Читать книгу Pirate Nation - David Childs - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWere I to choose a ship for myself, I would have her sail well, yet strongly built, her decks flush and flat, and so roomy that men might pass with ease; her bow and chase so galley like contrived, should bear as many ordnance as with convenience she could, for that always cometh most to fight, and so stiff, she should bear a stiff sail, and bear out her lower tier of guns in any reasonable weather.
Captain John Smith, A Sea Grammar
Visit any seaside resort in England and there will be an opportunity for the young, and the not so young, to dress up and participate in piratical re-enactments or visit pirate ships and grottos. Supreme amongst these, and host to hundreds of school parties, are the replicas of Golden Hind in both London and Brixham. Across the Atlantic youthful imaginations can be similarly stimulated by walking the boards of Elizabeth at Roanoke in North Carolina, a replica of a ship that sailed with the pirate Richard Grenville when he tried to establish a pirate base on that island in 1584. Further up the coast, at Jamestown, Virginia, are tied up replicas of Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, the ships which brought the first permanent English settlers to Virginia and, although these were not pirate vessels, their commander Christopher Newport was an ex-pirate and a very successful one at that. The replica Pilgrim Fathers’ Mayflower, secured at Plymouth, Massachusetts, represents well the vessels of the English merchant fleet that were subject to piracy and, although she herself avoided such trouble, the Pilgrims suffered a major setback when their resupply vessel, Fortune, was taken by pirates on her voyage home, as was another of their ships, Little James, while heading for England richly laden with beaver-pelts.
Back in England the remarkable original timbers and artefacts of Mary Rose, preserved and displayed in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, give a wonderful feel for what a medium-sized royal vessel was like and, although she was built in 1509 and sank in 1545, her shape, structure and, most certainly, many of the weapons and objects recovered, would have been similar to those aboard pirate vessels of Elizabeth’s time. Nothing, no lesson, however well-delivered, no book, however well-written, no film, however vivid, captures as well what life was like onboard a small ship of the late sixteenth century as these original or reconstructed vessels. This century’s generations are indebted to those who built them, for without them we would have a very limited idea of what such ships looked like, because although many travelled by sea in the sixteenth century, few described the ship beneath their feet. This is not so surprising for such ships were commonplace; in centuries to come few will be able to visualise an airliner from reading the works of travel writers. However, as with airline flights, comments were recorded when things went wrong: in the case of Richard Hawkins’s voyage to the Pacific in Dainty, plenty did, which he duly noted, and for which honesty subsequent generations must be duly grateful.1
Elizabethan England possessed four growing seagoing fleets. Smallest in size but not in number were her fishing boats, which were undertaking longer and longer voyages, as far as the kingdom of cod that was the Newfoundland Banks. Her merchant vessels, once the despair of their sovereign because of their unwillingness to venture much beyond Flanders with wool, and Gascony, for wine, gradually felt their way into the Mediterranean, seeking out more exotic cargoes. Merchant enterprise was also responsible for establishing the famous but forlorn English voyages into the northern ice where they fumbled, failing to find an eastward or westward passage to Cathay, until by the very end of the sixteenth century such endeavours were superseded by the establishment of the East India Company, whose vessels plied the longer route to the east via the Cape of Good Hope. The third fleet was the Navy Royal, which had been revived by Henry VII and grown large during the reign of his son, only to shrink thereafter, before the threat from Spain forced Elizabeth to restore its fortunes with her own. The fourth arm was the pirate fleet, which ranged from a single small vessel manned by a few men and their dog to squadrons of well-armed ships capable of taking several hundred men to sea. Their appearance marked the return of the privately-owned warship, which had all but disappeared between 1485 and 1543, and meant that the policy of state piracy could be practised with success.
These fleets were not mutually exclusive and although the fishing boats of all nations offered easy pickings to predators as diverse as Barbary pirates and England’s own Peter Easton and Henry Mainwaring, their skippers were not themselves averse to robbing from weaker foreign hulls. Neither, of course, were the merchants who became better armed the further they ventured, for as they traded to more distant ports they became open to attack, not only from the Dunkirkers on their doorstep, but also from the Barbary galleys that lay in wait off the Straits of Gibraltar, and their Turkish cousins who infested the eastern Mediterranean. To counter this they required to be well-armed and once so equipped could yield easily to the temptation to plunder a passing weaker seafarer. The result was a private arms race leading to many a merchant ship becoming as well-armed as most state warships.
The added armament of a letter of reprisal could provide justification for a most lucrative sideline, especially when the arrangements and understanding with the nation’s legal authorities almost guaranteed no awkward questions being asked and no restitutions being awarded. As far as her own fleet was concerned, Elizabeth was always looking for ways for reducing the costs of its manning and upkeep, unlike her father, Henry VIII, for whom the waging of war was so glorious an enterprise that it justified any expenditure so long as it bought honour. For Elizabeth, conflict, if it had to be undertaken, needed to be prosecuted at least cost to the Crown. This parsimony created a permeable membrane between the Navy Royal and the merchant and pirate fleet, so that in times of national crisis, most notably the Armada campaign, the sovereign could call on the latter to supplement her own ships, while in times of quiet the queen was content to loan her ships for pirateering operations, such as Drake’s West Indies raid, or explorative/settlement ventures such as Frobisher’s search for the northwest passage and Grenville’s voyage to Roanoke – provided, of course, that she had the promise of a profit from these ventures.
