Sir Francis Drake

An hundred iron pointed darts they fling,

An hundred stones fly whistling by his ears,

An hundred deadly dinted staves they bring,

Yet neither darts, nor stones, nor staves, he fears;

But through the air his plumed crest he rears;

And in derision ’scapes away …

JOHN HAWKINS WAS fitting out another expedition at Plymouth in September 1567, and Francis Drake was to be part of it. There were six ships in all, two of them warships belonging to the queen, the Jesus of Lubeck, armed with a formidable battery of brass and iron pieces, and the smaller 300-ton Minion. This time Hawkins would command in person, and he chose the Jesus as his flagship and Robert Barrett to be her master, or navigating officer. Barrett was only young, twenty-four years of age, but a local man from Saltash and one who had impressed Hawkins while serving as a ship’s master on a previous venture. Drake also sailed aboard the Jesus as one of her principal officers, and among the convivial company there he found not only his old friend Michael Morgan but Protestants as ardent as himself, such as Henry Newman and Nicholas Anthony.

The Minion was captained by Thomas Hampton and her master was John Garrett. The other ships were the William and John, 150 tons, the Swallow, 100 tons, the Judith bark of 50 tons, and the tiny Angel of 32 tons. Thomas Bolton commanded the William and John, and James Raunse, who had been with Lovell, served as her master. It was not, overall, as impressive a collection as it looked, although it was undoubtedly a far stronger force than Lovell had commanded, capable of bowling over the opposition at ports like Rio de la Hacha. The Jesus was a large ship for the day, but old – she had been purchased from the Hanse in 1545 – and in poor condition, rotting and unsafe, her huge poop and forecastle provided to help repel boarding parties rendering her top-heavy and straining her ageing timbers.

The sponsors of this, the fourth Hawkins slaving voyage, are imperfectly known, although they included merchants of the City of London like Sir William Garrard, Rowland Heyward and Sir Lionel Ducket, and probably once again the admiral and naval official, William Winter. Members of the government were alleged to have invested, and it seems that William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief minister, was one. As for the queen, her complicity is amply established by the use of her ships. She assured the Spanish ambassador that Hawkins would not, as Spain feared, intrude upon Philip’s colonies, but her reassurance meant very little. Originally, it was put about that the expedition intended searching for gold mines in Africa, but the two Portuguese hired as guides absconded and Hawkins substituted a conventional slaving voyage instead, something he probably intended from the beginning. He promised the queen that his adventure could be made without offending any of England’s allies or friends, a fatuous remark in view of his destinations, but one which might permit Elizabeth to deny that she had sanctioned his activities if they proved otherwise. Whatever words passed between the queen, Cecil and Hawkins did not retard his progress, and his voyage was soon under way.¹

The ships left Plymouth Sound on 2 October, 1567, laden with cloth of various kinds, carrying 408 men, and bearing the red cross of England at their mastheads. It was, however, what Hawkins termed a ‘troublesome’ enterprise that he had begun. North of Finisterre the ships were scattered by a gale that lasted for four days, and only the diminutive Angel managed to keep company with the ailing Jesus. Already the flagship was betraying her years. Leaks opened in her decaying timbers, and one in the stern was so large that it had to be plugged with pieces of baize. The ship pitched and rolled alarmingly, and Hawkins had his men manning the pumps day and night to keep the water in her down. Eventually he took so pessimistic a view of their chances of survival that he summoned the crew for prayers, entreating the Lord to preserve the ship from sinking. Their prayers must have been heard, for at midnight on 10 October the wind fell and the weather began to clear. In the morning Hawkins again assembled his men and led them in a thanksgiving for their deliverance.

Pressing southwards, and finding the Judith along the way, Hawkins made for the Spanish colony of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, looking for shelter in which he might repair his damaged vessel. Spain had never closed Tenerife to foreign traders, but her governor can have had few illusions about Hawkins’s eventual destination. Both sides eyed each other distrustfully. While his storm-battered vessels were refitting in an environment as potentially hostile as Santa Cruz, Hawkins was suddenly confronted with a quite different problem – dissension from within. Two of his officers, Edward Dudley and George Fitzwilliam, quarrelled and resolved to go ashore to settle their differences by a duel. Hawkins only heard about it after Dudley had left, but he immediately intervened and, refusing to countenance Fitzwilliam quitting the ship, he recalled Dudley forthwith. No display of disunity among his men would entertain the Spaniards while he was in command. Dudley was a hot-tempered man, and he stormed back to the Jesus where he fell into so violent an argument with his commander that the two resorted to blows and then drew swords. In a brief altercation both Dudley and Hawkins were wounded before they were separated. Dudley had overstepped the mark, as he must have known as soon as he had calmed down, and he found himself placed in irons and hauled before Hawkins. The penalty for mutiny was death, and attempting to kill or wound the commander of the expedition admitted of no less a charge. Everyone knew it, and yet there was much sympathy for Dudley among the spectators, a feeling that if he had acted wrongly it had been in temper rather than malice and that he should not suffer the ultimate penalty. While Dudley pleaded for his life, Hawkins menaced him briefly with a loaded arquebus. Then, as tension mounted, the captain suddenly pardoned him. It was a humane gesture which greatly enhanced Hawkins’s standing with his men, reinforced the point he desired to make, and saved him a valuable officer. Drake may have learned something about leadership by watching it.

