Sir Francis Drake

Sir Drake, whom well the world’s ends know,

Which thou didst compass round,

And whom both poles of heaven once saw

Which North and South do bound.

The stars above will make thee known,

If men here silent were,

The sun himself cannot forget

His fellow traveller.

FRANCIS DRAKE WAS homeward bound, but which way should he go? He had two ships, the Hind and Rodrigo Tello’s frigate, with upwards of sixty or seventy people aboard, and a vast amount of treasure. The problem of how to get his fabulous hoard back to England must have occupied Drake’s thoughts for many a day, and disturbed not a few nights. There were three alternatives that looked realistic. He could fulfil his original plan and return by way of the Strait of Magellan, or indeed even by Cape Horn, which he had discovered; he could seek the hypothetical Strait of Anian and attempt to circumnavigate the Americas and reach the Atlantic by the North-west Passage; or he might sail south-west, across the Pacific, to the East Indies and inscribe a girdle around the whole earth, as Magellan’s expedition had done. Each course was desperate, and beyond the experience of any on board, but Drake quickly struck out one of the possibilities. He would not commit his heavily laden ship to the storms he had encountered in the region of Tierra del Fuego, or to the dangerous winds that blew on to the Chilean coastline in the southern regions. He had lost two ships battling those waters, and could afford no further casualties. Besides, Drake probably reasoned, the Spaniards would be on the watch for him on the west coast of South America, and might even be waiting for him at the Strait of Magellan. If that thought crossed Drake’s mind, he was not entirely deceived, because Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa was directed to take a detachment to the strait by the Viceroy of Peru for precisely that purpose, although not until after the English had quit the Pacific.

A voyage around the world was a terrifying option, but one Drake took more seriously, and he had mentioned it to Captain Winter and Captain Thomas, suggesting that if they accidentally separated from him they might meet him ‘in the Portuguese Indies’.¹ There was no doubt, however, that if the Strait of Anian existed it represented the quickest way home, for it was believed that the western or Pacific entrance to it commenced in about 42° north. At least it seemed worth a try, and after leaving Guatulco Drake turned westwards to avoid contrary winds and then swung northerly towards the supposed location of the North-west Passage. There has been some dispute about how far he sailed, but nearly all our creditworthy authorities – the version in The World Encompassed; the anonymous narrative that forms one of the better accounts of the voyage; the depositions of John Drake; and the opinions of men of the Hind who later accompanied an expedition under Edward Fenton – agreed that he reached 48° north, or a little south of what is now the Canadian border. This was further north than any European explorer of the Pacific had gone before, although the Spaniard Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had got as far as present-day Oregon more than thirty years earlier.²

Shortly before the English reached their most northerly point the weather had turned cold, so cold, Parson Fletcher said, that cooked meat froze when it was removed from the fire, and the ropes and tackle became too stiff to manage without difficulty. For a while, Drake cheerfully urged them on, but on 5 June he ran towards the shore to anchor in a bay, where the ships were penetrated by violent winds and thick fogs. The weather was not encouraging, and Drake had also taken note that, if the Strait of Anian existed at all, it was not as the geographers commonly represented. Far from trending north-east from about 42°, the land was further west, and there was no indication that the entrance to a passage was imminent. It was time for the plans to be revised.

A trans-Pacific voyage was now inevitable, but so demanding an enterprise needed careful preparation, and Drake looked for somewhere to careen, repair and retallow the Golden Hind. Cruising southwards along the coast, the English reached latitude 38°, and thereabouts, in what is now northern California, they found the sufficient anchorage they had been seeking. On 17 June the ships halted in a quiet harbour that has inspired more ink to flow than any other Drake found in the New World. One of the most prosperous communities in North America has since flourished in the area where Drake careened his ship, its centre the great city of San Francisco, currently the fourth most populated in the United States, and generations of diligent American scholars have searched for the site of the Elizabethan anchorage. Yet to this day no one can say certainly where that safe haven was found. From the latitudes given in the contemporary accounts and an identification of the language and culture of the Indians Drake met as that of the coastal Miwok people, we can place the English landfall somewhere in present Marin or Sonoma counties, but within that region three locations have been powerfully championed as the actual spot: Drake’s Estero, in Drake’s Bay, at 38°; Bolinas Lagoon, in Bolinas Bay, at 37°55′; and an area inside San Francisco Bay, reached through the Golden Gate at 37°49′. None of these alternatives has been eliminated by even the most conscientious research.³