Many ships were thus given over to piracy at some time in their career, but a fair few were built specifically for this purpose. Of these, Drake’s Golden Hind was the most notorious, illustrious and successful; Richard Hawkins’s Dainty the least successful and most mismanaged; while Cumberland’s Scourge of Malice was the one that made the successful transit from the age of piracy to the age of trade. Hakluyt’s account of the tribulations endured by a fourth vessel, Desire, which having been Cavendish’s flagship during his successful circumnavigation also accompanied him on his disastrous second attempt, provided a very clear account of the far horizons of endurance to which both ships and their seamen could be driven when things went wrong.2
The Golden Hind
In 1573 Drake climbed up a tree at the invitation of a cimaroon, or escaped slave, named Pedro, and gazed upon the Pacific. Well-informed navigator that he was, he knew that nothing lay between the blue horizon to his west and the distant, fabulously wealthy Spice Islands or, to the northwest, the equally rich and distant shores of Cathay. Well-practised pirate that he was, he knew that close inshore a third fabulously rich treasure trove beckoned in the form of deep-draughted, poorly armed and unescorted merchant ships trekking towards Panama with cargoes of silver. All he needed to do was to sail a suitable ship on those seas to take prizes that would more than compensate for the losses, in ships, men, cargo and self-esteem, that he and his cousin John Hawkins had suffered in 1568 at San Juan de Ulua.
Drake and his partner John Oxenham returned to Plymouth in August 1573, rich beyond their expectations, but with the knowledge that further wealth lay ready for the taking. Oxenham, too impetuous to seek a suitable vessel for the proposed voyage, sailed to the Caribbean, crossed over the isthmus and seized a small ship on the further shore. He was soon caught, imprisoned and eventually killed. Drake, a better brain, took his time, drawing up plans for the sort of vessel he would need to sail the long route from England to the Pacific hunting ground via the seldom visited, but notorious, dangerous waters of the Straits of Magellan. He also spent time learning about the great ocean on which he planned to rove and built up a library of navigational works to improve his ability to sail out of sight of land on seas upon which no Englishman had ever floated.
For the voyage which would make his name, Drake needed a ship which, requiring few to man her, could nonetheless sail fast enough to overhaul her potential prey. Yet she needed to be deep-draughted and beamy so that she could hold both sufficient stores and a great deal of booty. Weaponry sufficient to awe she needed, but not of such power that they might sink a potential prize. Drake named his ship Pelican, which might have been an appropriate name for a ship designed to swallow up a large haul of plunder, yet she proved so capable of managing her incredible task that she fully deserved her name-change to the sleeker Golden Hind (Golden Fleece might have been even more appropriate!).
No plans of the ship survive, if any ever existed, for this was an age where the shipwright’s practised eye was the equal of the draughtsman’s sharpened pen. The few drawings that purport to show her are neither detailed nor accurate, but luckily we have a short description of her which was written by a Portuguese pilot, Nuña da Silva, whom Drake captured off the Cape Verde Islands in January 1578 and found so professionally useful that he did not release him until he was departing from Guatulco on the Pacific coast of New Spain in April 1579. Golden Hind, da Silva wrote, was:
in a great measure stout and strong. She has two sheathings, one as perfectly finished as the other. She is fit for warfare and is a ship of the French pattern, well fitted out and finished with a good mast, tackle and double sails. She is a good sailer and the rudder governs her well. She is not new, nor is she coppered nor ballasted. She has seven armed port-holes on each side, and inside she carries eighteen pieces of artillery, thirteen being of bronze and the rest of cast ironaa . . . This vessel is waterfast when she is navigated with the wind astern and this is not violent, but when the sea is high, as she has to labour, she leaks not a little whether sailing before the wind or with the bowlines hauled out. Taking it all in all, she is a ship which is in a fit condition to make a couple of voyages from Portugal to Brazil.3
Another Spanish prisoner records fifteen pieces of artillery onboard.
It might be a brief description – certainly with that information alone it would not be possible to make a drawing, let alone a reconstruction of the vessel, but fortunately sufficient contemporary sketches of sailing ships and shipwrights’ instructions as how to build one complete with the beam:keel:draught:tonnage ratios exist, along with details of the relevant mast size, sail fit, anchors and cables required, for the present generation to visualise these state-of-the-art creations.
Her dimensions can be estimated from those of the dry dock that was built to preserve her on public display at Deptford. These suggest that England’s first preserved historic ship had a length of 67ft, a beam of 19ft and a draught of around 9ft, making her about a 120-ton ship.4 She carried three masts and a bowsprit supporting six sails with a sail area of just over 4,000sq ft, meaning that in favourable conditions she could maintain a speed of about 8 knots.