Having disposed of his internal difficulties, Hawkins returned to the task of getting under way. As a precaution against attack the English ships had anchored behind a few Spanish vessels, masked from the guns of Santa Cruz, but one evening the covering merchantmen suspiciously shifted their position so that the castle guns had a clear line of fire. During the ensuing night Hawkins judiciously moved his vessels out of gun range, and soon afterwards he put to sea. At Gomera the Minion, the William and John and the Swallow joined company so that the squadron was complete as it approached the coast of West Africa. It encountered some Portuguese fishing caravels off Cape Blanco, but all but one of them had been evacuated, and the English heard that their crews had fled after a raid by Frenchmen who had entered these waters to barter with the Negroes for hides and ivory. Considering the abandoned vessels to be fair prize, Hawkins seized one of them to accompany his expedition.

Bent as they were upon piracy, slaving and illicit trading, the English yet demonstrated a simple but fiery piety. Every morning at seven or eight o’clock, and each evening when the night watch came upon deck to replace their tired fellows, and the hourglass was turned, Hawkins would assemble the men of the Jesus, both high and low, around the mainmast for religious services before a thundering quartermaster, whom Hawkins’s young nephew and page, Paul, later described to the Spaniards as ‘a notorious Lutheran, the greatest that existed in England.’ According to the evidence of Michael Morgan, ‘when a sufficient number of people did not gather round to hear what he preached he would order them to be rounded up with a rope’s end.’ Kneeling bareheaded the men recited the Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed in the English tongue, while the quartermaster’s sermons defamed the Pope and denied that he, Our Lady or the saints could intercede between a man and his god.²

For all the overt righteousness aboard the Jesus and the other ships, however, it was a miserable business that Hawkins began at Cape Verde. He used two methods to gather his slaves: direct raids upon native villages and the plundering of Portuguese vessels for their Negroes. The latter was piracy. Portugal was at peace with England, and Hawkins had no commission for reprisals against her shipping which could have authorized his proceedings. As for the slaving, undoubtedly many Elizabethans regarded the Negro as less than human and exempt from normal consideration, and discussion about the morality of the business was uncommon in England at that time. The issue was, after all, a new one for the English. But the conscience of Europe had already been pricked by the Spanish treatment of the American Indians, and some Spaniards were also raising their voices against black slavery. There is no reason to suppose that sensitive men can have been blind to the sufferings of the African natives they kidnapped and herded on to foul hulks for personal profit. Drake was in his twenties and did not question what his elders accepted, but he must share the blame, although in him, at least, there dwelt a capacity to sympathize with the blacks which time would one day draw out.

Hawkins’s first attempt to gather slaves was a failure. Near Cape Verde he landed at night with about two hundred of his men and stole upon a slumbering Negro village, but the attack backfired badly. The surprise was incomplete and the natives resisted, wounding Hawkins and twenty of his men with poisoned arrows. Seven or eight of the injured contracted a mysterious ailment like lockjaw and died, a high price to pay for the nine Negroes who were captured.

Soon after this, when the English had put the Cape Verde Islands behind them, Drake received his first command under Hawkins. Some Frenchmen were encountered, the very same who had robbed the Portuguese fishing vessels off Cape Blanco. Indeed, with them still sailed a Portuguese caravel now commanded by a French sailor called Planes. Hawkins impounded the ship, the Gratia Dei (Grace of God), and installed as her new captain Francis Drake. Another of the French ships also joined the English, but voluntarily, apparently considering that Hawkins offered good prospects for profit. Between Cape Verde and Sierra Leone numerous rivers and inlets flowed into the sea, and here it was that Hawkins hoped to gather the bulk of his slaves, using small, light-draught vessels and the ships’ boats to explore the streams in search of native settlements or Portuguese craft carrying Negroes. While near to Cape Roxo at the end of November the English captured six Portuguese vessels in one river and seized their slaves. In another expedition the Angel took a caravel. According to Job Hortop, who wrote a narrative of the voyage at the end of 1590, Drake participated in one such foray in what is now the Cacheo River. It was not the happiest of adventures. Although a number of vessels were captured they contained no slaves, and the English were frustrated in an attack upon the Portuguese settlement of Cacheo. The Swallow, the William and John and Drake’s caravel brought reinforcements up-river to join the advanced English already mustering for the assault, which was to consist of 240 men led by Robert Barrett, the master of the Jesus. Unfortunately, Negro levies turned out in support of the Portuguese and the raiders were beaten back. They had burned a few buildings and obtained some plunder, but four of their men were killed and they did not obtain a single slave.

The climax of these operations took place in January 1568, when Hawkins stormed a fortified Negro town on the island of Conga in the Tagarin River of Sierra Leone. At this point the commander had been unhappy with his progress, having only 150 slaves below hatches, and he was interested to receive an invitation from some chiefs of the Sapi peoples, who lived on the coast around the Sierra Leone and Scarcies rivers, to join them in an attack upon an enemy entrenched on Conga. The Sapi were being invaded by a Mande-speaking race from the east, in present-day Liberia, and it was a party of these tribesmen who inhabited the island town. Not slow to turn inter-tribal warfare to his advantage, Hawkins agreed to aid the chiefs against Conga providing he could keep the prisoners. Accordingly, Barrett was given ninety men to assist the Negroes in reducing Conga, but the English found it too strong, for it was surrounded by a log picket, defended by numerous warriors, and appeared capable of withstanding a long siege.

Hawkins had to come up-river with reinforcements. He directed his men to storm the defences and to fire the rude huts inside with torches carried on their pikes. As the shouting Englishmen breached Conga’s walls, their Negro allies followed them inside, falling upon the defenders with a ferocity which amazed even the Europeans. The town was captured and large numbers of its occupants killed, some in battle, some by drowning as they sought to escape across the river, and some by the whim of the victorious natives. The conquering Negroes even ate a few of the prisoners. Nevertheless, the English secured about 250 slaves for the loss of only eight or nine of their men killed or fatally wounded, and now had enough blacks aboard to make the Atlantic passage.

