Sir Francis Drake

Your general a valiant knight was never daunted yet,

But bravely made his foes recoil, when face to face they met;

Now is your bravery to be shown, there must you all take pain,

Else look for lasting ignominy when you return again.

PLYMOUTH SOUND, WHIT Sunday eve, 24 May 1572. Two small ships, the Pasco and the Swan, worked their way towards the open sea carrying seventy-three men and boys bent upon a dangerous mission to the Caribbean. They were volunteers to a man, and all but one or two of them below thirty years of age, young and vigorous, capable of waging a new and deadlier phase of Drake’s war. Francis Drake commanded from the Pasco while his younger brother, John, who had invested £30 in the adventure, was captain of the Swan. The desperate nature of the enterprise upon which they were bound was marked by the increased number of men Drake had recruited and the equipment he took with him: three pinnaces for inshore work, stored aboard in pieces; provisions for a year; and a plentiful supply of weapons and tools.¹

The Atlantic passage was a good one, and on 29 June the ships could have been observed passing between the West Indian islands of Dominica and Guadeloupe, bound for the Main. After replenishing his fresh water from the fine mountain streams of Dominica, Drake set a course for Port Pheasant, where he intended to put his ships into good order and construct the pinnaces. On 12 July the Pasco and the Swan paused at the entrance to the quiet bay and Drake, after briefing his brother, clambered into a rowing boat with a few men to examine the landfall. As his boat pulled into Port Pheasant the captain saw the first sign of trouble – a thin trail of smoke rising from the woods close to where Drake had established his camp the year before. Drake had supposed Port Pheasant to be uninhabited, and miles from any Spanish settlement, but he summoned a second boat, filled with armed men, and led his party ashore to the remains of a fire that appeared to be some days old. Nearby, nailed to a large tree, was a lead plate inscribed with a warning:

Captain Drake, if you fortune to come to this port, make haste away, for the Spaniards which you had with you here the last year have betrayed this place, and taken away all that you left here. I departed from hence, this present 7 of July, 1572.

John Garret was a Plymouth man, an ex-slaver like Drake himself. He had been guided to this coast by men who had served on Drake’s earlier raid, and was thus the first of many who would try to emulate the bold Devonian. Drake took note of Garret’s information, but he did not allow the news to swerve him from his purpose. The pinnaces were brought ashore for assembly and the carpenters set to work on them, while the other men busied themselves felling trees and erecting a great stockade for security.

While sweating at this work the next day, the Englishmen were disturbed by three small craft entering the bay, but they were not enemies. One, a bark, was English, shipping out of the Isle of Wight under James Raunse, an old shipmate of Drake’s, the same who as master of the William and John on Hawkins’s last slaving voyage had missed the battle at San Juan d’Ulua; now, like Garret, he had been drawn into Drake’s footsteps, and piloted to Port Pheasant by more veterans of the previous year’s cruise. With him Raunse brought two Spanish prizes, a shallop and the Santa Catalina. Seeing Drake’s men ashore in thatched shelters with their pinnaces a-building, Raunse asked that his small party might join them and increase the total English force to a little over one hundred men. The reinforcement was not unwelcome, for Drake, as he explained to Raunse, had in his mind the capture of Nombre de Dios itself.

With the three pinnaces, the Lion, Bear and Minion, finished, Drake quit Port Pheasant and sailed north-westwards along the rocky Darien coast to a small island called the Isla de Pinos, where he took two Spanish ships which had left Nombre de Dios laden with timber. Aboard the prizes Drake found a few Negro slaves from whom he tried to learn the strength of the town. To his dismay the Negroes said that Nombre de Dios lived in fear of an attack from the cimarrones and was daily expecting reinforcements of soldiers from Panama. These were certainly unpleasant tidings. Drake had no way of knowing that the information was erroneous, and that there were no soldiers on their way to Nombre de Dios. His men grew discouraged, but Drake released the blacks ashore (‘willing to use those Negroes well’) and bent himself to his task with greater urgency, trusting that he might surprise the town before it was reinforced.