The exact number of men who sailed out of Plymouth in Golden Hind at the start of her voyage is not known, but the fleet of five ships had a combined crew of about 160. Spanish prisoners taken in the Pacific reported that Golden Hind had a crew of around eighty to eighty-six, while according to John Drake’s evidence she sailed from the Moluccas with sixty men onboard, arriving off the Cape of Good Hope with fifty-nine.5
Although da Silva provided no visual image of his floating prison, his comments do give us some insights into the practical aspects of managing such a ship on a long voyage. He notes, for example, that she was well-sheathed, having a sacrificial outer hull as well-fitted as her inner one. The outer one acted as the larder for hungry tropical wood-boring molluscs whose hidden voraciousness could reduce hull timbers to dangerously feeble, riddled weakness. To further protect the hull, a coating of tar and horsehair was used both as a sandwich between the hulls and as a coating for the outer one. Well aware of the risk, Drake stopped several times to careen his ship, scrape off weed, examine her timbers, replace decaying ones and to recoat the hull. This not only protected her against worm, it also kept her robust. Nowhere was his diligence better rewarded than when Golden Hind went firmly aground in the Spice Islands.
As they realised that their ship was firmly stuck on a reef, John Fletcher, the priest, got down on his knees, while Drake the professional took more direct action:
Showing us the way by his own example, first of all the pump was well plied, and the ship freed of water. We found her leaks to be nothing increased. Though it gave us no hope of deliverance, yet it gave us some hope of respite, as it assured us that the hulk was sound [wrote Fletcher, continuing] Which truly we acknowledged to be an immediate providence of God alone, as no strength of wood and iron could possibly have borne so hard and violent a shock as our ship did, dashing herself under full sail against the rocks, except the extraordinary hand of God had supported the same.
In fact, it was the extraordinary day-to-day ship husbandry of Drake that enabled the ship to withstand the shock. Assured of the watertight integrity of the vessel, the captain then set about lightening her by – a hard decision this – throwing overboard 5 tons of spices, which was half of his cargo, and up to eight pieces of ordnance. He would also have lowered his boats and transferred to them any heavy movable items, including some of the crew. After twenty hours aground, a combination of a rising tide and a change in wind direction and speed slid the hull back into deeper water. From then on the voyage continued with little incident, with Golden Hind arriving back in Plymouth still in a most seaworthy condition. Yet her seagoing days were over. Taken round to the Thames, she was visited by the queen who, having knighted Drake on her decks, ordered his ship to be preserved for posterity in a dry-dock created specifically for this purpose.
Golden Hind might not have sailed again but her exploits soon encouraged a repeat performance.
The Failure of Desire
At 120 tons Desire, as well as being much the same size as Golden Hind, was built for much the same reason, being ordered by the young Thomas Cavendish specifically to mount an expedition to capture treasure on the Pacific coast of South America. Cavendish sailed from Plymouth in July 1586 in company with the 60-ton Content and the 40-ton bark Hugh Gallant.6 With just 123 men embarked, he needed to conserve his crew and was lucky not to lose more than he did following attacks on his shore-parties in both the Canaries and Brazil.
He needed to conserve his ships well, so carried out his first careening in mid December, taking advantage of a good tidal range off Brazil that also produced an abundance of fresh meat in the shape of sea lions. Their passage through the Straits of Magellan was plain sailing and they were able to record that ‘in this place we watered and wooded well and quietly.’
Watering continued but not quietly. As they passed up the South American coast, pillaging and burning as they went, they came across larger and better defended settlements. In fighting for the possession of these they were to lose a number of men so that by early June they had to sink Hugh Gallant ‘for want of men’.
Success came to the remaining two ships when the 700-ton carrack Santa Anna was sighted making her Pacific landfall off California. She put up a brave fight, only surrendering when she came in danger of sinking. The wealth unladen from the vessel (and over 500 tons of cargo was not transhipped for lack of space) almost upset the voyage, for the men squabbled over their shares and those onboard the inaptly named Content decided to part company and return home via the Straits of Magellan. They were never heard of again. Cavendish, however, navigated Desire successfully through the Asian island chains and made a swift and safe passage homeward, just having a storm blow out his sails a few miles short of Plymouth, where he arrived in early September 1588, his arrival by good chance timed so as to avoid falling in with the ships of the Armada.
Desire had proved to be stoutly built, but vessels needed to be as robustly commanded if they were to make successful voyages to the Pacific plunder grounds, as can be shown by the fate of Cavendish’s second, and unsuccessful, repeat voyage which began at Plymouth on 26 August 1591. On this occasion Desire was commanded by John Davis, while Cavendish sailed in Galleon Leicester, with Captain Cocke in Roebuck, and two barks keeping company.7
Things fell apart from the moment that they arrived in Brazil, giving such forewarning of their intentions at Santos that ‘in three days the town that was able to furnish such another fleet with all kinds of necessaries, was left unto us nakedly bare, without people and provisions’, so that they sailed ‘worse furnished from the town than when we went in.’