All manner of methods, from metal detecting to aerial photography, have been used to find the place where Drake built a fort near his anchorage, but searches in Drake’s Bay, Bolinas Lagoon and San Quentin Cove in San Francisco Bay have all been unsuccessful. It is a testimony to the intensity of this search that more than eight hundred artefacts from sixteenth-century European ships have been discovered about Drake’s Bay, most of them Chinese porcelain salvaged from the wreck of the Spanish San Augustin, which was lost there in 1595. Still, nothing that can positively be linked to Drake has been unearthed, although a number of hoaxes have been perpetrated. Three early English sixpences have turned up in Marin County, and in 1887 a sealing schooner was alleged to have pulled up an anchor inscribed with Drake’s name! These reports probably reflect the charlatanism that has marked this particular controversy, a facet most obviously illustrated by the famous case of the Drake plate. The story is a digression, but worth telling.

In February 1937 a store clerk, Beryle Shinn, telephoned Professor Herbert Bolton of the University of California to inform him that the year before he had discovered a metal plate on a ridge overlooking upper San Francisco Bay and Point San Quentin. It bore the date 17 June, 1579, and an inscription claiming the land of New Albion for Elizabeth I, and it had the signature of Francis Drake. There was instant excitement, for some such plate is known to have been erected by the English in 1579, and when the artefact was examined it bore all the appearance of authenticity. The plate was solid brass, some five by eight inches, and it was punctured by a ragged hole in the bottom right-hand corner, large enough to admit an Elizabethan sixpence. Opinion was divided, but after metallurgical investigations supported those who contended that it was genuine, the plate was acclaimed a priceless Californian heirloom and strong proof that Drake had anchored in San Francisco Bay.

The ‘finder’, Shinn, eventually sold the plate to members of the California Historical Society for $3,500, but its mystery deepened when a chauffeur, William Caldeira, came forward to proclaim that it was he, and not Shinn, who had originally discovered the plate. He said that he picked it up in 1933 near Drake’s Bay, but after carrying it for some time he concluded that it had no value, and discarded it about a mile from the spot where Shinn later came upon it. In time the argument about which possible anchorage the discovery of the plate favoured, and about the integrity of Shinn and Caldeira, became redundant, because renewed metallurgical and handwriting analyses, published in 1977, revealed that the plate was a fake. Thus the great memento of Drake’s visit to California was transformed into America’s counterpart of the Piltdown Man, a cunning hoax that outfoxed the experts of the day to be exposed by the technology of a later age.

Drake’s Estero, in Drake’s Bay, was probably the scene of Drake’s activities in California. This haven is the most immediately associated with the several miles of weatherbeaten white cliffs in Drake’s Bay, which are surely those we know to have reminded Drake of the Seven Sisters near Dover in England, and which prompted him to name the country Nova Albion. The weather conditions typical around Drake’s Bay correspond to those described by Francis Fletcher, and surely, if Drake had entered the Golden Gate to the substantial waterway within, would not the English have spent time exploring it? Would not their narratives have reflected their excitement at finding such an inlet, particularly since they had been searching for the Strait of Anian? Yet the contemporary sources are silent about all this, and so uninteresting were the waters surrounding Drake’s anchorage in 1579 that when he did explore he marched inland. While San Francisco Bay cannot be ruled out, Drake’s Estero seems to have the better of the argument.

The coast the explorers gazed upon seemed barren and forbidding, and their stay was attended by overcast skies, cold, and a fog that seldom permitted Drake to measure the altitude of the sun or the stars. Fortunately, the natives were more hospitable, and not long after the English arrived one of them brought a present, which consisted of a bunch of feathers and what may have been tobacco in a basket. For this he refused to be rewarded by more than a hat that was thrown to him from the ship, and which he successfully retrieved from the water. Drake was encouraged, but his experience at Mocha had made him more cautious in dealing with Indians. The Hind was leaking, and he needed to bring her close in shore so that she could be pulled over and her hull cleaned and repaired. In that condition the ship and her men were vulnerable to attack, so the General put his men ashore to erect tents and to throw up a fort for defence. The Indians came down a hill in a body to watch them, but although the warriors were armed Drake did nothing hasty or stupid. He could see that the native women were with their men, and guessed that their intentions were friendly, and when he motioned to the warriors to lay down their bows and arrows they did so. It appeared to the English that the Indians regarded them as gods; they were impervious to English attempts to explain who they were, but at least they remained friendly, and when they had received clothing and other gifts the natives returned happily and noisily to their village.

