Sir Francis Drake

Ulysses with his navy great

In ten years’ space great valour won;

Yet all his time did no such feat

As Drake within one year hath done.

Both Turk and Pope and all our foes

Do dread this Drake where’er he goes.

DRAKE’S NAME WAS ringing throughout Europe, and rumours cascaded from dispatches and newsletters in speedy succession. Many dealt only in the marvellous, and credited the most extravagant fictions, while their numerous contradictions fed uncertainty and generated excitement from England to Italy. He had liberated 12,000 slaves and inspired a black rebellion in Hispaniola by one account, and been attacked by the Negroes in another. He passed through the seas like a conqueror, leaving gutted cities and ravaged ships in his wake, said some; he had met disaster in the Canaries and his fleet was decimated by disease, countered others. There were reports that he had been defeated at Havana, or indeed achieved nothing at all; and others that not an important town in the West Indies had escaped destruction and ransack, and that he had gathered great wealth. It was said that the flagship of the Peruvian flota had been taken, and twenty-six ships and 300,000 ducats off the coast of Portugal. The truth was that no one in Europe knew. Everywhere there was a state of expectancy and apprehension. Ailing as he was, Philip summoned Santa Cruz to the Escorial for his counsel. And in the Vatican the Pope reflected upon this bold English heretic. ‘God only knows what he may succeed in doing!’ he protested.¹

The fall of Santo Domingo sent a shockwave through the Caribbean, creating a general state of confusion and fear. Men were mustered and defences inspected, even in Santa Fé de Bogatá the capital of New Granada (Colombia), where it was believed that Drake might march into the interior. However, it was Cartagena, the principal city on the Spanish Main, that he was after. An important port used by both the outward- and homeward-bound flotas, it was smaller than Santo Domingo, but better defended. Moreover, before Drake’s arrival it had received warnings of danger, first from Seville and then more directly from Santo Domingo, which advised the city that the English were on their way. There was no question of Sir Francis surprising the Spaniards here. They had evacuated their non-combatants from the city, removed everything portable that was valuable, and improved their defences. Men had been raised from Cartagena, Tolu and Mompox, pikes had been renewed and arquebuses repaired. The city itself was not easy of access. It rested on the coast, but there were few places nearby suitable for disembarking soldiers, and frequent north-easterly winds made it difficult for ships to maintain a position off shore for any length of time. The land to the east of the city was swampy, and the Spaniards had made some defences there. The obvious place from which to launch an attack was the harbour, a mile or more west of the city, for it presented a safe haven for the fleet and gave direct access to the town, and it was there that Drake headed on the afternoon of 9 February, 1586. To reach it the fleet sailed impudently past the city, with the governor and his forces drawn up on the beach as spectators to its progress, and through the Boca Grande passage which led into the outer of two harbours that served the town. Drake anchored, unable to get closer. The Boquerón Channel that linked the outer and inner harbours had been sealed by a strong chain, and was defended by a stone fort, and when Sir Francis later sent Frobisher to tease the garrison with a diversionary attack his ships were forced to retire. Unlike Santiago and Santo Domingo, this was going to be a battle only the army could win.

For opposition, Governor Don Pedro Fernandez de Busto had between 1,500 and 2,000 men, of whom some 600, half of them slaves, were aboard two fighting galleys, the Santiago (Captain Juan de Castaneda) and the Ocasión (Captain Martin Gonzales), moored in the inner harbour. Ashore, he had upwards of 1,000 more defenders, consisting of about 600 Spaniards and free blacks; including 50 horse under Captain Francisco de Carvajal, and perhaps 400 Indian levies, armed with bows and poisoned arrows. It was by no means a contemptible number, but a weak force nonetheless, relying upon a civilian militia with little stomach for fighting. The men were well armed, and had recently completed drill, but they continued to perform manoeuvres badly. In this they were not dissimilar to the English, and Captain Alonso Bravo, whose company failed to set up firing lines in the actual battle, believed that Drake’s men were clumsier than his own. The crucial difference was morale. The fate of Santo Domingo had chilled the Spaniards, and although the governor and his military adviser, Pedro Vique y Manrique, had mustered them for inspiring exhortations, they could instil no spirit into them. When the fighting started the English were prepared to press the attack; their adversaries were not.²