A great storm then ensued, scattering the fleet and drawing the laconic remark from the diarist, John Jane, ‘that our captain could never get any direction what course to take in such extremities, though many times he had entreated for it.’
Worse was to follow when, snowstorm-bound and ill-victualled in the Magellan Straits, ‘all the sick men in Galleon were most uncharitably put ashore in the snow, rain and cold, when men of good health could scarcely endure it, where they ended their lives in the highest degree of misery.’ The rest survived on mussels, water and seaweed. It could not last. The captains conferred and the men were consulted. Although there were many who wished to continue, Captain Davis was not among them, reporting that Desire had ‘no more sails than masts, no victual, no ground-tackling, no cordage more than is over head, and among seventy and five persons, there is but the master alone that can order the ship and but fourteen sailors.’ They turned back into a ferocious gale, the mariners dying from want while their once gallant ship was also failing as fast. The account records that on 16 May:
We had a violent storm [in which] perished our main trestle-trees, so that we could no more use our main top-sail, lying most dangerously in the sea. The pinnace likewise received a great leak . . . the 26th our fore-shrouds broke, so that if we had not been near the shore, it had been impossible for us to get out of the sea.
Desire found shelter at Port Desire, named after her on the first voyage, where her crew found that ‘our shrouds are all rotten, not having a running rope whereto we may trust, sails all worn, our top-sails not able to abide any stress of weather, neither have we pitch, tar, or nails, nor any store for the supplying of these wants; and we live only on seals and mussels, having but five hogsheads of pork within board, and meal three ounces for a man a day.’ There were also large shoals of smelt that could be hooked with a bent pin. Their troubles were far from over, for the suggestion by Captain Davis that he should leave the majority onboard, while he took a trusted few in the pinnace to search for help, almost caused a mutiny with murder in mind. Luckily, the plan was revealed and the ringleaders handled with clemency by the captain. Nevertheless, the crew drafted an account of their circumstances which remains one of the most harrowing tales of the tribulations of ill-victualled mariners.8
They were, to all intense and purposes, shipwrecked, but having sunk in despair they resurfaced to repair. A forge was created to make nails, bolts and spikes. A cable was converted into rope for the rigging and, having carried out essential maintenance, they weighed anchor to sail forth towards the Straits and through them into the South Sea. Here they met with storms which kept driving them back to the Straits because they did not dare subject their sails to any stress. Even in comparative shelter their trials were not over, for one of their cables parted causing them to fear being driven aground. The wind died just in time.
Now, ‘we unreeved our sheets, tacks, halyards, and other ropes, and moored our ship to the trees close by the rocks.’ Unable to recover their lost anchor they found the remaining one had just one fluke, and was secured by a piece of old cable spliced in two places. When the next wind arose they towed themselves out to sea by means of their repaired boat. The anchor came home held by just a solitary strand.
Back at sea they found the weather unimproved, while the precarious state of their rigging limited their options. Their pinnace, under tow, suddenly reared up and drove herself into the ship’s side; by morning she had disappeared. Onboard Desire, the night’s gale split both the foremast and its sail so that the mizzen had to be shifted to serve in its place. Now, every time the ship encountered rough weather a body blow was dealt her; like a boxer weakened by too many rounds, she was inexorably being driven onto her watery canvas. Except, and this speaks volumes for English shipbuilding, she appears to have remained both watertight and upright, so that it would seem to be the precarious state of her masts, rigging and anchors that would decide her fate.
That ‘ruinous end’ almost came in mid October when, forced once more under bare poles back towards the Straits, they feared that they would be driven ashore before rounding the entrance for ‘our sails had not been half an hour aboard but the footrope of our foresail broke, so that nothing held but the eyelet holes’. The seas continually broke over the ship’s poop, and flew into the sails with such violence that ‘we still expected the tearing of the sails, or oversetting of the ship.’ A wrecking seemed inevitable until ‘our master veered some of the main sheet; and whether it was by that occasion, or by some current, or by the wonderful power of God, as we verily think it was, the ship quickened her way, and shot past that rock where we think we would have shored.’
If there is a reverse analogy to a cork shooting out of a bottle, this is how Desire then entered the Straits for ‘we were shot in between the high lands without any inch of sail, we spooned before the sea, three men not able to guide the helm.’ Six hours later they anchored and pumped the ship dry then, probably, slept, as best might exhausted men being eaten alive by clusters of lice as big as peas.bb
Similar suffering was endured by the crew of the Bristol pirate ship Delight whose crew wrote a petition outlining why they had behaved mutinously in the Straits in February 1589.
By now, all hope of making the voyage was gone and they returned to the Atlantic and their anchorage at Port Desire, where they ran the ship up on the ooze and secured her firmly with a number of lines. There they had foraged for copious amounts of the aptly-named scurvy grass, which they fried together with penguin eggs and fish oil. Without their knowing why, this diet cured them all of the typical swellings and bleedings associated with scurvy. They also took onboard 14,000 dried penguins to supplement their victuals for the estimated six-month voyage home. For this journey, the ration per man was reduced to two ounces and a half of meal twice a week, three spoons of oil three times a week, a pint of peas between four men twice a week, and every day five penguins for four men and six quarts of water per day to be shared by the same four men, thus indicating the importance of the system whereby a small number of men formed their own mess.