There were other visits, some made by Indians drawn a considerable distance by reports of the white curiosities, but far from offering any violence to the strangers the natives struck the English as ‘a people of a tractable, free and loving nature, without guile or treachery.’⁴ On 26 June a singular ceremony was performed. Two Indian messengers arrived at Drake’s camp to inform him, by one means or another, that their chief was nearby, about to honour the English with a visit for the first time. Would Drake first demonstrate his goodwill by providing a present? He would, and an appropriate gift had no sooner been brought out than it was being carried away by the messengers. Aware that something unusual was going to take place, the sailors gathered round, and shortly they saw the Indians descending the hill towards them in full strength. At their head marched an official, holding a sceptre of black wood adorned with ‘knitwork’ crowns and chains manufactured from clam shells, and behind him, protected by his guard, the chief, attired in a head-dress and a skin cape, and followed by a throng of fiercely painted warriors, each one of whom bore a gift. The rear of the cavalcade was formed by the Indian women and children.

It looked a formidable array, and the English felt it prudent to retire into their fortress, but the precaution proved unnecessary. A short distance away the Indians halted and after a salutation fell silent while the sceptre-bearer delivered a speech that lasted half an hour. When it was over the children remained behind, while the adults completed their descent of the hill, and Drake, with his instinct for responding to the good intentions of native peoples, ordered the gate of the fort to be thrown open to admit them. In they came, and as the natives milled around them the Englishmen noticed that the women indulged in a strange ritual of self-mutilation, scratching their faces and scoring their cheeks until the blood flowed.

The point was that these Indians had never been close to white men before. True, Cabrillo had skirted the coast, but he had not landed on it north of the Santa Barbara Channel. Drake was bringing Europeans to new ground. At the time, the English could only think that the Indians were deifying them, paying homage to visiting gods, but anthropological research has come up with another explanation for the Indians’ behaviour. In the culture of the Indians of central California self-mutilation was associated with mourning, and it is possible that the natives considered Drake and his men to be not gods but spirits returning from the dead. Either way, the English were treated with reverential awe and as the possessors of uncommon power.⁵

By gestures the Indians indicated that they desired Drake to sit down, and when he had done so they regaled him with a number of speeches, which the English interpreted to mean that the natives wanted the General to take ‘the province and kingdom into his hand, and become their king and patron, making signs that they would resign unto him their right and title in the whole land, and become his vassals in themselves and their posterities.’⁶ Drake had chains placed about his neck, a ‘crown’ rested upon his head, and a sceptre put into his hands as if he were being proclaimed the king of the coastal Miwok, a novel destiny for the son of a yeoman farmer from Devon!

If nothing else, the ceremony indicated that the English had nothing to fear from the Indians, and Drake felt it was safe to explore. Further inland, further from the restless tide, the English discovered a lusher country, abundant in deer and ground squirrels, and the site of several native villages, which were found to consist of wooden conical shelters covered with earth. It was remote from Europe, this place, and perhaps the safer for that, but Drake could not resist claiming it for England. His country’s first possession in what is now North America was named Nova Albion, ‘in respect of the white banks and cliffs, which lie towards the sea’, and to proclaim it Drake had a post set up with a plate bearing his name and the date attached to it. It was this plate that Shinn claimed to have discovered over three hundred years later.

Now, this whole business introduced a new concept to the so far brief history of Anglo-American Indian relations, for Drake maintained that England’s rights rested upon the voluntary surrender of the territory by its owners, the coastal Miwok. We have seen how Spain and Portugal had originally founded their rights to ‘new’ lands on papal grants issued by Alexander VI, and equally how England had repudiated any such claim. The English view was that discovery alone did not constitute ownership of territory; only effective occupancy or control by a Christian prince could do that. Thus, even Englishmen more scrupulous than Francis Drake felt little compunction about sailing in regions claimed by Spain, and Drake saw no reason why he should not annex the Elizabeth Islands or Nova Albion, unoccupied as they were by Christians, for his country. In this respect, then, the issue was clear – Philip II defended his rights by discovery, as legitimized by the Pope; Elizabeth contended that only occupied territories might be claimed, and that the Pope’s authority had never extended to more than spiritual matters anyway. It had no relevance to matters of territory.

But what of the natives of these newly discovered lands? Where did the indigenous peoples stand in these squabbles over land which they had discovered long before the Europeans came, and in which they had supported themselves since time immemorial? In fact, there was already a growing body of opinion that the Christian nations had no rights at all to territories inhabited by aborigines. Francisco Vitoria of the University of Salamanca contended in 1532 that Spain’s claims to the New World were valid only inasmuch as they applied to uninhabited country; inhabited land belonged not unnaturally to its inhabitants. Not only that, but even the idea that the natives could be conquered and compelled to surrender their title was being criticized, particularly in the light of Las Casas’s arousal of much moral indignation at Spain’s treatment of the American Indian. Pope Clement VI issued a bull in 1529 authorizing the conquest of the Indian as a means of converting him to Christianity, but it was rescinded in eight years.

