Portrait of Francis Drake by Hondius c.1583.
FRANCIS DRAKE
One of the most thrilling periods of English history is the age of Drake, when the long night of Spanish New World dominancy was shattered by the exploits of the adventurer, slaver and warrior who harried, captured and robbed Iberian ships and outposts with such astounding success that he earned the nickname of El Draco (‘The Dragon’) from the fearful Spanish, along with a bounty of about £4 million in today’s currency placed on his head by King Philip II, and a knighthood from Elizabeth I. In addition to his remarkable victories along South America’s Pacific coast, in 1580 Drake would also become the first captain to complete a circumnavigation of the Earth.
It was in 1517 that the expedition of the conquistador Francisco Hernández and his group of settlers, which had set out from Cuba, discovered the Yucatán Peninsula and glimpsed for the first time a city of the New World and the hint of its wealth (Hernández likened the pyramids he saw to those of Egypt, referring to the structures as mosques, and labelling the entire area ‘El Gran Cairo’). Since that time, Spanish steel had cut relentlessly through the land and people of the New World to bleed it dry of its treasure. Matching the enormity of the haul of gold, silver, gems, hides, hardwoods and other treasures were the logistics of transporting the plunder back to Spain. Rather than risk sailing around the southern tip of the continent through Magellan’s dangerous strait, the loot was transported across land via mule and llama train, with the Spanish Main (the collective term for the captured coastal territories including Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, Panama and South America’s north coast) serving as the point of launch for ships to ferry the goods across the Atlantic to Spanish ports.
For decades the Spanish maintained this gold harvest with a fiercely guarded hegemony over the South American territories carved out by the conquistadors. The French were focused on colonies in North America, the Portuguese on their discoveries in the eastern regions of the continent, named by them Santa Cruz and Brazil. Rather unexpectedly, between 1528 and 1544 German explorers could be found pushing through the Venezuelan plains and into the highlands of Colombia, only to be forced into withdrawal. Spain dominated – and then came the English.
Francis Drake had seen for himself the elaborate network of the Spanish Main operation, having made several expeditions to the region to relieve them of their gold. He had crossed the Panamanian Isthmus, and on sighting the waters of the Pacific fell to his knees and ‘implored Divine assistance that he might, at some time or other, sail thither and make a perfect discovery of the same’. He got his wish in 1577 when Elizabeth dispatched him aboard the 120-ton, 18-gun Pelican with an accompanying four ships, with secret orders. Publicly the mission was to Alexandria, Egypt for trade. In fact Drake was to lead his unsuspecting men into Magellan’s wake, south to the bottom of the world, through the southernmost straits to round South America. They would surprise the Spanish on the Pacific, loot their treasure ships and investigate the possibility of a navigable easterly passage through the continent back to the Atlantic at a more convenient parallel. This was the same dangerous route that had led Magellan’s exhausted lieutenant and chronicler, Pigafetta, to warn that ‘nevermore will any man undertake to make such a voyage’.
Certainly in its initial stages the Drake mission suffered similarly to that of Magellan. After adding a captured vessel named the Mary to their fleet, following their Atlantic crossing two of the ships, the Christopher and the Swan, had to be scuttled after losing men, and when the party pulled into the Argentinian port of San Julián, where Magellan had dealt lethally with his mutineers, Drake also learned of imminent insurrection. The nobleman Thomas Doughty was put on impromptu trial, accused of treason and witchcraft, and with Drake as both prosecutor and judge was soon found guilty. The two men then dined together, ‘as cheerfully, in sobriety, as ever in their lives they had done aforetime’, wrote the ship’s chaplain Francis Fletcher. Doughty was then beheaded and the journey resumed.
The Mary was abandoned when it was discovered to be rotting, and with the three remaining ships Drake plunged into the Magellan Strait. (The Pelican by now had been renamed Golden Hind, perhaps in honour of the Lord Chancellor Christopher Hatton, whose crest was a hind.) The storms of the strait pummelled the English vessels, destroying the Marigold and forcing the Elizabeth to return to England. But the Golden Hind and its captain prevailed for fifty-two days over the roughest seas in the world, and so it was that the first English force to emerge into the Pacific consisted of a single ship, a modesty of size that would prove to be anything but a disadvantage.
In the fresh glow of a Pacific sunrise Drake wasted little time in carrying out the Queen’s secret orders. With eighteen cannon and fewer than 100 men, the English flagship sailed north along the Pacific coast of South America, attacking Spanish ports and colonies with relatively little resistance, because the Spanish were scattered in number, and in total shock at seeing an English vessel appear in their waters. With each sacking Drake made sure to seize Spanish maps of the area, and with developing intelligence the victories continued. The Chilean port of Valparaíso was seized with little difficulty, and yielded a great haul of Chilean wine; while as they approached Peru an essentially defenceless Spanish ship (for on the Pacific few Spanish ships needed guns) was captured with 25,000 Peruvian pesos (about £7 million today) in its hold. Of greater interest was the information that an immensely loaded treasure ship named Nuestra Señora de la Concepción (known to sailors as the Cacafuego, or ‘fire-shitter’) was in the area, on its way to Manila. Drake soon caught up with the galleon, thanks in part to it being weighed down with 26 tons of silver and thirteen chests of assorted treasure. The next six days were spent transferring the Cacafuego’s goods to fill the hold, and even the bilge, of the Hind. Not a Spaniard was killed – the Cacafuego’s crew were even gifted forty pesos each as a token.
The issue now for Drake was how to return to London with his overstuffed ship. There was little possibility of seizing Panama and traversing the isthmus, and considerable reluctance to submit the overweight Hind to the Magellan Strait for a second time (a good thing, it turned out, for the Spanish had sent an interception force there). Instead Drake headed north, first to Vancouver and then returning south to the warmer climes of California (which he called ‘New Albion’), where he spent a month attending to his ship.
With only one option, on 23 July 1579 Drake led the Golden Hind out across the Pacific, sailing for sixty-eight days with relative ease before reaching the goal of all previous European Pacific explorers: the Spice Islands. Their stay was brief, though long enough to load 6 tons of cloves. Home was the pressing objective. They continued westwards, affording a short call on Java and its five rajahs. On 18 June 1580 they passed the Cape of Good Hope, ‘the fairest Cape in all the circumference of the earth’, reaching Sierra Leone by 22 July and finally pulling into Plymouth docks on 26 September 1580, with fifty-nine men remaining, and a hold of treasure and precious cargo of which the queen would claim half (a prize that eclipsed the rest of the Crown’s entire income for that year). Drake received his knighthood aboard the Hind in April 1581, and the records and descriptions of the Hind’s encounters, along with their cartographic intelligence, were pored over with fascination. Drake had torn the binds of Spanish Pacific supremacy and shown with spectacular flair that nowhere was safe from English reach, and the sea fire of its dragon.
The extremely rare Wright-Molyneux map (the only one in private hands), found in only a few copies of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations . . ., detailing Drake’s discoveries. Unlike other contemporary charts, the map draws only on verified information, leaving blank the areas where geographic information was lacking.