Of all the provisions, water was both the most important and the most problematical. They called in at Plancentia in Brazil, their first stop on the outward voyage, not only to take fresh water onboard but, more importantly, to repair their split and leaking casks. The town had been abandoned and, while the overgrown gardens provided some fresh food, the repair of the casks was disrupted by an Indian attack in which thirteen of their number were killed and their weapons seized. They sailed with just 8 tons of water poorly stowed, only for a series of heavy showers to salve their thirst.
Relief was short-lived: in an ‘Ancient Mariner’-like incident the equatorial sun caused massive ‘worms’ to erupt from the bodies of the dried penguins and crawl upon the weak sailors where ‘they would eat our flesh, and bite like mosquitoes.’ Scurvy also seemed to return with a violence, so that ‘they could not draw their breath’, while their joints, limbs, breasts and ‘cods’ all swelled hugely and ‘divers grew raging mad, and some died in most loathsome and furious pain.’ By the time the ship was able to turn towards the British Isles, just sixteen of her original complement of seventy-six remained alive, of whom just five were capable of working the ship.
They flopped homeward, unable to set a sail, hardly able to handle the sheets, tackle or capstan, and with the captain and master taking watch about on the helm. ‘Thus as lost wanderers upon the sea’, they drifted into Bearhaven in Ireland on 11 June 1593, where the locals insisted on being paid £10 up front, before agreeing to help secure the vessel whose sorry condition belied the fact that she had withstood an assault on her timbers that would have sunk many larger ships.
Galleon Leicester, Cavendish’s flagship, also arrived safe home, but without her commander. Somewhere in mid Atlantic the disillusioned and half-mad leader of the failed expedition lost his will to live and was buried at sea.
Dainty
Information about the tragic happenings on Cavendish’s final voyage did not reach England until after Richard Hawkins sailed from the Thames in April 1593 on his own gloriously mismanaged voyage to the South Seas in Dainty. The ship had been built at the end of 1588, to voyage, so Hawkins claimed, to Japan, the Philippines and Moluccas by way of the Straits of Magellan, and to make a ‘perfect discovery’ of those parts and to establish ‘the commodities which the countries yielded, and of which they have want’, which is as disingenuous a description of piracy as wielded by any pen. Dainty was originally named Repentance by Hawkins’s puritanical stepmother, until Elizabeth sighted her and ordered a name change. She was larger than Golden Hind, being of some 350 tons, but she had those same essential attributes, being ‘profitable for stowage, good of sail, and well conditioned.’
All of these attributes she seemed to have demonstrated in her brief pirateering career before she sailed for the Pacific in 1593. She was part of the pack that captured the great and richly cargoed Portuguese carrack, Madre de Dios, in 1592 and was one of Frobisher’s squadron that seized a 600-ton Biscayan laden with iron that same year. Nevertheless, the elder Hawkins considered that she ‘never brought but cost, trouble and care’, and he had little hesitation in selling her to his son for he was, above all else, a businessman. The younger Hawkins wasted little time in readying her for the voyage for which she was built.
The account of Dainty’s Pacific voyage was written wonderfully well in The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, who proved to be a better raconteur than rover, ultimately losing his ship in a fight with the Spanish. Yet the whole voyage lurched towards this final ignominy with Hawkins always learning lessons after the event, while refreshingly admitting his own culpability in most of the incidents that occurred.
It began on day one, 8 April 1593, when Hawkins saw Dainty off from Blackwall, determined to join her himself that night at Gravesend. However, seeing the ship anchored at Barking he rowed out and clambered onboard to be greeted with a tale of near woe. Dainty had sailed with her gunports open and they, because the vessel was deeply laden, lay perilously close to the waterline. A sudden fresh wind had caused the ship to heel and water to rush in at the open ports pulling the vessel over. Luckily, once this was noted and the ‘sheet flowne, she could hardly be brought upright.’ Danger described, Hawkins recommended that ports be shut and caulked, although the example he quotes in evidence is the loss of Great Harry at Portsmouth in 1545 not, as it in fact and famously was, Mary Rose. It had been a close thing and Hawkins’s crew insisted that the ship be lightened before she proceeded into the Channel, so some 6 or 8 tons were duly offloaded into a hoy hired for the purpose.