The other decisive problem bedevilling the Spanish defence was its dispersed nature. The governor had to cover numerous points against which an attack might be made. Fifty of his men were holding the fort at the Boquerón Channel. Others were guarding Hanged Man’s Swamp, to the east of the city, and San Francisco Bridge, which linked Cartagena with its hinterland to the south-east.³ And the largest single force was waiting grimly at the Caleta, the narrows of a neck of land that extended westwards and formed an arm that enclosed the lagoon from which the two harbours were made. To cover all the options, therefore, the Spaniards were divided between several places too far apart to provide mutual support. Drake, on the other hand, could concentrate the bulk of his men into a single thrust.

Cartagena’s material, defences, like those of Santo Domingo, successfully deterred the ordinary freebooter, but were scarcely an obstacle to Drake. For this the governor bore some responsibility. Old, resistant to advice, and preferring chess to fighting, De Busto’s twelve years in office had failed to impress upon him the importance of defence. He had replaced a few of the city’s iron guns with bronze ones, and secured a few more, but the most essential fortifications had been neglected. The only strongpoint was the eight-gun fort overlooking the Boquerón Channel. There were no works on the point of the land encircling the harbour, and the Caleta was walled only for part of its width. Word of Drake’s approach had driven the Spaniards to throw up batteries and entrenchments in the streets leading to the waterfront, but the only substantial recent improvement in defence had been the supply of the Santiago and Ocasión galleys in 1578, and even these were now of doubtful utility. With another oared vessel, the Napolitana, and a tender, the Santa Clara, they lay sealed inside the inner harbour, defended by the fort and the chain across the Boquerón Channel, totally incapable of contesting a fleet such as Drake’s.

During the night of 9–10 February Sir Francis landed Carleill with nearly 1,000 men on the point and left them to march upon the Caleta while the fleet made as impressive a display as it could. As the soldiers made their way through the darkness they found that the enemy Indians had driven poisoned stakes into the path, and had to bypass them by occasionally wading through the shallows by the beach. Ahead was the Caleta, a neck of land only some 150 paces across from the harbour in the south to the sea on the north side. Here, behind a wall with an outer ditch, was the principal Spanish force with a four-gun battery, but the defences were flawed because of an incredible thirty-yard gap in the wall, from its northern extremity to the sea-side. True, it had been plugged by a crude barricade of wine butts filled with sand, but it was on the wrong side of the Caleta to be effectively supported by fire from the ten guns of the galleys in the inner harbour.

About three hundred Spaniards and two hundred Indians, dubiously supervised by the governor, manned the wall at the Caleta. Some of them ventured out to try to ambush the advancing army, but when they gauged its size they soon scuttled back, protesting that they would not commit suicide. It was about an hour before dawn, on the blackest of nights, that Carleill’s column eventually reached the Caleta, stealthily moving forward in the darkness like an enormous caterpillar. Then someone struck a match and the light was seen from one of the Spanish galleys resting close by. As the English emerged from thickets on the beach they were greeted by a burst of artillery and small-arms fire, first from the galleys and then from the wall, and in the ensuing uproar a brief exhilaration enthused the Spaniards. ‘Come on, heretic dogs!’ called one.⁴ But the galleys were firing too high, and Carleill’s attack was made on the other side of the Caleta, where he threw his men against the flimsy wine-butt barricade with a cry of ‘God and St George!’ So impetuous was the assault that the Spaniards at the wall had no time to recharge their arquebuses. There was a brief clash of pikes, and then the defenders broke, running pell-mell towards the city with the English on their heels. A few examples of Castilian courage occurred. Captain Alonso Bravo, one of three captains of infantry, was taken prisoner after being wounded six times, while a standard bearer stood his ground until Carleill himself cut him down. Most simply followed the example of their governor, and ran for their lives.