That being said, then, as now, legalities were scarcely allowed to interfere with the sequestration of valuable resources held by the weak, and all sorts of justifications for dispossessing natives were trotted out. The most common were that they were only pagans and that many were merely rude hunters and gatherers, ‘savages’ who made little use of the soil. On either count they might be swept aside like the wilderness of which they were a part. It is interesting that in the case of Nova Albion we have recognition, of a kind, that the natives possessed title to their soil. Drake’s view was that by giving him a sceptre and crown, the Indians had ‘freely offered’ him their ‘kingdom’, and conferred its possession upon England. At the same time he must have been aware how little the likelihood was that his country would ever be able to enforce its claim upon a land so remote as Nova Albion.⁷

For the rest of Drake’s stay relations between the dusky Miwok and the barely lighter, weather-worn seamen remained good, and when the Hind was finally readied for sea the Indians exhibited great distress. Leaving the Spanish frigate behind in the bay, Drake slipped out on 23 July, saluted by the forlorn natives who ran to the hill-tops to keep the ship in sight and kindled fires in what seemed to the English a strange form of final obeisance. Drake had plenty of water and wood, but he was short of food, and the following day he called at one of the Farallon Islands, south-west of Drake’s Bay, and obtained birds and sea lions as provisions.

His next job was no light feat – the crossing of the great Pacific Ocean – but here the charts and sailing directions he had pilfered from Tello’s ship proved invaluable, because they pointed out to him his best course and gave him some understanding of the distance involved, suggesting a longer passage than was indicated on any map he had brought with him. The real distance was greater still, but at least Drake was stocked for a long haul, and escaped the privations that had struck down Magellan’s men. Equipped thus, the Hind carved her snowy wake south-westerly and then, a little north of the line, westwards as Drake took advantage of the northern trades and avoided the difficult currents of the Equator.

The English were sixty-eight days out of sight of land, long, monotonous days beneath the sun, with little more than the groan of the timbers, the creak of the rigging and the sounds of the ocean for company. But on 30 September they fell in with an island about 8° or 9° north, probably one of the Carolinian Archipelago, and possibly Palau, in which case Drake would have been its European discoverer.⁸ Multitudes of Micronesians in dugout canoes swarmed out to receive them, and at first it looked as if friendly trading would be the order of the day. However, the natives soon began helping themselves freely to the sailors’ possessions, and squabbling among themselves over whatever they acquired. The English tried to defuse the situation by refusing to trade further, but it got uglier, and the angry islanders began to bombard the Hind with darts and stones they ferried out in their canoes. Drake directed a gun to be fired as a warning, and frightened one group of natives away, but others were soon worrying the ship and he reluctantly administered a severer lesson. His artillery shot tore through the fragile canoes, mangling craft and bodies, and scattering the survivors in terror. Drake was not proud of his action, and the narrative he later had prepared carried only a veiled reference to the slaughter of the natives, but John Drake would tell the Spaniards that twenty of the islanders were killed. It was a bitter incident, and using the name Magellan had applied to the Ladrones, the English called their landfall ‘the island of thieves’.

Drake next reached Mindanao, in the Philippines, and then at last passed out of the vast South Seas, southwards into the Celebes and towards the Moluccas. The Moluccas! How many Englishmen had dreamed of reaching these legendary regions, the rich spice islands, and of some northern passage that might unlock the way to them? What would Chancellor and Dee, Lok and Frobisher, Gilbert and Grenville have given to have been with Drake at that moment? The sense of occasion cannot have escaped the theatrical little commander of the Hind as he reached the frontier between the sea empires of Spain and Portugal.

Yet there was much to trouble him. Only fifty years before Spain had surrendered her claims to the Moluccas, which her sailors had reached by sailing west, to the Crown of Portugal, and now the Portuguese were entrenched in the islands, filtering eastwards from the Indian Ocean. Drake could count upon their resentment at the appearance of an English ship, and he had little knowledge of how many of the native peoples would welcome him, if any. Not only that, but his Spanish maps were now useless, and the other charts at his disposal did little justice to the elaborate maze of islands that spotted the seas in which the Hind now sailed. Drake was excited, proud that his ship was cutting the steamy seas of the Indian Archipelago that had inspired so much interest at home, hopeful that he might yet meet Winter or Thomas whom he had bade meet him there if they missed Peru, and fearful that after so much travail his expedition could still come to grief. Picking up two native fishermen who agreed to help him, he anxiously threaded his way through the Siau Passage and into the Molucca Sea.