At Isla de Pinos the captain divided his forces for what was undoubtedly the boldest stroke he had yet attempted. Raunse would remain behind with his own ship and the Santa Catalina, the Pasco and the Swan, while Drake would lead the attack on Nombre de Dios with seventy-three men in the three pinnaces and shallop. He got his assault force to an island at Cativas, where each man was issued a principal tool or weapon. There were six shields, twelve pikes, six firepikes which could also act as torches, twenty-four arquebuses, sixteen bows, six spears, two drums and two trumpets. The men were drilled and briefed, and then on 28 July the raiders rowed silently onward, to steal upon the sleeping town of Nombre de Dios in the ensuing night.

Drake planned to carry the town in a sudden dawn onslaught, and brought his men to a point flanking Nombre de Dios bay where he waited for first light. His men were uneasy. They began to mutter anxiously about the size of the town and the soldiers supposed to be reinforcing it, and Drake sensed that further delay would only multiply their fears. He decided to act. Between two and three o’clock in the morning the moon scudded from behind the clouds and in the twilight the captain declared that dawn was breaking and it was time to attack. Once on the move, the men recovered their spirits, but the assault began shakily nonetheless. A ship conveying wine from the Canaries was anchored in the bay, and some of her crew saw the dim shapes of the English craft as they emerged stealthily from the gloom. The Spaniards instantly lowered a boat which tried to dash for the shore to raise the alarm, but Drake had anticipated the movement, and an English pinnace headed the Spanish boat off and drove her across the bay where she could do no more harm. Without further difficulty Drake landed and seized a battery of six guns from which the sole defender fled as fast as he could towards the town.

The success of Drake’s operation depended upon how quickly and suddenly he could move, for if the Spaniards learned how few English were attacking them they would rally in numbers likely to be overwhelming. Consequently Drake paused no longer than it took to reconnoitre and to post a dozen men to guard the pinnaces and secure his retreat. Then he divided his men to storm the town. John Drake and John Oxenham were given sixteen men to approach the market-place from one of the flanks, and Drake himself advanced directly along the main street. As the parties set off they could already hear Nombre de Dios awakening before them in a cacophony of noise – shouts, drums beating up and down the streets, and the church bell pealing a frantic warning to the people of the town.

With the firepikes flickering eerily aloft, Drake’s company brazenly marched forward to the sound of drum and trumpet as if they were a formidable array. At the south-east end of the market-place that served as the town centre the alcalde, Antonio Juarez, had assembled a body of militia to withstand the corsairs, and when Drake’s men poured into view they were met by a volley of shot from the Spaniards. Most of the bullets struck the ground before the English, but one smashed into Drake’s leg and another killed his trumpeter on the spot. The pirates replied with their own shot and arrows, and then surged forwards ferociously, brandishing their pikes. At the same time John Drake’s company suddenly burst into the market-place from another direction. It was too much for the Spaniards. Terrified, they broke and fled precipitately from the town, some of them discarding their weapons as they ran.

Drake commanded the town, for the time being, but he must act quickly before the inadequacy of his force was discovered and the Spaniards counter-attacked. He reformed his men by a cross in the market-place and then commanded a few prisoners to lead him to the house of the town governor, where he expected to find a fair sample of the treasure that was brought into Nombre de Dios from Panama. According to the English account of the expedition, Drake was not disappointed, for there was discovered

a pile of bars of silver, of (as near as we could guess) seventy foot in length, of ten foot in breadth, and twelve foot in height, piled up against the wall. Each bar was between thirty-five and forty pound in weight. At sight hereof our captain commanded straightly that none of us should touch a bar of silver, but stand upon our weapons, because the town was full of people, and there was in the King’s treasure-house near the water’s side more gold and jewels than all our four pinnaces could carry, which we would presently set some in hand to break open, notwithstanding the Spaniard’s reports of the strength of it.³