As Spaniard and Englishman tumbled into the city together, the hastily improvised redoubts guarding the streets were abandoned in panic. A few Indian bowmen inflicted casualties upon the invaders by firing poisoned arrows from houses, and a detachment of defenders under Captain Martin Polo briefly rallied at San Francisco Bridge, but neither was able to retard Carleill’s progress, and the town was soon in his possession. In the harbour the position of the galleys was now hopeless, for they were trapped behind a chain that had been designed to protect them. Captain Gonzalez aboard the Ocasión made a run for it, promising his galley slaves reduced sentences of servitude if they would take him out to sea. His vessel did reach the chain, but there it had to wait while someone went to the Santiago to fetch a key to unlock it. Unfortunately, Captain Castaneda had problems of his own. Momentarily inspired by Polo’s stand at the bridge, he tried to land men to reinforce him, but as the hopelessness of further resistance became apparent, the disembarked crew simply scattered into the countryside. The ship was then run aground near the fort and abandoned. Fear now spread to the trapped Ocasión, and her men were soon out of control, despite the captain who tried to reduce them to order with a sword in hand. In the confusion a powder barrel was ignited and the ship was enveloped in flames. Some of the sailors plunged into the water, while others piled into an overloaded skiff to pull for the shore, beating the swimmers away from the boat with their oars. Less lucky, three or four galley slaves burned to death. As night fell the remains of both galleys lay aground and deserted, and Vique sent detachments to complete their destruction so that Drake could not capture them. The English did not, however, go entirely empty-handed, seizing the Napolitana, Santa Clara, and a few other vessels they cornered in the harbour.

It took another day to force the Spaniards in the fort at the Boquerón Channel to evacuate their position, and on 11 February Drake was master of Cartagena, a city he had merely taunted in his early raids along the Main. He had taken sixty or more brass ordnance, and used them to entrench his men in the town, while he took for his own headquarters the house of his prisoner, Alonso Bravo, reputed the best residence in the area. Reflecting upon the cost of his victory, he cannot have been dissatisfied. Twenty-eight of his men had been killed and others wounded. The Spanish losses may have been even lighter, for not more than nine Spaniards died in the fighting. A few galley slaves perished in the flames of the Ocasión, and the Indians probably sustained casualties, but it is doubtful that in all the enemy losses were higher than Drake’s. About ten Spaniards were taken prisoner.

With Alonso Bravo reluctantly serving as host, Sir Francis now held court, attending to the details of the occupation. Sickness had reappeared in the fleet, and he ordered wells to be dug in a search for clean water. To protect the numerous captives of the Spanish whom he released Drake issued ‘a general commandment given for the well usage of … Frenchmen, Turks and Negroes’, and he recruited several into his forces.⁵ A hundred Turks accompanied the fleet back to England, where the government sent them home by the Levant Company, and used them as a basis for a rapprochement with the Ottoman Porte. There was also the crucial matter of plunder. Although the Spaniards had stripped the city of valuables, Drake was bargaining upon raising a respectable ransom.

The process began with individuals, such as Alonso Bravo, himself a wealthy city burgher. From him Sir Francis wanted 5,000 ducats covering his release and the preservation of his house and neighbourhood. Between these two men, of conflicting nationality and creed, a rough understanding developed. The Spaniard accepted the misfortunes of war, and knew that Drake must have his money, but he saw much sympathy in the English commander. Bravo’s wife, Elvira, who had left Cartagena before the battle, was gravely ill, and Drake granted him leave to visit her, first for a day, and later for longer as the woman’s condition deteriorated. With the integrity of the best Spanish gentleman, Bravo always returned, as good as his word. When Elvira died, Bravo asked permission to bury her in a Franciscan priory then held by the English, south of the town. Perhaps Sir Francis was remembering Mary, sleeping in that Plymouth churchyard. Anyway, he understood. The funeral took place according to the Spanish custom. Drake attended, and had his men drawn up; flags were reversed; drums muffled; and a volley fired in honour of a soldier’s wife. Sir Francis had wanted 3,000 ducats from the Spaniards to save the priory from destruction, but he assured Bravo that he would not desecrate Elvira’s resting place, and reduced the demand to a nominal 600 ducats.