Drake was in luck. He found the politics of the Moluccas entirely in his favour. The bulk of the rich clove trade was in the hands of the Sultan of Ternate, named Babu, and the sultan had no love for the Portuguese, who had killed his father. Indeed, Babu was desperately seeking to keep the Portuguese out of his islands of Ternate, Motir and Maquiam, and to dislodge them from Tidore, which alone rivalled Ternate in fame and opulence. For their part, the Portuguese were preparing to bring the maverick sultan to heel. Consequently, the arrival of a new power was important. Babu was not slow to understand that the English could serve his war against the Portuguese as well as provide him with an alternative European outlet for the cloves his islands produced. Thus, as Drake approached Ternate, the most northerly of the Moluccas, searching for victuals and water, he was contacted by an emissary from the sultan inviting him to the port of Talangam on Ternate, where an old Portuguese castle offered a home for the court of Babu. He was assured of a good welcome, and responded as munificently by sending a velvet cloak to the sultan.

The ostentation that awaited the Hind at Talangam immediately betokened the great wealth that flowed from the spice islands. Three galleys, each propelled by eighty oarsmen, stood out to greet the English, their decks full of soldiers armed with lances and bows and arrows, and sporting a piece of artillery seized at some time or another from the Portuguese. Encircling the seaworn ship in an impressive ceremony, the galleys eventually towed Drake towards the best anchorage, and as they did so the vessel of Babu himself appeared. The English commander was not going to be outdone. He had the sultan saluted with artillery and small-arms fire, and broke out his musicians to entertain him. In his best finery, Drake must have struck an odd contrast with the visitor. The Englishman was fairly short, but burly; Babu, tall, well built and imperious. Drake’s European outfit seemed almost prosaic beside the sultan’s. On one appearance his waist was girded with ‘all cloth of gold, and that very rich.’ Part of his legs were bare, but he wore red leather shoes, and precious stones and gold ornaments festooned his person; there were large gold rings on his headgear, a gold chain around his neck, a diamond, emerald, ruby and turquoise on the fingers of one hand and a turquoise and several diamonds on the other. Can we doubt but that Drake had some of that dazzling treasure from Peru brought up to demonstrate that he was no less magnificent a figure, although but a humble servant of his queen?⁹

The sultan allowed his vessel to be hitched to the Golden Hind and drawn into port by the galleys, and before he departed he promised Drake that the English would be supplied with all they required. And he was true to his word, for sugar cane, fruit, hens, rice, sago and clothing were brought aboard. More than that, Drake was able to get a trade agreement. According to a Spanish report of his activities,

Captain Francis went to the fortress of Ternate, where he was well received and provided with certain supplies. The King of Ternate soon opened negotiations with him, saying that he was not a friend of the Portuguese but an independent king, and that as Captain Francis had said that he was a vassal of the Queen of England, if the Queen desired to favor and help him to expel the Portuguese from that region, he would concede to her the trade in cloves, which up to that time the Portuguese had had. Captain Francis, on the part of the Queen of England, promised that within two years he would decorate that sea with ships for whatever purpose might be necessary. The King asked a pledge that he would as a gentleman comply with the word he had given in the name of the Queen of England, and Captain Francis gave him a gold ring set with a precious stone, a coat of mail, and a very fine helmet. The King gave Captain Francis other presents, but I could not make out what they were.¹⁰

Perhaps the agreement was only a verbal one, but it was nonetheless one that both parties took seriously. Drake loaded six tons of valuable cloves upon his ship, while as late as 1605 Babu’s son wrote to James I of England referring to a ring his father had sent Queen Elizabeth via Drake and explaining that Babu had long expected Drake to return with a force of ships. The islanders were by then anxious to preserve their relations with England, because Spain, which inherited Portugal’s eastern empire in 1580, had within two years launched an offensive against Babu, and by 1605 the final conquest of Ternate was only a year away.¹¹