Drake should have ordered his men to carry off some of the silver, but he was hungry for more valuable booty, gold and jewellery. The governor’s residence was devoid of this particular treasure, so Drake decided to break into the waterfront strongroom where the treasure was stored before being transferred to the flota for shipment to Seville. There he was sure more was to be had. He directed Oxenham and John Drake to return to his pinnaces to reassure the men there that all was well, and led the main force towards the treasure house in the teeth of one of those sudden thunderstorms for which this part of the coast was notorious. By the time Drake’s men reached their destination they were sodden, much of their gunpowder was useless, and even the strings to their crossbows were too wet to be efficient. The men would have to shelter and restore their weapons to order, and for more than half an hour Drake waited impatiently beneath a penthouse while the storm subsided, knowing that every moment that passed gave his enemies time to regroup. Not unnaturally the delay reawakened the nervousness among his men, and Drake had curtly to remind them that ‘he had brought them to the mouth of the treasure of the world. If they would want it, they might henceforth blame nobody but themselves.’⁴

The whole adventure ended abruptly. When the rain eased John Drake, fresh from checking the pinnaces, was ordered to break down the door of the treasure house while his brother held the market-place. But as Drake stepped forward he became faint, and then it was that his men noticed the blood that covered one of his legs and stained the footprints that he left in the sand. The captain had hidden the wound he had received in the skirmish as best he could, unwilling to withdraw for attention lest it should damage the morale of his company. Now there was nothing more to be done. The sailors gathered around their fallen leader, bound his leg with a scarf, and despite his protests carried him back to the pinnaces, leaving the door of the treasure house solid and inviolate behind them. In the words of the contemporary narrative, they

so abandoned a most rich spoil for the present, only to preserve their captain’s life, as being resolved of him that while they enjoyed his presence, and had him to command them, they might recover wealth sufficient; but if once they lost him, they should hardly be able to recover home.⁵

A Portuguese account of the raid stated that the men Drake had left to defend the pinnaces had become so frightened that they had retired to the boats, and that Drake’s party were compelled to swim or wade through the surf to reach safety. However, one way or another the whole force was embarked at daylight on the 29th, and as they left the bay the English took the ship from the Canaries with them.

They withdrew to the Bastimentos Islands, west of Nombre de Dios, to refresh themselves, tend their wounded and overcome what must have been a crushing disappointment. Bitter must have been the thoughts at this time. They might have been on their way home, laden with treasure, bound for Plymouth and the best time they had known! But God had not willed it so, and Drake’s mind wrestled with the consequences of the failure, at least thankful that he had brought provisions for a year in preparation for just such a misfortune. A new plan had to be formulated, and the men set to work to occupy their minds and prevent unprofitable reflection.

There was one sense, however, in which the sudden retreat from Nombre de Dios had salvaged rather than damaged the little captain’s credibility. It is uncertain how much treasure was actually in the town that night of the attack, for the flota had left harbour a few weeks before and presumably with it had gone most of the treasure being stored for shipment to Spain. Obviously, Drake could not have contemplated assaulting Nombre de Dios while the fleet was in port – it would have been far too strong for that – but it may be doubted if much treasure lay behind that great door that John Drake was set to break down. And how would Drake’s reputation have stood if the coffers had been empty? Paradoxically, Fortune may have been smiling on Francis Drake the day he attacked Nombre de Dios.

This was, of course, no consolation to the Spaniards, for whom such a daring raid upon the outlet of the treasure route was of the gravest concern. Some of the citizens of Nombre de Dios had been killed and wounded by the corsairs, although how many is unknown, so variant are the estimates in our sources. Many years later a Portuguese commentator reported that the only Spaniard killed was an unfortunate onlooker who was struck down as he peered from his window to ascertain the source of the racket! But a Spanish complaint of 1575 raised the fatalities to eighteen. Perhaps the severest version was given in April 1573 by an eye-witness, García de Paz. Recalling the eventful raid he testified that the English ‘began to sound trumpets in the streets and to fire artillery (from four pinnaces which they had brought close in to the shore), and to discharge arquebuses and arrows through the streets; and they killed some men and women, white and black, and wounded many more, in all thirty-two persons.’⁶