The passage down-channel was a drearisome one against contrary winds, with Dainty having to anchor on the flood tide before weighing to gain westings on the ebb. The ship then ran into fog so dense that for three days they had no sight of land and had to feel their way gingerly down the coast, until a bark from Dartmouth informed them they were not far off the Eddystone, while they thought they were off Exmouth. Cue for another lesson from Sir Richard about navigation in mist when he states that over-shooting ‘often happeneth to those that make the land in foggy weather, and use no good diligence by sound, by lying off the land, and other circumstances to search the truth, and is the cause of the loss of many a ship, and the sweet lives of multitudes of men’, to which he adds a few lines later the sound advice that, ‘I found by experience that one of the principal parts required in a mariner that frequenteth our coasts of England, is to cast his tides, and to know how they set from point to point, with the difference of those in the channel from those of the shore.’
No sooner safe, or so he thought, in Plymouth than fog gave way to gale. Hawkins, who was ashore at the time, found himself unable to regain his ship because of the storm and could only pray and watch as he noticed the mainmast of Dainty ‘driving by’, which must have been a startling experience. Luckily, that loss lightened the vessel and kept her off the rocks. Not so lucky was Hawkins’s pinnace, Fancy, which was beaten upon the rocks and had to be salvaged over the next few days.
The woes of Hawkins’s consort continued, for when they finally got underway from Plymouth, she signalled frantically to Hawkins that they had sprung a great leak and needed to return to the Sound. On examination it was found that the caulkers had left a great seam uncaulked, just running pitch along its length which the sea soon removed, allowing a powerful ingress. As so often in Hawkins’s yarn, he no sooner suffered a setback than he quotes a similar example so as to gain the satisfaction of a woe shared. On this occasion it was Ark Ralegh, which on her maiden voyage was found to be leaking because a trenail hole had not had a trenail driven home. This embarrassing departure made Hawkins a keen caulker, and when the planks of his ship shrank in the tropical sun, he turned out his whole crew to recaulk all the area that they could reach, both inboard and outboard.
Such good husbandry caused another near fatal accident through fire. One day, the ship’s carpenter, supported by the master and against Hawkins’s better judgement, heated some caulking pitch in a pot on the galley fire. Unwatched, it bubbled up, spilled over and ignited. The carpenter fled the flames. Another, braver, man put on a double pair of gloves and grabbed the pitch pot, but was forced to drop it, overturning its contents into the fire, which now raged fiercely. Hawkins saved the ship by commanding his men to tie lines around their watch-gowns (garments he had provided them with to keep them warm at night) and to throw the coats overboard until they were soaked. A succession of soaking gowns dampened the blaze, surely a unique way to douse a fire at sea. True to form Hawkins then related that:
With drinking of tobacco [ie, smoking] it is said that the Roebuck was burned at Dartmouth.
The Primrose of London was fired with a candle at Tilbury and nothing saved but her keel.
The Jesus of Lubeck had her gun-room set on fire with a match, and had been burned without redemption, if that my father, Sir John Hawkins, then general in her, had not commanded her sloppers [scuppers] to be stopped and the men to come to the pumps, whereof she had two, and plying them in a moment, had three or four inches of water on deck . . . which they threw upon the fire.
Along with fire, Dainty’s crew were also subject to another of the seamen’s fears – grounding. One day, just as he was about to conduct morning prayers, Hawkins noticed a change in the colour of the sea, which he thought might indicate that they were nearing shoals. Being assured by his master, officers and his own observations that they could not be nearer than two hundred miles from land, Hawkins continued with the service. But his suspicions were not driven away by prayer and he ordered soundings to be taken, which showed them to be in fourteen fathoms of water. Lookouts were quickly sent aloft and continuous soundings taken and, in a short while, they found themselves just five leagues off the low-lying coast of Africa. The sudden arrival of shallow water was a common experience, which most mariners acknowledged was often due to them having no sure way to measure longitude. Hawkins, while acknowledging this defect in navigation, blamed the, fallacious, presence of strong but variable ocean currents, which meant that some ‘coming from the Indies and looking for the Azores have sight of Spain and some having looked out for Spain have discovered the Azores.’ The suspected presence of this fickle current was also commented on during Cumberland’s return from Puerto Rico when the narrative relates that:
though the winde was not worthy to be called so, nor scarce by the name of a breath, and besides so narrow, that we stood upon a bowling, yet we were found in that last passed artificiall day, to have run above fiftie leagues at the least.9
Reading the accounts, and the fact that no such current exists, indicates that the problem was caused by faulty positional fixing, which is unsurprising given the inchoate state of knowledge and instrumentation available for celestial navigation. Whatever the cause, the potential hazard of such errors was best handled by the keeping of a good lookout which Hawkins, being Hawkins, acknowledged, but did not enforce.
The cause of another near grounding is shocking, for had it been been common practice it would have meant many a good ship would have found herself cast up upon the coast. Tracking along the coast of Brazil one night, content that a steady wind would keep the ship on track, both Hawkins and his master decided to turn in for the night, leaving one of the master’s mates at the helm. This man was also overcome by drowsiness and allowed the ship to track more westerly towards the shore. By one of those inexplicable moments of luck, to which many a seaman will vouch, the writer included, the master woke with a start, realised all was not well, went on deck, saw white water to starboard, and ordered the helm put hard over. When soundings were taken it was discovered that the ship was in just over three fathoms of water and had been heading directly for the shoals.