After leaving Ternate Drake wanted another peaceful anchorage to prepare his ship for her voyage through the Indian Archipelago and into the Indian Ocean. He found it in the Banggai Archipelago, somewhere off the north-eastern coast of Celebes, on a small and uninhabited island, but one wooded and watered, and commanding all the necessities of life. He sailed again on 12 December, 1579, leaving behind three Negroes, including one named Maria, who had been brought from Guatulco and had conceived a child aboard the ship. The so-called ‘anonymous narrative’ of the voyage complains that poor Maria was ‘set on a small island to take her adventure’ in the disapproving tone so characteristic of the account, but John Drake described the incident without condemnation. He said that the blacks were left to form a colony, with rice, seeds, and fire-making equipment. The island had been pleasing, and it is possible the Negroes elected to remain there. Harder judgements have charged Drake with dumping them to save victuals, but this would not only have been out of character, it would have made little sense. If Drake had wanted to spare food he would perhaps have left the blacks at Nova Albion, and not brought them across the Pacific at all. Diego, Drake’s Negro friend, was still aboard, and the Negroes left at ‘Crab Island’, as the English called it, represented only a small proportion of the burden on victuals. Drake seems to have borne no ill will towards the Negroes he left behind, and renamed the island Isle Francisca in honour of one of them. Possibly he even believed he had served them, removing them from a life of servitude with the Spaniards and leaving them to make their own lives free from molestation.¹²

Whatever, Drake now sailed westwards, planning to pass around Celebes into the Celebes Sea and Makassar Strait. Ahead the greatest peril of the entire voyage lay quietly waiting for him. It was submerged beneath the warm green seas that washed the east coast of Celebes, its ragged crest only seven feet below the surface at low water: a long, steep-sided, sinuous reef. Nothing was more dreaded by sailors, nothing more terrifying than the destruction of those few planks of wood that protected them from the sea-bed. Drake had little knowledge of an area for which no reliable maps existed in any language, and was ignorant of how far to the south-east Celebes extended. Also, the prevailing north-east wind drove the Golden Hind south, instead of west, and the English found themselves in the maze of islands, shoals and finger-like peninsulas of the east coast of Celebes, confronting hazards more intricate than any yet encountered – ‘inasmuch that in all our passages from England hitherto, we had never more care to keep ourselves afloat.’ With ‘extraordinary care and circumspection’ Drake beat back and forth.¹³ At one point, with the wind in their favour, the English believed that only open water lay ahead, and the ship was put under full sail, but as the men began the first night watch, about eight o’clock on the evening of 9 January, the Hind drove with a terrific shock upon the reef. Her fragile, life-saving timbers grounded perilously upon the rock.

No sooner had the frightened sailors recovered from the impact, than they were thrown to starboard as the ship, caught on her port bow, heeled over at an alarming angle. It seems that if a strong wind had not been blowing from the land, about 18 miles away, and counteracted the list the ship might have lost all semblance of being upright. But that wind also pressed the Hind more firmly aground, grinding her against the reef, and trapping her upon it. In the darkness the fears of the men multiplied. There was not so much panic as a deep despair.

The reef itself has not been identified. The World Encompassed put it at almost 2° south. Julian Corbett, Drake’s Victorian biographer, identified it as the Mulapatia Reef, south of Peleng Island. An American scholar, Henry Wagner, agreed, pointing out that the context of the incident suggested that it took place near Tomori Bay. More recently, Vesuvius Reef or its neighbouring shoal have been mentioned. It made little difference to the sixty or so men aboard the Golden Hind, for at a stroke all the prospects of the voyage, even of survival itself, seemed to have been vanquished. They knelt in prayer, calling for their deliverance – a response typical of Drake – and then set to work on the pumps, trying to reduce the water in the hold so that the damage could be inspected more closely. Now came the first thread of hope. The timbers of the ship were found on the whole to have withstood the collision, and to be capable of repair, if the Hind could be worked from the reef without further damage.

Drake had a small boat lowered and ran an anchor to it. Then he was rowed out to the open water to starboard. He began sounding for ground in which he could wedge the anchor, because he might then have the men haul upon the cable and draw the ship towards the deeper water. But there was no ground. The reef must have risen sharply from a great depth, for even a boat’s length from the ship Drake’s line sounded over 300 fathoms and found no bottom. It was a dark situation indeed. If the Hind could not be brought off, she would surely break up, and what then? The nearest land was 18 miles away. There was one small boat, and it could accommodate only a third of the crew.

Throughout the rest of the night the vessel lay desperately fast, and at daylight Drake resumed his soundings with no better success. Fletcher once more led the men in prayers and gave them the sacrament. Then attempts were made to lighten the ship so that she could ride higher in the water, and three tons of cloves, victuals, ammunition, and two pieces of artillery were thrown overboard, but with no obvious result.¹⁴ It seemed hopeless. Then, about four o’clock in the afternoon of 10 January, the wind suddenly slackened and shifted. It veered to the opposite direction, and pushed the Hind clumsily towards the deep water. She slid from the rock, lurched crazily upright, and then wallowed deliriously in the open sea.