Negotiations for the city’s ransom formally opened on 15 February. The governor and a bishop, Fray Don Juan de Montalvo, appeared at Drake’s insistence, but Cartagena was generally represented by others, including the lieutenant-governor, Diego Daca, and a merchant named Tristan de Oribe Salazar. Sir Francis fired off a demand for upwards of 400,000 ducats, and the Spaniards countered by offering a mere sixteenth of that amount. As talks faltered, the English resorted to the pressure that had wrung a settlement from Santo Domingo, and Drake set his men to burn parts of the city. After 248 houses (two-thirds of them masonry and tile, and the rest thatch and palmboard) had been destroyed a ransom of 107,000 ducats in bullion was agreed early in March, and for several days heavily laden mule-trains tramped to Captain Bravo’s house to discharge the debt. The total sum obtained is unknown. Drake’s haul for Bravo, the city, the priory, and a small estate on an island totalled 113,000 ducats’ worth, and apparently gold ducats too, equal to up to £48,000 in English money. Yet there were other payments, for Drake dealt with various individuals for their houses and possessions, and some of the prize ships were redeemed by their owners. He refused to treat for the artillery, which was carried off, and he destroyed the fort. The money Drake had taken from Santo Domingo and Cartagena was thus raised to over £50,000, but it was still short of his rosy predictions.⁶

In treating with his enemies, Drake was as courteous, affable and hospitable as usual. His conversation was quick-witted, but full of the bravado so many found irritating, and when he spoke of Philip and the Pope he grew angry and bitter, sparing none of the feelings of the Spaniards about him. The Pope was a dissolute tyrant, and what right had Philip to call Drake a pirate when he himself oppressed so many in Europe and America? But he had no fear of this king, he boasted. He would assemble some pinnaces and ascend the Chagres to destroy Panama, and as for a Spanish fleet that was reportedly being sent after him, he would rather fight it than not. He was not afraid of it.

Behind the façade, Drake was nevertheless far from confident. He was probably depressed by the loss of one of his closest friends, Captain Tom Moone of the Francis, the same who had followed him in jungles in Darien and around the world. One day two Spanish barks had innocently entered the harbour, and Tom manned a pinnace with John Varney of the George and a few sailors. With two other English boats, they pursued the barks into the shallows of a small island, where one ran aground and its crew leaped over the side to splash ashore. There was no resistance as the first pinnace, under John Grant of the Tiger, came alongside and her men boarded the prize to rummage around. When Moone and Varney arrived Grant refused to allow them aboard, perhaps wishing to reserve the credit for the capture to himself. While Moone and Varney stood in their boat remonstrating with Grant a shot was fired ashore. Some Spaniards were seen lurking in the undergrowth, and Varney raised his piece to reply, bidding Moone hold a shield before him as he fired. Then both suddenly received a volley from the island. Varney and Moone fell, each, as it turned out, fatally wounded, Varney in the head and Moone in the right thigh, and four or five other men were injured. Bold John Grant and his comrades now bolted, tumbling into their pinnace and pushing away to safety, and it was left to Captain Fenner, who came up in a third pinnace, to try to flush the Spaniards out by firing into the thickets. Moone lingered a few days and died. His death must have been keenly felt by Drake, for this Plymouth man had not only been one of his oldest shipmates, but a man of unequivocal loyalty. The admiral buried his old comrade in the cathedral of Cartagena, with all the captains in attendance and a volley of shot to salute the passing of one of the most courageous of the Elizabethans.

There was far worse, for a sickness had returned to the fleet, perhaps a re-emergence of the earlier pestilence or possibly dysentery. During the two months that Drake occupied Cartagena it claimed one hundred deaths, among them that of Captain George Fortescue of the Bark Bonner. On 27 February the land captains had a meeting to consider whether Cartagena might be held as a permanent English base in the Caribbean. It was desirable, for such a colony would facilitate the disruption of Philip’s bullion route, and it might be done, they thought, if provisions were maintained. However, they did not like the idea. Only seven hundred men were fit for service, and disease was still at work. Besides, the voyage had not provided the dividends anticipated, and the force was probably now too reduced to attempt Panama or Havana, especially with a Spanish fleet supposedly on its way.⁷ The land captains declared that they would follow Drake whatever he decided, but they suggested he go home. Drake was certainly behind schedule, and was probably no less alarmed about the distemper torturing the expedition than were his officers. He would certainly have been concerned about the dissatisfaction among his men, many of them adventurers who had been in it for the rewards. In view of the problems of maintaining and victualling a healthy force in the area in the face of possible Spanish retaliation, Drake’s decision to follow the recommendations of his officers was probably sensible. After a false start he got away from Cartagena in the middle of April and headed for England.