By the beginning of February, therefore, Hawkins was much cheered. The first part of his voyage had been successfully completed, and with only slight casualties – a few killed in action, some lost by disease, and two drowned when a vessel was stoved by a hippopotamus. But as his squadron sailed westwards he may have been forgiven for frowning, for ahead lay only uncertainty. Times had obviously changed since Hawkins had last seen the West Indies, as he must have realized from what Lovell had described. A decidedly frosty reception might be in store for them. Colonial resistance to contraband trade had been stiffened, and local officials knew what penalties would be imposed for collusion with the English. Hawkins could still bank upon a demand for his wares, but he would have to contrive the means to sell them.

At first all seemed to go well. The English made their landfall at Dominica on 27 March, and after taking aboard fresh water and some wood they made their way to Margarita, where Hawkins announced that he was engaged in peaceful trade and exchanged some linen, cloth and iron for fresh victuals. No major dealing here, for it was at Borburata on the Main that he anticipated beginning his principal business. When he arrived off that port he approached the governor of the province by the agency of a courteous letter, in which the English acknowledged that Spain was enforcing its trade regulations but implied that they had come to these parts by misadventure and needed money to pay their soldiers. Would the governor be kind enough to let Hawkins sell a few wares and sixty Negroes so that he could overcome his difficulties? To soften the governor, the English commander hinted that a bribe would be available if negotiations were facilitated. The reply was disappointing:

I am sure you know what straight charge the King of Spain, my master, hath given, that no stranger be licensed to traffic in no part of the India, the which if I should break, before my eyes I saw the governor, my predecessor, carried away prisoner into Spain for giving licence to the country to traffic with you at your last being here, an example for me that I fall not in the like or worse. I pray you therefore hold me excused.³

In other words, the new governor had learned by the mistakes of the old, and Hawkins would have to look elsewhere. He stayed for a while at Borburata, and managed to supply a little cloth to Spaniards who cared less than the governor for the laws, but finally sailed at the beginning of June pondering whether this episode boded ill for what was to follow. After a brief landfall at the island of Curaçao, where the English secured further provisions, Hawkins turned to his second major prospect, Rio de la Hacha, where the treasurer, Miguel de Castellanos, had humiliated John Lovell two years before.

Drake must have relished returning to Rio de la Hacha, and perhaps Hawkins knew it. At any rate, he sent the Judith and the Angel ahead to prepare the way. Now, about this incident there is great confusion, but we must examine it because it concerns Francis Drake. The larger of the two ships was the Judith, and her captain was presumably the senior officer of the advance. It will be seen that in September, a few months later, the captain of the Judith was Drake, and because it was he who commanded the ship at that time writers have generally assumed that Drake was also in charge of her at Rio de la Hacha. This is likely, but the sources do not prove it. At the close of 1567 he commanded a Portuguese prize, as we have described, and obviously transferred to the Judith some time between then and the following September. But there is no indication of when that change took place. It could have been as late as August, when Hawkins may have reduced his force from ten vessels to eight, and if such was the case, Drake would not have commanded the Judith at Rio de la Hacha.

However, the behaviour of that little vessel at Rio de la Hacha so fits the personality of Drake that we are inclined to believe that it revealed his hand. This is how Job Hortop, then aboard the Angel, remembered it:

He [Hawkins] sent from thence [Curaçao], the Angel and the Judith to Rio de la Hacha, where we anchored before the town. The Spaniards shot three pieces at us from the shore, whom we requited with two of ours, and shot through the Governor’s house. We weighed anchor, and anchored again without the shot of the town; where we rode five days in despite of the Spaniards and their shot. In the mean space, there came a caravel of advice from Santo Domingo, which, with the Angel and Judith, we chased and drove to the shore. We fetched him from thence, in spite of two hundred Spaniard arquebus shot; and anchored again before the town, and rode there with them till our General’s coming.⁴

Hortop was writing many years after the event, and his description may lack precision. There are substantial discrepancies between accounts of this arrival of the English at Rio de la Hacha, and a clear reconstruction is impossible. It seems that when the Judith and the Angel reached the port they applied for fresh water, but the Spaniards firmly refused it and opened fire, precipitating an exchange in which a ball penetrated Castellanos’s house, surely an action of Drake’s if anything was! After retreating beyond the range of the harbour guns, the English virtually blockaded the port and drove a ship ashore, although rifling it they found nothing more valuable than some glasses and Indian pots.

Drake, if it was he, suffered some casualties during the proceedings. A participant’s account in the Cotton manuscripts of the British Library implies that an Englishman was wounded by an arquebus ball as his ship traded shots with the enemy after the water was refused. However, some colleagues who were captured months later testified to the Spaniards that the English losses were incurred during the attack on the Spanish vessel. For example, Thomas Bennett deposed that ‘in the port of Rio de la Hacha they found a Spanish ship the crew of which defended themselves; that in the fight the said Spaniards killed three Englishmen, among them the sergeant-major; that the crew of the said ship escaped on shore, which was very close; but the English found nothing on the said ship and left it.’⁵

Yet a further set of confessions made by English participants who were subsequently taken and interrogated maintained that the Spaniards drew first blood by firing with arquebuses upon two longboats sent ashore to request permission for the English to anchor, water and trade. In these statements the distinctions between the activities of the English advance party and of Hawkins’s main squadron were blurred or eliminated entirely, so that it seemed that the longboats were dispatched by Hawkins himself with his full force in attendance and not merely by two forward ships. In one deposition that will stand for many, John Brown, a musician with Hawkins, declared:

Thence they sailed to a port called Rio de la Hacha, on reaching which John Hawkins sent two boats on shore with his men to speak with the governor of the country requesting permission to provide themselves with water, but while the men were landing they were attacked by some Spaniards armed with arquebuses, who did not permit them to do so, firing at them and killing one of the Englishmen, Seeing this the party returned to the ships and informed John Hawkins of what had occurred, whereupon he put himself at the head of one hundred and eighty men, more or less, armed with arquebuses and crossbows, [and] went on shore.⁶

These latter accounts are almost certainly in error, and were probably deliberately distorted by the English to emphasize that they had only acted in self-defence at Rio de la Hacha, and that the Spaniards had unjustifiably fired upon small boats. It must be remembered that the witnesses who gave this information were in captivity and threatened with torture and execution, and their duplicity was eminently understandable. They disguised the fact that the Judith and the Angel had harassed the Spaniards for days before Hawkins arrived at the port, and provided an apology for his conduct.

Hawkins appeared off Rio de la Hacha on 10 June, and learned of the skirmishing between Castellanos and the English advance. In his characteristic manner Hawkins wrote to the royal treasurer reminding him of the loss he had suffered on account of Lovell’s Negroes, but he did not pursue the matter. Instead he repeated what he had said at Borburata, asking licence to sell no more than sixty slaves so that he could pay his soldiers, and affecting that he had not intended visiting the West Indies but had been driven accidentally from his course. Perhaps he thought this letter could provide Castellanos with an excuse for dealing with the English, but the device was ineffective. The Spaniards dare not risk it. Castellanos had been sounding his trumpet about the defeat of Bontemps and Lovell, and he was not squandering his glory now. In effect he showed Hawkins the door.

The following day a number of small boats landed two hundred Englishmen, fully armed, who marched resolutely upon the town, towards the few modest fortifications that barred the road. Behind them the royal treasurer had assembled his forces, fewer than one hundred arquebusiers, twenty horsemen and some Negro and Indian auxiliaries. They were not a match for the English, and after firing a feeble volley which killed two of the attackers the Spaniards fled, scattering into the woods or racing into the town with their enemies on their heels. Once there, it was a simple matter for the English to occupy Rio de la Hacha and bring it under control.

What Hawkins had not reckoned upon, however, was the tenacity of Castellanos. The treasurer rallied his men, insisting that the loss of Rio de la Hacha made no difference to his decision. He set his followers to destroy any crops and provisions round about, so that the English could not use them, and when Hawkins threatened to burn the town if the Spaniards continued to obstruct him he sent an impudent note in reply, ‘that though he saw all the India afire, he would give no licence.’⁷ Angrily the English put torches to about twenty houses, including the governor’s own.

For several days the deadlock continued. Hawkins held Rio de la Hacha, but could not obtain his licence, and though his purpose was trade the Spaniards refused to barter with him. Then an unexpected event changed the situation. A Negro, dissatisfied with his Spanish masters, defected to the English and promised that if they gave him his liberty he would guide them to the place where most of the Spaniards had hidden their valuables. He was as good as his word. In the night, about six miles from the town, the English discovered a cache of possessions, including some of the royal treasure, and triumphantly they bore it back in ox-carts. Here was the best bargaining tool Hawkins could wish for.

The townspeople soon forced Castellanos’s hand. Alarmed by new English threats to carry all the captured property away, they clamoured for negotiations. ‘Seeing this,’ ran an official report, ‘your Majesty’s general, moved by his great commiseration for the said burghers, resolved to ransom them from the Englishman, that he might not carry out his cruel threat, and so they and all their goods and houses of the town which remained unburned, were ransomed for 4,000 pesos in gold.’⁸ Discussions between Hawkins and Castellanos took place in an open plain, lest either side contemplated treachery, and some deal was made. Its nature is unclear. Castellanos maintained that he paid 4,000 pesos to prevent Hawkins killing some prisoners, destroying the rest of the town and stealing the valuables the English had discovered. Robert Barrett, a trusted officer of Hawkins, has it that the money was in payment for sixty Negroes which the English delivered to Castellanos, and that such amicability developed between the two commanders that they exchanged gifts. In any case, the upshot was that Hawkins was able to unload two hundred of his slaves before sailing for Santa Marta at the beginning of July. And it is a mark against him that he left behind him not only a town fully chastened for the humiliation of Lovell, but the Negro whose flight to the English had facilitated their triumph. Instead of taking him along, Hawkins turned the wretched fellow over to the Spaniards, who forthwith put him to death.

Santa Marta was the next call. It was a small town of forty-five houses, too weak to resist, and in a conference ashore with the governor Hawkins agreed to feign an attack to provide the Spaniards with an excuse for trading. In accordance, 150 Englishmen disembarked, shot was fired over the houses and an old building was demolished. That done, Hawkins received his licence and trading was conducted with great courtesy by both parties, with 110 Negroes sold. The English believed that they could dispose of the remainder of their cargo at Cartagena, and they now set a course for that city on the Main. But it was far too powerful for Hawkins to coerce, and when he was again refused licence to trade he could do little more than protest with a futile demonstration. Exchanging fire with the shore batteries, he tarried thereabouts for a week, taking aboard some fresh water and provisions, but finding no further opportunities to sell his Negroes.

Hawkins probably doubted that any more could be done. It had not been easy dealing. Only Rio de la Hacha and Santa Marta had taken his slaves, and fifty-seven of them remained unsold in the English ships. But he also had aboard about £13,500 in gold, silver and pearls, and that was probably enough to yield a profit for the voyage. It was time to go home. The Frenchman who had voluntarily joined Hawkins at Cape Verde now went his own way, and the English scuttled one of their Portuguese prizes, no longer needed now that so many of the Negroes had been sold. With his eight remaining ships, the Jesus, Minion, William and John, Swallow, Judith, Angel, Gratia Dei and a caravel, John Hawkins turned on the homeward run, sailing northwards to pass around Cuba by the Yucatan and Florida channels and so into the Atlantic.