This perilous episode had a singularly absurd epilogue that still invites explanation. Apparently Drake had taken exception to some remarks passed by Francis Fletcher during the crisis. He had the parson chained to a hatch in the forecastle of the ship, and excommunicated him. Sitting cross-legged upon a chest, the General imperiously addressed the miserable cleric in front of the assembled company: ‘Francis Fletcher, I do here excommunicate thee out of the Church of God, and from all the benefits and graces thereof, and I denounce thee to the Devil and his angels.’ About the parson’s arm was affixed a notice, labelling him ‘Francis Fletcher, ye falsest knave that liveth’.¹⁵

We do not know why Fletcher aroused so malignant a sense of humour in Francis Drake, but we can guess. Fletcher was apt to ascribe every calamity to the divine judgement of God. When, for example, the Marigold had foundered and Edward Bright, who had testified against Doughty, had drowned, Fletcher could not resist annotating his script with the observation that it was ‘God’s judgement against a false witness.’¹⁶ It is not unlikely that he had similarly proclaimed the perils of the reef as God’s revenge upon Drake for the execution of Doughty. If that was so, the General gave him his answer.

Drake’s movements after his escape from the reef are difficult to interpret. It may be that he was driven eastwards into the Banda Seas by adverse winds, or that he decided to steer towards the Indian Ocean, south of Java rather than north of it so that he might avoid the Malacca Strait, which was controlled by the Portuguese. He refitted and replenished his provisions at an island that may have been Damma or Roma, and then slipped between the northern coast of Timor and various islands into the Samu Sea, and then westwards along the south coast of Java. Although the Portuguese were familiar with Java’s northern coastline, and suspected that it was an island, Drake was the first European to navigate its southern shores and to prove to the western powers that Java was not part of the continent of Terra Australis.

Tjilatjap, in Java, proved to be a crucial haven for Drake, for the water and supplies he embarked there had to last for a long time. The Golden Hind sailed on 26 March, forging across the Indian Ocean. She came within sight of the African coast on 21 May and cruised around the Cape of Good Hope in June, searching anxiously for a further source of fresh water. If it had not been for the rain collected in casks set upon the deck the company would have been in difficulties, and when a landfall was made at Sierra Leone the supply was down to less than half a pint to every three persons. Surprisingly, the narratives are silent upon this extraordinary phase of Drake’s voyage, a run of 9,700 miles from Java to Sierra Leone without a base or a reliable map, but experienced seamen marked it as among his finest achievements, and as late as the end of the eighteenth century reckoned it ‘a thing hardly to be credited, and which was never performed by any mariner before his time or since.’¹⁷

There were sights for them in Sierra Leone, sights some Englishmen had never seen, such as elephants or the famous ‘oyster tree’ so beloved of contemporary travellers’ tales. More important, water was at last taken aboard, as well as lemons and other fruit, all very necessary in the fight against scurvy, symptoms of which had probably begun to appear after so strenuous a trip. Home was now not far away, and everyone must have dreamed of it, of meetings with loved ones, of the fresh green hills of Devon, and of days free of the toil and danger with which they had lived for almost three long years.

But would reward and praise be waiting for them when they returned? That was what nagged at Drake as the Hind cut breezily through waters increasingly familiar to him. He had been away so long. He had plundered the King of Spain and the hold of his ship was full of treasure. He had set at naught the pretended monopolies of the Iberian powers. And he had done it on the basis of a private understanding with a spirited queen who might pot even now be alive. What if the Catholic, Mary, the Queen of Scots, had succeeded to the throne? The thought made Francis Drake feel that his head sat loosely on his shoulders.

On 26 September, 1580, some fishermen at work with their nets in the English Channel saw a small, heavily laden ship picking her way towards the entrance to Plymouth Sound. As they passed her, a man aboard hailed the fishermen and asked a strange question. Was the queen alive? She was, and in good health, but a plague was raging in Plymouth itself. Then the fishermen watched as the Golden Hind sailed home.

¹ Juan Solano to the Audiencia of Guatemala, 29 March, 1579, Nuttall, ed., New Light on Drake, 111–14.