Cartagena was no longer the strongpoint of the Main. It had not a gun to defend itself, and the damage Drake had dealt it was assessed at 400,000 ducats. In wiping eggs from innumerable faces, the citizens had to explain why their city had fallen so easily. Everyone blamed somebody else. Martin Gonzales was explaining the abandonment of his galley, the Ocasión. Don Pedro Vique y Manrique, commander of the galleys, was explaining why he had not even been aboard them. Captain Pedro Mexia Mirabel had reasons for his evacuation of the fort, and the treasurer and accountant was looking for reasons to excuse his payment of the city’s ransom from Crown funds. The lieutenant-governor exonerated himself for the failure of his men to defend an important bridge and the Franciscan priory, One by one, in depositions and letters, they bailed themselves out by sniping at others, and particularly at the governor, who at least had the wit to warn his sovereign beforehand that it would be so. Considering his own role in the inept defence of the city, De Busto was indeed remarkably frank in his letter to the Audiencia of Panama: ‘I do not know how to begin to tell your lordship of my misfortune … I can only say that it must be God’s chastisement of my sins and of those of others.’⁸ In that, at least, he had a convincing argument.

At Cuba the English landed to dig wells for fresh water, and the admiral, who never lost the common touch, ‘helped to load, and went into the water to his armpits, fully clothed and shod, carrying barrels and demijohns of water.’⁹ Then the expedition skirted the east coast of Florida, bound to call upon England’s new colony at Roanoke Island, off what is now North Carolina, until on 27 May a Spanish watchtower was observed on shore, marking the proximity of Philip’s oldest town in Florida, St Augustine. Drake regarded it as a threat to Walter Ralegh’s infant settlement, and the next day disembarked with some of his men and marched up-river until he found himself gazing across the stream at the timber fort of San Juan. Inside it Governor Pedro Menéndez Marquez commanded only seventy to eighty effectives, but he fired upon the English and dispersed them temporarily among the sandhills until Drake could bring up some ordnance. That done, the fort was incapable of effective resistance, and in the night the Spaniards stole away, leaving the English to take possession without more opposition than that of a few bullets fired by the rearguard and a brief demonstration launched in favour of the Spaniards by local Indians. Sir Francis discovered that the governor had fled so quickly that he had left behind a strongbox containing £2,000 worth of money that had been sent from the nearby town to the fort for safe-keeping! Daylight also revealed a number of useful artillery pieces that the English greedily purloined.

A short way upstream reposed the town of St Augustine, a diminutive collection of wooden houses sheltering less than three hundred civilians, all of whom had fled before Drake’s men arrived on the 29th. Both town and fort were completely destroyed, including the adjacent orchards and cornfields, but Drake did not harm the Indian village close by, although some warriors had turned out to defend the Spaniards and cost the English a man. Instead he went on his way, north-eastwards, looking for Roanoke, where Ralph Lane commanded the first group of colonists lodged in America under the patent of Walter Ralegh. He did not know exactly where it was, because Richard Grenville, who had shipped the settlers to Roanoke, had not returned to England before Drake had left, but he suspected that it lay about 36° north.

He reached Roanoke on 9 June, and since the anchorage was unable to admit his fleet he had his ships ride outside. Nevertheless, some of the men rowed ashore, and Drake was able to confer with Lane about the progress of the colony. All was not well. Lane’s men were largely soldiers, not artisans and farmers. They were interested in exploring, but lacked the skills and knowledge to form a sustainable community, and to provide for themselves they badgered the natives for food and waited for supplies from home. Understandably, the Indians had begun to resent the colonists, while Richard Grenville, who was supposed to have returned with provisions at Easter, had failed to show up. After listening to Lane’s woeful story, Drake offered him a choice; the settlers, all 105 of them, could return to England with the fleet; or Drake could give them a ship, pinnaces, some seamen and provisions sufficient to help them find a more suitable harbour, or, if unsuccessful, to come home. Lane wanted to persevere, and the admiral readied the Francis with some small boats, food for four months and one hundred men. Unfortunately, the preparations were interrupted by a storm that lasted for three days, and some of the ships, including the Sea Dragon, Talbot, White Lion and the important Francis were driven out to sea and separated. A few made their own way across the Atlantic.