In his commentary Hawkins observed that they ordered such things better in Spain and Portugal, where a seat was provided by the compass in which sat, throughout the voyage, the master or one of his mates, in the role, as we would refer to it today, of officer of the watch. Sat here, he would not only keep a check that the ordered course was being steered, but make sure that the helmsman was ‘continually excited’ to keep him alert. Whether Hawkins himself adopted this precaution he does not say, but one excellent practice he did follow was to make sure every opportunity to reprovision with fresh food and water was taken. Additionally, like Drake, if a stopover was of any length, he had the ship’s company exercise. He had, without realising it, solved the problem of scurvy which so ravaged the crews on most long voyages.
The inevitable grounding took place in the Straits of Magellan, while Dainty was being conned by some who thought they knew the waters around Tobias Cove. They did not, and steered the ship onto a rock shortly after a mighty wind blew itself out, giving her a calmer collision than might have been the case. Worryingly, it was found that she was trapped on a pinnacle amidships, so that the weight of bilge-water, both forward and aft, was in danger of weighing her down and breaking her back. Despite trying to wind her off, they had to wait until the next high tide to float clear. Months later, when she was grounded near Panama, they saw that ‘a great part of her sheathing was beaten off on both sides in her bilges, and some four foot long and foot square of her false stem, adjoining the keel, rested across, like unto a hog yoke, which hindered her sailing very much.’
Another threat to ships on lengthy voyages through the tropics was an attack on their timbers by worm, Teredo navalis, a pest not present in colder northern waters, but a ship destroyer in warmer climes. The remedy was to provide a sacrificial sheathing, such as Nuña da Silva noted was fitted to Golden Hind. Indeed, the provision of such sheathing on certain ships was interpreted by spies as an indication that the English were planning voyages of plunder. Hawkins, as ever, provided his expert view, ‘for the ignorant’, on the dangers of worm which ‘enter in no bigger than a Spanish needle, and by little and little their holes become ordinarily greater than a man’s finger.’ Noting that the Iberians used lead for their sheathing, he dismissed this as too costly, too heavy and too frail. He also dismissed simple double-planking as too heavy and only suitable as a delaying factor as regarded penetration. A method which he did consider efficacious was to burn the outer planks black and then apply pitch, either by itself or mixed with ground glass. Best of all, he thought, was to apply a thin outer sheathing of elm, which of itself was rot-resistant, while between this and the main planking a thick smearing of tar mixed with horsehair was applied. Although he admitted that this method was ‘invented by my father’, his view that ‘experience has taught it to be the best and of least coat’ is borne out by the fact that it remained in use until Dolphin completed a circumnavigation in 1769, successfully sheathed in copper.
Whether or not Hawkins and Dainty would have completed a successful circumnavigation will never be known, for the ship was captured by the Spanish after a lengthy fight in which, true to form, the behaviour of his crew contributed much to their defeat. Yet, in theory, Hawkins knew precisely what was needed among a company to keep a ship safe while at sea. This necessitated: having a knowledgeable captain keeping a watchful eye upon all his men and their works; a watchful pilot; a boatswain to keep the ship clean, and well-rigged and secure; and a carpenter who regularly inspected the ship’s sides, pumps, masts, boats. Above all, Hawkins believed:
Every officer, in his office, ought to be an absolute commander, yet ready in obedience and love, to sacrifice his will to his superior command. This cannot but cause unity; and unity but purchase a happy issue to dutiful travellers.
Unless, of course, they fall foul of a stronger enemy, a circumstance which ended Hawkins’s voyage and which Cumberland, often frustrated by the escape of his quarry, was determined to avoid.
The Scourge of Malice and her Consorts
So in 1594 that most optimistic and persistent of pirates resolved, in Monson’s words, ‘to build a ship from the stocks that should equal the middle rank of Her Majesty’s and act so noble and rare, it being a thing never undertaken before by a subject that it deserved immortal fame’, comments that would have been as appropriate for the earlier Ark Ralegh.
Cumberland’s desire was to have a ship not only capable of overwhelming the great carracks whose escape from his fleet’s clutches in earlier years had so frustrated him, but also one not subject to the queen’s caveats against close-quarters engagements, and one that he could crew and victual himself. The result was a four-masted vessel of some 700 tons and a set of ten sails, including topgallants and two lateen sails. Her thirty-eight guns included a number of demi-cannons, sixteen culverins, twelve demi-culverins and eight sakers, a suite that would have enabled her to batter as well as board.
Rather than confiscate her for her own use, as she had done with Ralegh’s Ark, Elizabeth graciously agreed to be present at the launching of ‘the best ship that ever before had been built by any subject’, being most content that the name she gave her, Scourge of Malice, had an irony that would not be lost on those whom the ship was designed to plunder. In fact she plundered but little, being an unlucky vessel through most of her piratical career despite Elizabeth’s early support.