The alcalde of Nombre de Dios was worried enough about his injured to send an envoy to the Bastimentos Islands to enquire of Drake if he was the same Drake who had raided the coast before. The emissary flattered the captain that he had earned a reputation for humanity, and asked if the arrows the English had used were poisoned. With the courtesy that many Latins commanded so easily, the Spaniard concluded his address by asking if he could serve Drake by supplying any necessaries required by the English. Drake replied with a braggadocio that was becoming his trademark:

Our captain, although he thought this soldier but a spy, yet used him very courteously, and answered him to his governor’s demands that he was the same Drake whom they meant; it was never his manner to poison his arrows; they might cure their wounded by ordinary surgery; as for wants, he knew the island of Bastimentos had sufficient and could furnish him if he listed, but he wanted nothing but some of that special commodity which that country yielded [treasure], to content himself and his company. And therefore he advised the governor to hold open his eyes, for before he departed, if God lent him life and leave, he meant to reap some of their harvest, which they get out of the earth, and send into Spain to trouble all the earth.

When the messenger departed he was so burdened with English gifts that he protested he was never so much honoured of any in his life.⁷

Listening to the Spaniard’s report, the alcalde of Nombre de Dios may have been forgiven for pessimism. The coast was badly defended, for although the West Indies fleet had patrolled the Main earlier in the year it had then retired to Cartagena to convoy the flota to Spain, leaving the Caribbean uncovered. The best that could be done was to summon assistance from Panama, and improve the town’s defences. About a hundred soldiers were accordingly sent to Nombre de Dios. Earthworks were thrown up in the town, trenches dug near the beach, and a new battery of seven or eight guns erected on a commanding headland. Drake’s failure was becoming a costly one. Not only was Nombre de Dios strengthened, but word of the presence of the corsairs was already on its way to Cartagena, Santa Marta and Honduras.

It was too much for James Raunse. When Drake returned to the Isla de Pinos and told him about it he refused to have anything more to do with Drake and shivered at the prospect of alerted Spaniards combing the coast for the pirates. Drake let him go, and cannot have been sorry; it was sterner material that he needed to meet the challenges ahead. To his remaining men, the faithful band he had brought from Plymouth, he proposed an audacious stroke against the shipping at Cartagena, the most important town on the Main. Cartagena was not strongly defended, but there was a stone tower and a battery of guns, and far too many defenders for Drake to contemplate the sort of attack he had made on Nombre de Dios. But it might be possible to surprise the ships in the harbour.

After dark on 13 August two English ships and three pinnaces stole stealthily into the bay of Cartagena and boarded a Spanish vessel anchored some distance from the waterfront. Another disappointment! Only one old man was aboard the prize, the rest of the crew having gone ashore to watch two men duel over a mistress, and he told Drake that the city already knew that Drake was on the coast, and that the shipping had moved in shore, beneath the protection of the shore batteries. One large vessel of about 240 tons was still within reach, however, behind the next point, and Drake led his pinnaces upon her, attacking her amidships with one boat while his consorts fell upon her bow and quarter. Scaling the ship’s sides, the Englishmen quickly took possession of the ship, and they towed her towards the open sea with the hapless crew shut in the hold. This excitement now attracted notice ashore, and the townspeople gathered to watch Drake make his escape. They were powerless to stop him, although musketeers opened fire from the water’s edge, the guns of the castle roared, and warning bells tumbled the militia from their houses. According to a Spanish account of the attack Drake pillaged his prize and burned it, carrying its owner, Bartolomeo Farina, to England, but this finds no verification elsewhere and was probably a deliberate invention to strengthen the case Spain was making against the English corsairs.⁸

The affair at Cartagena demonstrated the inability of either side to inflict a decisive blow upon the other. Drake had been foiled by the speed at which news of his attack upon Nombre de Dios had passed through the Caribbean. He could take neither Cartagena nor most of its shipping, and after seizing two more vessels the following day he retired to the nearby San Bernardo islands to refit. At Cartagena, on the other hand, Spanish efforts to arrest Drake’s career proved futile, even when he virtually blockaded the city later in the year. The governor of the city was absent, and its defence was conducted by Alvaro de Mendoza and Martin de Mendoza. These worthies persuaded various shipmasters to put to sea in search of Drake but they merely made a fruitless voyage to Tolu and then refused to participate in further expeditions against the elusive raiders.