Hastily revising his plans, Drake offered a substitute vessel, the Bark Bonner, and what further provisions he could spare, but Lane and his men had now had enough. They wanted to be taken home. On 18 June the fleet weighed anchor, thus writing an end to yet another English attempt to colonize America. Ironically, within days Grenville at last appeared. He left a few men behind, but none of them survived.¹⁰ Drake himself abandoned a plan to raid Spanish fisheries around Newfoundland because of contrary winds, and made straight for England, reaching Portsmouth on 27 July. He announced his return to Lord Burghley with a typical blend of swagger and piety, praying his voyage would be the foundation of greater deeds. ‘My very good Lord,’ he wrote, ‘there is now a very great gap opened very little to the liking of the King of Spain. God work it all to his glory.’¹¹

Financially the expedition had failed, and there were embarrassing delays in due payments while committees sifted the accounts. Drake got an advance to discharge the men, but as late as September Sir William Winter and others were being asked to investigate complaints from the crews and to authorize necessary remuneration. Nor did that silence the discontent. Drake’s accountant had died on the voyage, and his records were in disarray, so the general audit by a committee under Winter and John Hawkins was protracted. It eventually reckoned the total proceeds at about £65,000, of which £45,000 represented plate, bullion and pearls, a figure that seems to have been rather too low. However, a third went to the crews, and the investors, including the queen, had to be content with an initial dividend of 15 shillings in the pound. Far from providing money to finance Elizabeth’s increasingly expensive foreign policy, the expedition had left its promoters out of pocket. It all worried Sir Francis, because he wanted another voyage to complete the work left undone, and to maximize the return of the investors he refused to claim the not inconsiderable expenses he had sustained in fitting out the fleet. As the commissioners acknowledged, Drake ‘dealeth very liberally and truly with the adventurers, and beareth a very great loss therein.’¹² If he had to work within the framework of private enterprise that the queen and her council insisted must govern naval operations, if he had to turn his voyages to profit, at least he was not the man to put his own gain before the public service.

Nor had the expedition been without other difficulties and costs. Some of them were embedded in the structure of Elizabeth’s navy, like the underfunding that made voyages such as Drake’s dependent upon joint-stock profit seekers and threatened to subordinate strategic to economic goals. Then there had been the problem of the gentlemen, ready to fight at the drop of a hat, but not only unwilling to share with the common seamen the mundane burdens of seafaring but also resentful of being commanded by their social inferiors. Drake had never had any use for such distinctions aboard ship. The sea tested all men equally, irrespective of birth or privilege, and he himself always laboured with his mariners cheerfully. They were his own people. Back in England the issue between Drake and Knollys resurfaced, and it was the talk that Sir Francis would never be allowed to command gentlemen again. The upshot of the affair is not known, although Knollys was placed temporarily under arrest.

Drake’s expedition had also raised another, and even more important problem: the disease that invariably wasted those who adventured into pestilential tropical seas with large numbers of men packed into tiny ships. Here it had curtailed his schedule and ruined many of his prospects, and it would reappear in all the great campaigns that lay ahead. It would take two centuries and more, and the work of Blane, Trotter and other eminent physicians, to find means by which a large navy could keep to the sea and remain healthy. We should not blame Drake too severely for his failure to find answers to the problem in 1586. Indeed, on the whole, Sir Francis had not handled his first large-scale expedition too badly. He had overcome the command and organizational problems, and succeeded in directing the offensive spirit on an ambitious scale.