In any deep-sea voyage the weather is apt to overturn the most careful of calculations, to destroy a schedule or throw months, even years, of toil into jeopardy in an instant. The perils of the stormy tropical seas of the West Indies, where tempests might be whipped up with little warning, had brought disaster to many of the old-time sailing ships, as they do now to far better founded and sturdier vessels. Such an unforeseen trial now enveloped Hawkins’s expedition, as it tried to weather Cuba, and wrought a decisive change in the English fortunes. On 12 August their ships were gripped by a violent storm.

The William and John was separated from her consorts, and eventually made her way alone to England, but the rest of the squadron ran helplessly before the gale, deep into the Gulf of Mexico where none aboard had ever been. For eight days the tempest scourged the ships, torturing the aged Jesus and prising open her seams so that on both sides of her stern the planks ‘did open and shut with every sea.’⁹ The gaps were such that fish were found swimming in her ballast. Hawkins’s men returned to the work of the previous October, labouring desperately at the pumps and plugging leaks with cloth, and they cut away some of the ship’s upper works to relieve her straining timbers. When the storm slackened, Hawkins found himself in a strange sea in need of a harbour where he could repair the broken Jesus, at least sufficiently for her to make the voyage home.

The English sighted land, and groped along the coast searching for shelter but finding none. On 12 September they happened upon a Spanish vessel, and inquired whether there was a port nearby. The Spaniard was bound for San Juan d’Ulua in Mexico, was the reply, but Hawkins frowned when he further learned that the annual flota from Seville was due to arrive there at the end of the month. The English were upon illicit business and in a bad way. Hawkins had no wish to encounter a powerful force of the king’s ships in this condition, and he asked if there was any other port to leeward. There was not. Hawkins had no choice. Anxious at heart, he set a course for San Juan d’Ulua.

It was a modest enough place, although it served as the outlet for Vera Cruz, 15 or so miles away. The port was nothing more than a roadstead, about 250 yards long, running between the mainland and a low-lying bank of shingle off shore. There was little to justify San Juan d’Ulua’s being called a town. On the island was a battery, and a chapel tended the few seamen and labourers whose huts were scattered around both mainland and bank. When the English arrived on 15 September they saw eight Spanish ships in the roadstead, their crews ashore. Hawkins was relieved. He had detained the few Spanish merchantmen he had encountered on the way to San Juan d’Ulua to prevent them alerting the authorities there, and he had clearly arrived before the flota. With luck the English might complete their repairs and leave before the Spanish fleet appeared.

Francis Drake had never seen San Juan d’Ulua before, but he would remember it all his life. Now he saw a small boat pulling out towards the English ships, aboard her the Deputy Governor of Vera Cruz, Martin de Marçana, and its treasurer, Francisco de Bustamante. They had hurried to the port to welcome the flota, not because its arrival was always an event of importance, but because in this instance it carried the new Viceroy of Mexico, Don Martin Enriquez, one of the two most powerful men in the Americas, come to take up his post. When the Spaniards saw Hawkins’s ships they felt sure they were the first of the flota, and it was only when their boat got too close to the newcomers to flee that they noticed the faded royal standards of England at the mastheads of the Jesus and the Minion. The Spanish party was brought aboard the flagship, where Hawkins received it politely and explained that he intended no harm and would leave as soon as he had refitted his squadron. In the meantime the Spaniards must remain with him for safe-keeping. The next day the Jesus led the English ships line ahead into the anchorage, provoking a brief surge of dismay among the observers, both afloat and ashore. It was not without difficulty that Hawkins was able to reassure them. He announced that he would pay for all necessaries consumed by his squadron, and released all his prisoners barring the treasurer to betoken his goodwill. And then he took control of the port, and settled down to preparing his ships for sea.

Dawn on 17 September brought a different prospect indeed, for thirteen sails could be seen out to sea – the Mexican flota was approaching already! Aboard was the viceroy, Don Martin Enriquez, but the command of the fleet, two warships and eleven armed merchantmen, was in the custody of Don Francisco de Luxan. It was a formidable array, greater than Hawkins had at his own disposal. The Jesus, his largest vessel, had twenty-six mounted guns; the Minion might hold her own; but the other English ships were small. The Gratia Dei had only eight guns mounted, and the Swallow and the Portuguese caravel some eleven between them, while Drake’s Judith was so diminutive that witnesses later spoke of her as a ‘tender’. Hawkins delayed not an instant. He deployed a force to occupy the island, and ordered new batteries to be erected upon it, using the Spanish guns available to enfilade the approaches to the roadstead. In the meantime the English ships were prepared for action, as a Spaniard remarked:

Aboard these vessels they had many and very choice pieces of heavy bronze and iron ordnance, trained and loaded with powder and iron shot. Deponent saw the pieces loaded. He also saw many pikes and arquebuses and targets and corselets brought up and laid out upon the quarter decks and along the midship gangways of these ships. He saw many archers with bows and arrows and heavy stones take their places in the rigging. He saw them there, armed and ready to take either offensive or defensive. They made ready with such brevity and despatch that by 11 o’clock in the morning they had finished the land works on the island and cleared their ships for action.¹⁰

Hawkins believed that he had the strength to keep the flota out of harbour, but he could not be sure, and in any case he dared not do so. Without shelter from wind and weather, the Spanish fleet would likely have been scattered, and possibly shipwrecked. It would have created an outcry in Spain, and one the queen would have found difficult to explain. Rather than risk that, Hawkins determined to bargain with the Spaniards, trusting that he could bring them to terms – admission to the port in return for an armistice to last as long as Hawkins’s stay. Consequently, he sent forward a boat with a Spanish official, Antonio Delgadillo, to apprise the flota of his position and to learn if the viceroy was willing to discuss terms of entry. Hawkins contended, with less than the truth, that he had harmed no Spanish citizen, but that after trading slaves and merchandise he had been driven into San Juan d’Ulua by bad weather. As soon as he had refitted his squadron he intended to leave.