After this attempt upon Cartagena, Drake decided that, to keep his pinnaces fully manned and ready to steal into shallows, he could not afford to man both his ships. His brother’s Swan would have to be sacrificed. The incident is interesting to us because it illustrates the guile and tact that Drake was capable of bringing to a problem. John Drake and most members of his crew loved the little Swan and Drake knew they would never agree to her being scuttled. In the San Bernardo islands he found an answer, and summoned the carpenter of the Swan, Thomas Moone, for a private conversation. Now, Moone’s loyalty to Drake was unquestioned, but the instructions he received must have been as bewildering as they were unpalatable. He was sworn to secrecy and told to creep into the well of the Swan during the second watch and use a gimlet to bore three holes in the ship’s hull, close to the keel. Then, placing an object against the leaks to prevent the water from gushing in too quickly, Moone was to withdraw and act as if he had done nothing untoward.

The morning after Moone had accomplished his furtive mission Drake rose early aboard the Pasco. He took a pinnace and pulled across to the Swan, where he called to his brother and asked him to join him for some fishing. John agreed, but told Francis to go ahead, for he must first prepare himself. He would follow as soon as he could. As Drake’s boat drew away, he shouted to his brother again. Why, Drake asked innocently, was the Swan so low in the water? John cast his eyes over his sinking vessel in amazement, and ordered his steward to go below and investigate forthwith. In the words of the narrative, ‘the steward hastily stepping down at his usual scuttle was wet up to the waist, and shifting with more haste to come up again as if the water had followed him, cried out that the ship was full of water.’⁹ Drake affected great concern at this news, and offered to send men from the Pasco to help the leak, but John was proud of his company and maintained that the reinforcements would not be necessary.

He was wrong, for Drake’s saboteur had worked well. All that day the men of the Swan struggled with the pumps, but even when some sailors from the Pasco were eventually ferried across to join the battle, the stricken vessel settled lower and lower in the water. John Drake was at a loss to account for the disaster, but he had to admit himself beaten. During the ensuing night the crew of the Swan transferred their belongings to the other vessels, and the empty shell of the ship was then set on fire to burn to the waterline and sink where none might salvage her. Drake had got his way, but to console his aggrieved brother he magnanimously gave John the command of the Pasco and shifted his own berth to one of the tiny pinnaces.

Having reorganized his force Drake was ready for another surprising and unprecedented move. If he could not capture the treasure at Nombre de Dios, he would take it before it reached the town, somewhere on the track that wound through the jungles of the isthmus of Panama. No corsair had attempted such an escapade before, but there were others who knew the interior well: the cimarrones, those Negro outlaws living about Panama, Nombre de Dios and the mountains of Vallano in the southern regions of the isthmus. If Drake could contact them they might serve him as scouts, guides and allies, for they shared the Englishmen’s enmity towards the Spaniards.

It was at this point that Drake’s attitude to coloured races began to change. Hitherto, he had probably seen blacks in the same light as did John Hawkins, as commodities for sale, like bales of cloth, but now they were emerging as individuals who shared a bond with himself – a grievance against the Spaniards, their common enemy. An instrumental figure in the transformation, and in the formulation of Drake’s new strategy, was a remarkable Negro called Diego, who had defected from his Spanish masters to the English during the raid on Nombre de Dios. He attached himself to Drake as a manservant, and between the two developed a close friendship that benefited both. Diego had probably been born in Africa and shipped to the Caribbean as a slave, but he followed Drake to England and ultimately around the world, becoming possibly the first black circumnavigator. It was from Diego that Drake learned more of the cimarrones, of their knowledge of the treasure route between Panama and Nombre de Dios, and of their hatred of the Spaniards, from whose cruelties they had fled. Diego assured Drake that the cimarrones would help him, and the captain led his small squadron into the Gulf of Uraba, where he could perfect his new plan, reprovision his vessels and allow the alarm that had frustrated his attack upon Cartagena to subside.

