, stakes sharpened and smeared with a deadly poison had been driven into the ground. Carleill’s troops had thus a very different task from that which they had performed at San Domingo. But on the night before, the plan of attack had been worked out in Drake’s cabin and every possibility which could be foreseen taken into account.
The soldiers marched with a vanguard of musketeers and pikemen. Captain Sampson commanded the pikemen, Captain Goring the musketeers, and the Lieutenant-General Carleill took his station with them. Behind the vanguard, Captain Powell, the Sergeant-Major, commanded the four companies which were the striking force; and behind them followed the rearguard under Captain Morgan, who had led the vanguard at San Domingo.
The march began at midnight, but time was wasted since the guide whom they had brought with them lost his way. There was perhaps something of good fortune in this error, for they escaped the poisoned stakes which had been prepared for them. Whilst they were still two miles from the town they fell in with the mounted patrol and discharged a volley. The ground was too thick with scrub and trees for the horse-men to manœuvre with any success, and they made off without further parley. The volley, however, had been plainly heard on the ships, and Drake, practising the same tactics which he had used at San Domingo, sent Martin Frobisher forward to bombard the fort at the boom between the two harbours. It was a feint to distract the attention of the garrison from the real attack, but it was a feint pressed home and Frobisher had the rudder of the pinnace from which he was directing it shot away.
Meanwhil
e, Carleill’s small army had reached the edge of the sea. Carleill was not merely a gallant fighting Captain, he was clever. He had a trick now up his sleeve for which his enemy was quite unprepared. The rise-and-fall of the tides in the Caribbean Sea is small compared with the rise-and-fall about the coast of England; but it is appreciable and at this hour it was low water. Moreover, the bank of the spit was cut sharp on the side of the sea. By an order given before the march began, the men dropped now from the top of the bank and moved forward in the actual wash of the sea. There were Indians armed with bows and poisoned arrows posted here and there across the five hundred yards of land who were passed in the darkness without the flight of a shaft. As the spit narrowed to the hundred and thirty yards of the neck, the soldiers advancing in the sea were protected by the bank from the crossfire of the galleys in the lagoon, which carried not only eleven guns but four hundred musketeers. Guns too had been mounted in the trench in the dip of the ground in front of the wall which would have mowed down a force advancing in close order over the skyline. All these dangers were avoided and little hurt was suffered until they had come within the distance where it was possible to rush the barricade at the end of the wall. The musketeers fired a volley and then the rush was made. It was an affair of hammer and tongs. There were no old gentlemen this time imploring the defenders to fire at least a couple of volleys to save their faces. The Spaniards fought manfully. But the English had some advantages. They wore corselets of steel, whereas their opponents had only quilted jackets, and their pikes were longer. “Down went the butts of earth and pell mell came our swords and pikes together, after our shot had first given their volley even at the enemies’ nose,” writes Captain Biggs. Goring took Alonso Bravo, the General of Cartagena, prisoner at the point of the sword. Captain Sampson was wounded; and Winter, who had given up the command of the Queen’s ship Aid so that he might fight in the vanguard, did his full share of cut and thrust at the side of the Lieutenant-General. “Every man as well of one part as another came so willingly on to the service as the enemy were not able to endure the fury of such hot assault.” They piled through the gap, foe and friend together, Carleill slaying with his own sword the Spanish ensign-bearer. The Spaniards gave, but behind the wall there were barricades erected in the streets. “But we gave them no leisure to breathe,” says Captain Biggs, and they rushed the barricades. It was not until the invaders had reached the marketplace that the defence slackened. But there the battle came to an end and the Spaniards, who had already sent their wives and households into the country, streamed across the stone causeway in full retreat. The battle was won, but at some cost. Carleill had twenty-eight of the soldiers under his command killed, without counting the wounded. However, Cartagena had fallen even as San Domingo. The Capital city of the Spanish Main like the Capital city of all the Indies. Drake advanced his fleet the next morning, and the forts on the mainland guarding the boom and the great causeway fell without a shot into his hands.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 883