Thus, within minutes of arriving in his viceroyalty, Enriquez was presented with a difficult problem. He was angry, perhaps even humiliated, that contrabanders should dictate terms to him from his own port. It was also his duty to destroy the English, who by Spanish law had no right to be in the Gulf of Mexico. But discussing the matter with his officers, Enriquez was cautious. It would be inadvisable to force his way into San Juan d’Ulua against the English guns, but nor could he permit his deeply laden merchantmen to lie exposed to adverse winds. In the afternoon Delgadillo returned to Hawkins with a message from the viceroy. Enriquez wanted to know the English terms. It took until the next day, and much shuttling to and fro by emissaries, to determine their nature. Both sides gave ten hostages to secure the conduct of the other, and Hawkins was to be allowed to complete his preparations unmolested. As another guarantee of their own safety, the English would continue to occupy the island and its batteries for the duration of their visit. This settled, the flota was free to enter. The weather was poor, and for three days the Spaniards lingered off shore, but eventually they crowded into the narrow anchorage. The ships sat uncomfortably side by side, their bowsprits overhanging the island, within point-blank range of each other, the Minion nearest the Spanish vessels and the Jesus next to her.

On the face of it both parties were friendly, and ashore Englishman mixed with Spaniard, Protestant with Catholic, whiling away hours in polite and curious conversation. Nonetheless, treachery was afoot, for Enriquez had no intention of honouring his pact with Hawkins. He conspired with his officers upon the means by which the hated Lutherans could be destroyed, and a secret summons was passed to Vera Cruz calling 120 soldiers to San Juan d’Ulua. On the night of 21 September they were smuggled aboard the Spanish ships. A big merchantman lay nearest the English vessels, and Enriquez and De Luxan had it filled with 150 arquebusiers, rowed silently in the darkness from the other craft. Surreptitiously, the Spaniards also prepared the head ropes of the hulk so that at a given signal it could be hauled closer to the Minion. Enriquez was planning a soldiers’ battle. At a signal his men would scramble aboard Hawkins’s ships and take them in hand-to-hand fighting, while simultaneously Captain Delgadillo and Captain Pedro de Yebra would lead another force in an assault upon the English batteries on the island.

The English were not entirely deceived by these preparations. Although the greater perfidy was yet unknown to them, they had become alarmed at suspicious movements on the part of the Spaniards, and may have pondered the meaning of new gun ports being cut in some of the enemy ships. In fact, Hawkins was so concerned that on the morning of 23 September he twice sent Robert Barrett to Enriquez’s flagship to complain. The first time Barrett returned with reassurances, but upon his second visit Enriquez had the Englishman seized and imprisoned in the hold. The viceroy was about to attack, and needed no further excuses.

Spanish accounts declare that their signal was given too early. De Luxan, who chose to command from the hulk closest to the English, the same that had been stealthily filled with soldiers, was supposed to signal the flagship that he was close to the Minion by waving a white napkin. In the event, it was a subordinate, Juan de Ubilla, who gave the signal – prematurely, because (according to his story) the English had realized what was happening and, indeed, had fired an arrow at Ubilla as he stood on the deck of the hulk. Anyhow, the napkin was seen aboard the Spanish flagship and Enriquez ordered his trumpeter to sound the attack.

The Englishmen heard that trumpet too. To their dismay they saw soldiers massing on the decks of the nearest Spanish ship, ready to board, drawing steadily closer to the Minion as the Spaniards heaved upon their hawser. Rowing boats appeared from various quarters, all bristling with armed men, some pulling frenziedly to the island, where the Spaniards quickly overran the English positions and cut down the defenders, and some bringing more boarders to attempt the sides of the Minion and the Jesus.

Hawkins called to his trumpeter, Thomas Johns, to signal a stand to arms, and as the enemy clambered over the sides of the Minion called to his men to repel the boarders. ‘God and St George!’ he shouted. ‘Upon these traitorous villains, and rescue the Minion! I trust in God the day shall be ours!’¹¹ It took reinforcements from the Jesus to expel the Spaniards from the Minion. Once the ship had been cleared the English cut the head fasts of both the Minion and the Jesus and hauled on their stern fasts to pull away from the Spanish vessels, dropping launches in the gap that opened so that their adversaries could not close again.

A thunderous cannonade then erupted on both sides. Ashore, the Spaniards turned the batteries upon the English ships with devastating effect, but the Spanish ships themselves proved no match for the queen’s vessels, despite the heavy firing at close range. The guns of the Jesus and the Minion were trained not on the crowded hulk but upon the next two ships in the line, the Spanish flagship and its capitana, the only genuine fighting ships in the flota. They hulled the flagship on the waterline and saw her settle lower in the roadstead, the greater part of her crew abandoning her to flounder ashore, leaving Enriquez and only a few of his followers aboard. The vice-admiral’s capitana suffered a direr fate. An English shot exploded a powder keg and the vessel burst into flames. Within a short time she had burned to the waterline with a loss of thirty-four men. Once the warships had been put out of action, the Spanish merchantmen received greater punishment and one of them also sank.