On a quiet river Drake’s party spent fifteen days repairing their pinnaces, using an anvil, iron and coal brought from England to set up a forge, and erecting shelters under the supervision of Diego. The men worked a shift system, with alternate days of off-duty in which games of skittles, quoits or bowls were played or arrows fired at butts.

As soon as the company had been restored to good order, Drake detailed John Drake and Diego to attempt to contact the cimarrones on the Darien coast while he took two pinnaces eastwards along the Main in search of provisions. It was his intention to establish a network of depots so that if some were discovered by the Spaniards others would survive to sustain the Englishmen. This prudence tempers the charge often made against Drake of haphazard organization and a dependence upon the inspiration of the moment. He was successful in his quest for supplies, topping up his reserves by trading with Indians on the coast and during the second week of September capturing six or seven enemy ships and seizing their provisions. Thus equipped, he was able to return to Isla de Pinos and construct four storehouses, some hidden on the mainland and others on islands, and while employed on this service Diego again drew the attention of his allies, this time by the rapidity with which he built the caches.

John Drake was also successful, for with Diego’s help he had contacted the cimarrones while Drake himself had been probing eastwards for provisions. The free Negroes had been seen ashore, and, using Diego as an intermediary, John was able to arrange for fuller negotiations to be held shortly on a river between the Isla de Pinos and Cape San Blas. Now Drake could feel that his plans were shaping. Returning from the provisioning foray, he had spoken with two cimarrones John had brought back with him, and he learned from them that the Negroes not only knew of Drake’s earlier voyages and his attack on Nombre de Dios, but that they would likely make common cause with him.

Drake did not want to waste time before cementing so vital an alliance, and he led his pinnaces westwards towards the rendezvous, leaving the Pasco secreted behind leafy islands, shoals and rocks off shore. On 14 September he met the cimarrones his brother had encountered, and ten days afterwards a second party of blacks. Eventually, Drake brought both groups aboard the Pasco ‘to their great comfort and our content, they rejoicing that they should have some fit opportunity to wreak their wrongs on the Spaniards, we hoping that now our voyage should be bettered.’¹⁰ Drake found them eager to discuss the movement of the treasure and was told that the process languished during the rainy months and was resumed some time before the arrival of the next flota. Drake calculated that this meant he would have to wait for five months.

The alliance with the cimarrones marked Drake as the most enterprising corsair the Spaniards had yet faced in the Caribbean, and later King Philip’s officials repeatedly spoke of the terror it caused them. ‘This league between the English and the Negroes is very detrimental to this kingdom,’ commented the Municipal Council of Panama, ‘because being so thoroughly acquainted with the region and so expert in the bush, the Negroes will show them methods and means to accomplish any evil design they may wish to carry out and execute. These startling developments have agitated and alarmed this kingdom. It is indeed most lamentable that the English and Negroes should have combined against us, for the blacks are numerous.’¹¹

Drake had turned to the cimarrones as tools to his ends, but from the relationship he learned a respect for Negroes and coloured peoples generally that was in advance of most of the empire builders of his time. Working shoulder to shoulder with these black men, following them along jungle trails only they knew, confronting hazards together, and listening to their stories of the treatment they had received from the Spaniards, Drake thought that he understood their plight. He relied upon them as he relied upon his Plymouth lads, saw qualities in them as sterling as those he found in any whites, and they did not let him down. Interestingly, Diego figures more prominently in the English narrative of the voyage than any other individual, barring the two captain Drakes themselves. If the enslaving and slaughter of Indians in the West Indies and Central America and the introduction of the African slave trade were harrowing chapters in which the English had played a not unimportant part, it is pleasing to record the development of an unusual measure of racial tolerance in Elizabeth’s greatest sailor.