If the plunder was disappointing the voyage had been successful as an act of war. The capture of Santo Domingo and Cartagena proclaimed to the world how weakly Philip’s American empire was defended, how vulnerable were its principal cities and the treasure flow that depended upon them. The king’s credit, upon which his military campaigns were founded, temporarily collapsed, and he was rumoured to be almost bankrupt. The bank of Seville broke, and that at Venice tottered. The Pope and the dukes of Florence and Savoy refused Philip a loan of 500,000 ducats, and in the Netherlands ‘the most contemplative’ of Parma’s paymasters ‘ponder much over this success of Drake’, and tightened their purses. The man from Devon had dealt his enemy an enormous blow to morale. ‘Truly,’ declared Burghley, ‘Sir Francis Drake is a fearful man to the King of Spain.’¹³

Conversely, throughout Protestant Europe spirits soared. The Spanish complained that ‘every gentleman’ in the English court ‘buildeth a ship or two to send after Sir Francis Drake.’ The predatory and patriotic instincts of Elizabeth’s subjects reached new heights, as the voyage ‘inflamed the whole country to adventure unto the seas in hope of the like good success.’¹⁴ Even more than the circumnavigation, Drake’s West Indian raid was commemorated in literature. Captain Bigges, a participant, wrote the first full-length account of any of Drake’s expeditions in his Summary and True Discourse, while Henry Roberts chided his countrymen for neglecting the subject and compared Drake to David and Alexander in his Most Friendly Farewell. A Spanish poet, a priest of New Granada, Juan de Castellanos, was less fortunate with his six-thousand line ‘Discurso del Francisco Draque’, recounting the sack of Cartagena, for it was held unconducive to his country’s morale and had to wait more than three centuries to find a publisher.¹⁵

There were other consequences of this voyage, more far reaching than the immediate blow to Spanish national prestige. For fifteen years Drake had been advertising Spain’s imperial weaknesses, and Philip had never failed to respond. So it was now, for in 1586 he sent an engineer and a campmaster to the West Indies to assess their defences. The mission of Juan Bautista Antonelli and Juan de Texeda was the beginning of the effective fortification of the Caribbean, but it cost Philip sorely, and forced him to pare down his efforts in Europe.

And it was just as well that it did, for Drake’s expedition set in motion another, and deadlier, policy. In Spain the maritime classes, grown prosperous on American trade, were clamouring for an end to the English threat. Drake’s achievements would attract imitators, many of them, who cumulatively would inflict greater damage than he had ever done. Privateers, financed by merchants, the navy and the court, were already beginning to sally from English ports with commissions of reprisal, the harbingers of an industry based upon plunder, and a substitute for the old trades with Brazil and the Iberian Peninsula that fell victim to the worsening relations between England and Spain. Drake’s expedition was a signal to Spanish merchants that decisive action was necessary to avert possible ruin. Whether or not Elizabeth had genuinely hoped that she could release Drake without starting a war, for Philip the raid was the last straw. Encouraged by his leading counsellors, Juan de Idiaquez and Cristóbal de Moura, he recognized that even though Parma had captured Antwerp, even though Leicester’s English army had achieved little to halt the Spanish tide in the Netherlands, Spain’s communications with both the Low Countries and the Americas depended upon defeating England. It had to be done, for God and Empire. From the different proposals submitted to him by Santa Cruz and Parma came the king’s great crusade against England. Around the Portuguese galleons inherited in 1580 and the ships of the West Indian guard, a mighty Spanish fleet was already assembling, and Santa Cruz would take it to England and wrest the narrow seas from Drake. When he had done so, he would link with Parma and ship his army across the Channel, where it would overthrow the heretical queen. From Spain’s humiliation and frustration over Drake’s raid emerged a greater strength of purpose, and before the end of the year the new Pope, Sixtus V, had joined the crusade, promising Philip a million crowns after Parma’s army had landed in England.

Across Europe the reverberations of Philip’s new plans were heard, and the great Armada formed. Ships were commandeered or hired in Spain, in Italy and in the Baltic regions. Naval stores and provisions poured into Spanish and Portuguese ports. Guns were cast in Italy and Germany, and troops raised in Milan, Portugal and Naples. The dockyards throbbed to the new schedule. In February of 1587 the king’s secretary wrote: ‘The intervention of the English in Holland and Zeeland, together with their infestation of the Indies and the Ocean, is of such a nature that defensive methods are not enough to cover everything, but forces us to apply the fire in their homeland.’¹⁵

Drake’s war had become England’s war now. But Drake held a torch too, and with it he would singe the King of Spain’s beard.