The shore batteries, for their part, were now ripping holes in the smaller English ships. The small Angel sank, and the Swallow, the Gratia Dei and the Portuguese caravel were battered into submission. Only Drake’s Judith, which was virtually unarmed, got clear, probably because she was the outermost ship of the English line and the furthest from danger. From his position of safety Drake could see the Spanish guns turning upon the stricken Jesus, but he was powerless to help and could only stand by ready to move in as opportunity served.

The Jesus had already been in a poor condition before the attack, but as the batteries on the island found their range they riddled the great ship with shot, shredding her masts and sails to pieces. Job Hortop remembered Hawkins directing the fight from her deck:

Our general courageously cheered up his soldiers and gunners, and called to Samuel his page for a cup of beer; who brought it to him in a silver cup. And he drinking to all the men willed ‘the gunners to stand by their ordnance lustily like men!’ He had no sooner set the cup out of his hand but a demi-culverin shot struck the cup and a cooper’s plane that stood by the mainmast, and ran out on the other side of the ship; which nothing dismayed our general, for he ceased not to encourage us, saying, ‘Fear nothing! For God who hath preserved me from this shot will also deliver us from these traitors and villains!’¹²

Yet Hawkins knew he could not save the Jesus as she agonized beneath the shot. His priority must now be the protection of the Minion and the removal of men, provisions and treasure from the doomed flagship. He signalled the Minion to shelter behind the Jesus and summoned Drake to bring in the Judith. Drake did as he was instructed, and received as many stores and men as he could, and perhaps a little of the treasure. Then he withdrew from gun range and allowed the Minion to take his place. ‘At this stage of the fight,’ recalled a soldier of the Jesus, ‘John Hawkins went below where the ten Spanish hostages were detained and told them that since he had given his word to let them go in peace and free to return to their own land he would keep it, even though their Viceroy had broken his plighted faith of a gentleman, wherefore he wished them farewell and Godspeed, and with this he left them in the disabled English flagship.’¹³

Returning to supervise the evacuation of his men to the Minion, Hawkins was greeted by the sight of another and potentially overwhelming danger, a fireship which the Spaniards had set adrift to bear upon the injured English vessels. The men of the Minion saw it too, closing upon them ominously, and, exhausted as they were by hours of hard fighting, their nerve now reached breaking point. They were overcome with what Hawkins called ‘a marvellous fear’. Casting off the lines, they pulled the Minion away from the Jesus while their desperate comrades were still crowding upon the flagship’s deck waiting to be taken off. Suddenly it was every man for himself, as the crew of the Jesus plunged towards the departing Minion in an attempt to get aboard. Some, like Hawkins himself, leaped from the bulwarks of the Jesus on to the Minion as she moved away. Some fell short, into the water. Some, like the boy Paul Hawkins, his arms clutching a rich goblet and some fine crystal plate set with precious stones and pearls, hesitated, frightened to jump, and were left behind. A few managed to follow the Minion in a rowing boat; most of those remaining on the Jesus, along with forty-five unsold slaves and the Spanish hostages, escaped the fireship, which was ultimately ineffective, but fell into the hands of the victorious Spaniards.

Towards evening, after a six-hour duel, the guns of San Juan d’Ulua fell silent. The Minion was sorely wounded and both she and the Judith were overcrowded. They lay beyond the range of the batteries, their men labouring to ready them for sea. Behind, the Spaniards chose not to pursue them. They had lost their warships, and their merchantmen were deeply laden and not a few damaged. Both sides were exhausted, and, balefully eyeing each other, gathered themselves for the next moves.

What happened next has never been adequately explained. Daylight revealed the tattered Minion alone at the mouth of the harbour, but of Drake and the Judith there was not a sign. Hawkins did not doubt that Drake had deserted him, and he held to this opinion after hearing his kinsman’s explanation many months later. So bitter was he that when he wrote a narrative of the expedition, published in 1569, he had hard words for Drake, although he did not charge him by name. ‘So,’ he wrote, ‘with the Minion only, and the Judith, a small bark of 50 tons, we escaped, which bark, the same night, forsook us in our great misery.’¹⁴ Whatever Francis Drake said in his defence has not been preserved, and we are left to speculate about his reasons for leaving Hawkins. The weather conditions on the night after the battle offer part of the answer. After the engagement the wind was offshore, and both Hawkins and Drake used it to work further outside the range of the enemy guns, but the wind seems to have intensified in the night, threatening to run the two English ships upon the reefs about the coast. Drake, whose experience in West Indian waters was negligible, probably put out to sea where he was safe. In the morning he no doubt worried about Hawkins. Had he been shipwrecked? Was he still alive? It should have been Drake’s business to find out, but his resolution, as far as we know for the first time, failed him. The Judith was certainly overcrowded, and probably under-victualled, and the voyage ahead was daunting for a man who had never guided a ship across the Atlantic before. The measure of Drake’s difficulty is indicated by the fact that, although his bark was known to be a fast ship, she took four months to reach Plymouth. It is, therefore, conceivable that Drake felt his first duty was to bring his company home, and he must be complimented for doing so, but when he anchored in Plymouth on 20 January, 1569, he must have wondered how he would be judged if Hawkins ever returned.

The defeat at San Juan d’Ulua was not the turning point in Anglo-Spanish relations some historians have depicted, but it was decisive in the lives of the surviving English commanders. It marked the end of John Hawkins’s slaving voyages. When Drake left him he was in a desperate position, with two hundred men crowded on the broken Minion and scarcely any food to maintain them. During the few days that followed the battle, the first fought by English-speaking people in the New World, the crew subsisted on what they could find, vermin from the hold, parrots, even hides which the men chewed to nourish their fragile bodies. So bleak seemed the prospect of surviving the homeward run that half the men asked to be put ashore; they would rather confront the Indians, the wilderness and the Spaniards.