Drake established a forward base on an island about five leagues east of Cativas Headland, and built a fort there, protected by timber and earthworks and standing 13 feet high. He honoured the architect of the new alliance by naming the stockade Fort Diego.¹² Two weeks of labour, into which the cimarrones threw themselves with enthusiasm, saw enough of the task completed for Drake to leave his brother in charge while he made again for Cartagena with two pinnaces, evidently seeking more intelligence, provisions and prizes.

He would never see John again. Two days after Drake’s force left, John was employing his remaining pinnaces collecting wood for the fort when a Spanish ship was seen close off shore. Had he been a cautious man, perhaps an older one, or had he not been a Drake, John might have let the Spaniard pass unmolested. The sailors left with him were poorly armed, and their leader relatively inexperienced. Now he allowed the clamour of his followers to persuade him into an ill-advised attempt to board the enemy vessel. As the English pinnace ran alongside its quarry it received a sharp volley of shot from the defenders. John, standing in the bow of the pinnace with nothing more than a broken rapier in one hand and a pillow as a shield in the other, was fatally wounded by a ball in his stomach, and a seaman standing beside him with a fishing harpoon also fell in his death agony.

Hastily the surviving pirates pushed away, but within an hour of regaining the Pasco John Drake died. He had not made a will, and in the closing moments of his life called his friends to witness the simplest provisions he desired for his young wife, Alice. His brother Francis was to be sole executor of his possessions, and would ensure that debts were met, but his share of any profits of the present adventure were to belong to his wife. Later, when Drake was back in England he attempted to fulfil these obligations and obtained probate, but for some reason the will was contested and pronounced null and void. Happily, Alice remarried quickly and secured letters of administration by which she claimed the full amount of her late husband’s property.

Ignorant of his brother’s death, Drake was merrily tormenting the city of Cartagena in the autumn of 1572. He chased some ships ashore, seized others, and almost blockaded the port, always taking care to put his prisoners ashore or into small boats, unharmed. Two vessels, perhaps the frigates of James Raphael and Sebastian de Proenca mentioned in a Spanish document of 1575, were intercepted by the English on 20 October just as they were trying to leave Cartagena. The Spaniards fumbled helplessly before Drake’s impudent antics. The city’s authorities negotiated with him; they tried to lure his men ashore into ambushes; and they sent out two armed ships to recover some of Drake’s prizes. They failed to drive the corsairs away, but they were at least to be successful in preventing them from securing what might have been the richest prize Drake had yet encountered in the voyage. On 27 October the English ran a frigate ashore, where without rudder or sails she lay aground like a beached whale. Drake tried to board her, but four or five hundred mounted Spaniards thundered towards the ship and began a firing which kept the corsairs at a distance. The English were not particularly concerned, because they had no knowledge that the frigate contained a considerable amount of gold and silver as well as a more prosaic cargo of flour.

This, however, was the height of the Spanish achievement. The rest was frustration, particularly when they manned a large shallop and two pinnaces with soldiers and Indians and sent them out to engage the English, only to see Drake making light of them and forcing them to retire. But this could not go on, for Drake was desperately short of provisions, and when the weather favoured him on 3 November he quit Cartagena and set a course eastwards along the Main, proceeding as far as the memorable Rio de la Hacha. A prize was taken in the cruise, but not a valuable one, and the captain noticed ominous signs of discontent in his crew. He was probably not surprised, for the men were five months out of Plymouth and had little to show for their efforts. This time trouble was averted by an uncommon piece of good fortune, the discovery of a Spanish vessel of over 90 tons filled with the victuals so urgently needed by the English.

Drake summoned the stranger to surrender, receiving in defiance a discharge of their artillery. The narrative tells us:

The sea went very high so that it was not for us to attempt to board her, and therefore we made fit small sail to attend upon her and keep her company to her small content, till fairer weather might lay the sea. We spent not past two hours in our attendance, till it pleased God after a great shower to send us a reasonable calm, so that we might use our pieces, and approach her at pleasure, in such sort that in short time we had taken her, finding her laden with victual well powdered and dried, which at that present we received as sent as of God’s great mercy.¹³

The capture certainly alleviated the food shortage, more so in that her complement, eager to please their captors, guided them to further supplies of victuals and water near Santa Marta. After bartering with local Indians, Drake deposited his prisoners on shore and turned back for Fort Diego.