¹ Giovanni Gritti, Venetian Ambassador to the Doge and Senate, May 1586, Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers … in the Archives and Collections of Venice, 168. There are numerous contemporary reports in Butler, et. al., ed., Calendar of State Papers, Foreign; Hume, ed., Calendar of Letters and State Papers … in the Archives of Simancas; Klarwill, ed., Fugger News-Letters; Lemon, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic; Corbett, ed., Papers Relating to the Navy During the Spanish War.

² Dean of Cartagena to Alonso de la Tome, 16 February, 1586, Wright, ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 29–31; Martin Gonzales deposition, 27 April, 1586, Ibid, 70–80; account enc. by Don Luis Guzman and Alonso de Tapia, 1 June, 1586, Ibid, 150–60; Vique y Manrique to the Crown, 5 April, 1586, Ibid, 62–4; return of the forces, Corbett, 19. In addition to the forces on the galleys there was a small crew aboard the oared Napolitana. Estimates of the numbers of defenders on shore vary greatly. The dean gave 650 Spaniards and 800 Indians. Vique y Manrique (deposition, 3 May, 1586, Wright, 100–15) made the Spanish land force 589, including 25 blacks. The official return has 624. Captain Bravo’s deposition (Ibid, 115–29) gives 550, and the governor and Diego Hidalgo Montemayor put it lower still, at 450 (Montemayor to the Crown, 23 May, 1586, and De Busto to the Crown, 25 May, 1587, Ibid, 129–47).

³ Figures for the Indian force are most disparate, with the return given by Corbett stating 100 and an eyewitness (‘the sack of Cartagena’, Wright, 46–52) 1,000. Vique put it at 400.

⁵ Leicester journal, Keeler, ed., Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage, 169; Lorenzo Bernardo to Doge and Senate, 1 April, 1587, Brown, 261–2; Dasent, ed., Acts of the Privy Council of England, 14: 205–6.

⁶ Presumably the 25,000 ducats obtained at Santo Domingo were silver ducats, worth about 5s 6d each. The ransom at Cartagena seems to have been valued as gold ducats, which would have made it worth at least £40,000. For valuations of the ducat see Keeler, 259–60.

⁷ In fact, the Spanish fleet was so ridden with disease that it put back without ever reaching the West Indies.

¹⁰ Documents and valuable commentary on Drake at Roanoke in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 1: 243–313; see also Bayly to Shrewsbury, 27 July, 1586, Owen, ed., Bath MSS, 5: 71–2.

¹⁴ Spanish advertisements, Corbett, Spanish War, 77–9; John Hooker in Quinn, 1: 312–13.

¹⁵ In this context reference should be made to a late sixteenth-century French manuscript called ‘Histoire Naturelle des Indes’, acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library of New York in 1983. Containing 134 leaves, principally depicting the flora, fauna and natives of the West Indies, the manuscript appears to have been the work of different artists and writers, probably Huguenots. It is sometimes called the ‘Drake manuscript’ because of the claim that it ‘almost certainly derives from Francis Drake’s West Indian voyages’ (Klinkenborg, Sir Francis Drake and the Age of Discovery). Valuable as the manuscript is, the link with Drake seems questionable. It contains two references to Drake, one a vague aside on his visit to the Moluccas, and another asserting that the Indians about Roanoke were skilled warriors and had fought the English under Drake in 1586. Unfortunately, the contemporary accounts of Drake’s visit to Roanoke in 1586 do not mention any such conflict, and the reference is probably either an outright error or a confusion of Drake with some other commander, such as Grenville. The ‘strongest link’ between Drake and the manuscript is said to be geographical. It mentions many places in the West Indies connected with Drake. But French corsairs were in the Caribbean before Drake, and almost certainly knew its geography as well as the English. Until more is known about the evaluation of the ‘Drake manuscript’, authoritative judgement must be withheld.