With the remainder of his men, dying by the dozens along the way, Hawkins limped home. There was little to console him, although much, perhaps most, of the treasure had been saved in the Minion, enough to meet the costs of the voyage. But all but two of his ships had been lost, and further opportunities for trading in the West Indies dissipated, while between two and three hundred Englishmen never saw their native land again. Some starved in the forests or were murdered by Indians, and others, possibly the least fortunate, fell into the hands of the Spaniards, either at San Juan d’Ulua or after leaving the Minion. The Inquisition was not famed for its mercies, and the reports of the examinations of Hawkins’s seamen make the grimmest reading. Most of those captured died in prison or in servitude. There was William Orlando of London, who died in the dungeons of Seville; Robert Barrett of Saltash, who perished in the flames of the Seville auto da fe; David Alexander, a Cornishman, who loitered in the isolation of a monastery; William Collins from Oxford, who laboured at the oars of the Spanish galleys; Michael Morgan of St Bridgets, Cardiff, who was tortured, whipped with two hundred lashes, and also sentenced to the galleys; George Ribley from Gravesend, who was strangled and his body burned at the stake … and many, many more. Sometimes over the years their stories filtered back to England to grieving relatives and friends, reopening the wounds of San Juan d’Ulua. Hawkins was close to despair when he brought his handful of survivors into Mount’s Bay in Cornwall on 25 January, 1569. Reflecting upon his adventures, he told William Cecil that ‘if I should write of all our calamities I am sure a volume as great as the Bible will scantly suffice.’¹⁵

The battle changed Francis Drake too. He was as yet a minor figure, even among the West Country seamen; asked by the Spaniards to name the captains of Hawkins’s expedition, a captured Englishman, Noah Sergeant, did not even mention him. He had probably invested his small means in the slaving voyages, but he owed his current command to his family, connexion with Hawkins rather than to wealth or even ability. Now even that patronage was doubtful. Lovell’s voyage had been a commercial flop, but Hawkins’s was a naval disaster, and Drake had barely received a command than he had tarnished the little reputation he had.

But for all that Drake emerged a new man from the carnage and smoke of San Juan d’Ulua. He had reached a crossroads. Hitherto, his memories of the reign of Philip and Mary, the story his father had told of the family’s flight from the Catholic insurgents in Devon, and his Protestant background had left him with little liking for the enemies of his faith and his country. He, like his shipmates, had joined in the extreme denunciation of the Pope heard aboard the old Jesus. All this was now sharpened by a deep sense of personal grievance. First there had been Lovell’s discomfiture, and now far more mortifying the treachery of the Viceroy of New Spain. Drake had seen the fruits of a year’s toil wither before Spanish gunfire, the English ships sink or surrender; and he had fled for his life. Good friends had died, and for all Drake knew as the Judith made for home Hawkins and the men of the Minion were among them. It can hardly be doubted that as he struggled over the wintry Atlantic swells Drake was coming to an important decision. The day of the contraband trade was over, smouldering in the ruins of that Mexican roadstead. It was time for another way, Drake’s way. For the rest of his life Francis Drake pictured himself an avenger, bent upon rewarding the treachery of Don Martin Enriquez. It must have seemed a futile, an almost presumptuous decision at the time, but it put a fire into the obscure little sea captain, defeated and dishonoured. On the pitching Judith, brooding upon his misfortunes, Francis Drake declared war upon the King of Spain.

¹ The contemporary published narratives of this voyage, John Hawkins’s A True Declaration of the Troublesome Voyage of John Hawkins (1569), Job Hortop’s The Rare Travels of Job Hortop (1591) and Miles Philips’s narrative, are reprinted, with summaries of the testimony given before the High Court of Admiralty in England in 1569, by Beazley, ed., An English Garner. More valuable is the anonymous account in the Cotton manuscripts of the British Library, published as an appendix to Williamson, Sir John Hawkins. Spanish materials have been printed in Wright, ed., English Voyages to the Caribbean, and Lewis’s two articles, ‘The Guns of the Jesus of Lubeck’, and ‘Fresh Light on San Juan de Ulua’. A wealth of unpublished detail can be found in the transcripts of the confessions of captured Englishmen contained in the Conway Papers of the Cambridge University Library. Additional valuable secondary accounts are Williamson, Hawkins of Plymouth; the over-dramatized Unwin, Defeat of John Hawkins; and Hair, ‘Protestants as Pirates, Slavers and Proto-Missionaries’.

² Criminal Suit against Paul Hawkins, 1573, Conway Papers, Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 7237.

⁵ Statement of Thomas Bennett, 1568, Conway Papers, Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 7257. This is substantially the same as an account given by William Sanders, to be found in the same volume.

⁶ Statement of John Brown, 1569, Ibid, Add. MS 7260. Similar depositions, dated November or December 1569 were made by William Orlando, Michael Sol, George Fitzwilliam, Richard Temple, John Truslon, Thomas Stephens, Diego Hen, Anthony Goddard, Thomas Fowler, and others, for which see Ibid, Add. MSS 7258 and 7260.

⁸ Lazaro de Vallejo Aldrete and Hernando Costilla to Philip ll, 26 September, 1568, Wright, 116–19.

¹⁰ Deposition of Francisco de Bustamante, 30 September, 1568, Wright, 146–52.

¹³ Statement of Anthony Goddard, November 1569, Conway Papers, Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 7260.