His return was not a comfortable one. First, he heard of John Drake’s death, and then he lost another brother, younger still, Joseph Drake, who had been serving in some obscure capacity. The cause of this last tragedy, one of several, is not precisely known, other than that it was one of those terrible and feared epidemics which for centuries scourged seamen in the West Indies. Its sudden and spectacular onslaught – at the beginning of January 1573 some ten men were stricken and died within a few days – suggests it was yellow fever, a disease later christened Yellow Jack or the black vomit on account of its manifestations; it was capable of decimating whole crews with terrifying speed. It was not contagious, but arose from a virus associated with the mosquito. Drake and his comrades did not know that. They saw one man after another mysteriously struck down and wondered where it would end; at one time thirty men were sick, and when it was over about 40 per cent of the company had died.

The survivors argued the causes of the pestilence, speculating that it related to changes in the temperature or to the negligence of some sailors who had refilled water containers from a brackish estuary instead of up-river where the streams were purer. Drake could not contend with a problem he did not understand, even when his young brother died in his arms. With his usual decision he declared that he would open the body of one of the victims to investigate the origins of the sickness, and since the very proposition filled the men with horror, he chose his brother as the subject of the autopsy. Unfortunately, the operation was futile, and left Drake no wiser. When the epidemic shortly passed, leaving the ravaged band at its weakest since it had left Plymouth, the men gave their island a new name, Slaughter Island.

As they foraged for provisions, or worked on the fort and the pinnaces, the thoughts of the sailors may have weighed upon the series of disasters that had overcome them, from the repulse at Nombre de Dios to the deadly fever, and some may have resigned themselves, with that superstition so common in seafaring men, to a belief that theirs was simply an unlucky voyage. It was when spirits were at such an ebb that the Englishmen were suddenly invigorated by the news for which they had been waiting. Cimarrone scouts arrived at the fort to inform Drake that Diego Flores’s flota had arrived at Nombre de Dios and the treasure was moving across the isthmus.

¹ The standard narrative of this voyage was issued by Drake’s nephew as Sir Francis Drake Revived (London, 1626), Composed from eye-witness accounts of the expedition now lost, it was written about 1592 by Philip Nichols, then Rector of Mylor, near Plymouth, at the instigation of Drake himself, and it was said that the admiral had improved the text ‘by divers notes with his own hand here and there inserted.’ The work contained a dedicatory epistle from Drake to the queen, dated 1 January, 1593, proclaiming it ‘the first fruits of your servant’s pen.’ Obviously intended for publication, it lay neglected for many years before Drake’s nephew put it into print. Although favourable to Drake throughout, the narrative checks consistently with the other documentation. An account of the voyage by the Portuguese, Lopez Vaz, can be found in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 10: 75–7. Some attacks made by Drake during the expedition are mentioned in a Spanish complaint of 1575, published in Butler, et. al., Cal. State Papers, Foreign, 17: 500–3. Wright, ed., Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, collects other Spanish depositions and dispatches and reprints Sir Francis Drake Revived. It is from this edition that quotations are made below.

⁶ Deposition of García de Paz, 9 April, 1573, Wright, 57. The other accounts from Nombre de Dios and Panama, written in 1572 and 1573, place the number of men killed by the English at between two and nine.

⁸ This charge, like others found in the complaint Spain made to Elizabeth in 1575, must be treated with caution. The same source had Drake capturing a caravel, bound for Havana from Seville with munitions. When the pilot, Francisco Ravano, refused to guide the corsairs to other ports, they threw him overboard. Such behaviour was certainly not beyond the English, but the episode cannot be identified from other English and Spanish accounts, and it was possibly concocted to blacken Drake’s reputation and to sharpen the Spanish protest.

¹¹ Municipal Council at Panama to the Crown, 24 February, 1573, Wright, 48–51.

¹² Irene Wright identified the site of Fort Diego as an island In the Gulf of San Blas.