² In discussing the latitude Drake reached in the north Pacific weight has sometimes been given to the account published in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589), according to which the English found the air cold at 42° on 5 June, ‘and the further we went, the more the cold increased upon us.’ This narrative not only leaves unclear how far north Drake sailed, but cannot probably rank as a primary source. It was put together from Cooke’s account, ‘the anonymous narrative’, and either Fletcher’s narrative or an early draft of The World Encompassed. We do not know when the last was written. Quinn, ‘Early Accounts of the Famous Voyage’, in Thrower, ed., Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage, 33–48, argues that Hakluyt used a version of The World Encompassed, which Quinn believes was written by Philip Nichols from Cliffe’s narrative and the notes of Francis Fletcher. If this is correct, the Hakluyt story of Drake’s voyage north was probably a carelessly transcribed derivation of The World Encompassed, and has no independent value. The World Encompassed states that Drake reached 42° on 3 June; that during the following night the weather became cold; that the Hind ran towards shore on 5 June in latitude 48°; and that he then turned south. See also the diary of Richard Madox, 13, 26–7 October, 1582, Donno, ed., An Elizabethan in 1582, 208–9, 215.

³ The principal claims have been made for Drake’s Bay (George Davidson and the Drake Navigator’s Guild) and San Francisco Bay (John W. Robertson and R. H. Power). For an ingenious attempt to locate the exact site of Drake’s anchorage in a small cove just inside Drake’s Estero (Drake’s Bay) and a reconstruction of the visit based upon that assumption, see Aker, Report of Findings Relating to Identification of Sir Francis Drake’s Encampment. The whole controversy, with a judicious evaluation of competing claims and a comprehensive bibliography, is given by Hanna, Lost Harbor.

⁵ Heizer, Elizabethan California, reviews the events of Drake’s visit and reprints his two important papers analysing the English accounts in the light of the language and culture of the Miwok.

⁷ That Drake’s behaviour at Nova Albion did not reflect a consistent view of native rights is shown by his claim to the Elizabeth Islands at Tierra del Fuego, although they were inhabited by Indians with whom he had little contact.

⁸ For a fascinating, comprehensive and rigorous identification of Drake’s ‘Island of thieves’ see Lessa, Drake’s Island of Thieves. The same author’s ‘Drake in the South Seas’, in Thrower, 60–77, complements the longer study.

¹⁰ Report of Dueñas, 1582, in Wagner, Sir Francis Drake’s Voyage Around the World, 180. In 1580 Spain annexed the kingdom of Portugal, and the Spanish governor of the Philippines sent Dueñas to the Moluccas in 1581. He gathered information there about Drake’s activities.

¹¹ Legend speaks of a disagreement between Drake and Babu. It is true that the sultan did not honour a promise to revisit the Golden Hind, and equally that Drake avoided a personal appearance at Babu’s court for fear of treachery. Nor did the English remain at Ternate more than a few days. But the story that Babu wanted to kill Drake was introduced by Antonio de Herrera’s Historia General de Mundo (1606) and elaborated by Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola’s Conquista de las Islas Malucas (1609), who added that the sultan became annoyed because the English traded without his permission and was appeased by presents sent by Drake. Readers are cautloned about accepting information which appears so long after the event as this, and it should be noted that Herrera’s only valid source on Drake’s visit to Ternate seems to have been the depositions of John Drake, who makes no mention of the quarrel. Argensola lifted most of his material from Herrera. Neither historian merits serious attention on this point.

¹² The anonymous narrative, Vaux, 178–86, covers the voyage from the passage of the Magellan Strait, and was possibly written after Drake’s return to England by a participant. Depositions of John Drake, 24 March, 1584, 8–10 January, 1587, Eliott-Drake, Family and Heirs of Sir Francis Drake, 2: 343–401. There is not enough information about Maria to establish why she and the other two Negroes were left at ‘Crab Island’.

¹⁴ I have followed the anonymous narrative. John Drake’s first deposition says that 8 pieces of artillery, 10 tons of cloves, 5 tons of ginger and pimento, and 2 pipes of flour were jettisoned. Argensola reported that the Sultan of Ternate had a heavy bronze gun salvaged from the bottom of the sea and mounted before his palace. It is not likely that the sultan learned of Drake’s disaster, less that he was able to locate the exact scene and salvage the gun. Argensola is not an authority for this or anything else respecting Drake. Interestingly, Dueñas, who is an authority (although a poor one, since his material comes no more than second-hand) asserts that Babu displayed two of Drake’s guns, one of them bronze, that were recovered from Colo Island. Colo Island was probably ‘Crab Island’, and although no English account refers to Drake leaving artillery there it is conceivable that he did so.

¹⁵ Memoranda relating to the voyage in Harleian MSS, reprinted in Vaux, 176–7.

¹⁶ Fletcher in Penzer, ed., The World Encompassed, 133–4. Fletcher, it should be noted, had himself signed some of the evidence against Doughty.

¹⁷ William Anderson, The Whole of Captain Cook’s Voyages (1784), quoted in Robinson, ‘A Forgotten Life of Sir Francis Drake’, 17.