On 28 March 1595 the Queen issued authority for Cumberland to victual and arm for sea the ‘Malice Scourge and such other ships and pinnaces . . . not exceeding six’, although she made sure that her own coffers would benefit from the permit by stating that ‘all prizes that shall be taken by you or by any person or persons appointed by you are to be brought into the most convenient haven without breaking bulk or making any distribution of shares until our further pleasure is known.’
The earl, having a close relationship with the queen by right of rank rather than, as in Ralegh’s case, whim, might well have protested against the stringency of audit as outlined above, for in less than a month he had new documents which instructed him: ‘to weaken the force of those who are hostilely disposed against us and to destroy the forces of the subjects of the King of Spain’, for which service the earl was allowed ‘the value of any prizes taken by them without account saving £10,000 on every carrack bound from Portugal to the Indies or £20,000 on any from the Indies to Portugal.’
Prior to sailing, Cumberland had gained some intelligence as to the timings of the departures of the Indies ships from Portugal, only for him to arrive at Plymouth to discover reports that Hawkins and Drake had stolen a sail on him and had captured just such a carrack, an act and a presence that had led to the cancellation of further sailings that year. Much disgruntled, Cumberland disembarked, sending his squadron on without him. Without his being present, they lacked the drive to achieve much and returned with a limited haul.
In 1596, the year of the Cadiz raid, Scourge of Malice appears to have been employed in a supporting and not rewarding ancillary role, being tasked with investigating shipping movements around Ireland and making a show of force off Calais, which the Spaniards had recently captured. Inactivity or absence from the centre did not appeal to Cumberland and in 1597 he offered to lead a fleet in his flagship to ‘burn the Spanish Navy [or] impeach them divers ways and hinder them from going to Ireland or pursue them thither.’
Whatever the aim, the weather intervened and a few days out Scourge lost her mainmast and had to return to harbour. This assault by the weather should not have surprised observers of Cumberland’s sea career, for he seemed to have drawn storms to him like a meteorological magnet and he needed strong ships to ride them out, as is evidenced in the account of a most frightening gale:
Upon Thursday the seventh of September, the gale began to be very fresh and to keepe the sailes stiffe from the Masts, and so continued all that day. Upon Friday it began to speake yet lowder, and to whistle a good in the shrowdes, insomuch that our Master made the Drablers bee taken off, and before night it had blowne the fore-top-saile in pieces by the terrible board; this was taken for the beginning of a storme, which came indeed about the shutting in of the day, with such furie and rage, as none could say it stole upon us unawares. For I am out of doubt that I had never heard any winde so high. One of our Bonnets had beene taken in the evening, and the other was rent off with the furie of the storme. And thus (for our mayne-top-saile was taken in and the top-mast taken downe) bearing onely a bare corse of each, if the ship had not beene exceeding strongly sided, shee could not have indured so rough weather. For oftentimes the Sea would ship in waves into her of three or foure Tunne of water, which (the ship being leakie within board) falling often, was as much as both the pumps were able to cast out againe, though they went continually all night, and till noone the next day were never throughly suckt, so that if any leake had sprung upon us under water, it could not have beene chosen, but shee must have foundered, seeing the pumpes were hardly able to rid the water that was cast in above hatches. The Missen-saile had beene in the evening well furled (for the winde came upon the starboard quarter) and yet the storme had caught it, and with such violence and furie rent it, that with much adoe the Missen-yard was hailed downe, and so the quarter decke and poope saved from danger of renting up. All this was in the night, which made it much more hidious, specially in the fore-end of the night before the Moone got up. The winde continued in this excesse of violence till midnight, and then abated hee something, but then began the effect of his blowing to shew it selfe, for High-swoke then the Sea began to worke, and swell farre higher then before. His Lordships ship is a very goodly one, and yet would shee bee as it were in a pit, and round about vast mountaines of water, higher then our mayne-top. And that (which is strangest) the Sea came upon every point of the Compasse, so that the poore ship, nor they that directed and cunned her, could not tell how to cunne her to bee safe from the breaking of these vast waves upon her. This continued all night: and though the winde fell by little and little, yet the Sea was so light, that all Saturday it was not quieted, so that though out of a storme, yet were wee still in a stormy Sea, insomuch that our mayne-top-mast was broken.10
Cumberland was to endure many such storms including one so powerful that ‘his Lordships Cabbin, the dining roome, and halfe Decke became all one, and he was forced to seeke a new lodging in the hold.’ He may have experienced more extremes of weather than most, but the best description of such conditions was written by the poet, and landlubber, John Donne, whose brief time at sea while serving the earl of Essex on both the Cadiz raid and the Island Voyage, gave rise to his poems ‘The Storm’ and ‘The Calm’ (Appendix 3).
Scourge of Malice re-emerged in March 1598, with Cumberland onboard for what was to be his last and in many ways most successful voyage. The plan, as always, was based on the seizing of carracks, this time off the Tagus. The plan, as so often, failed when the fleet was sighted and the carracks stayed. A few small ships were attacked, as Cumberland related:
I ceased not working day nor night, and by Saturday at night was readie to set saile, when within night I heard the Ordnance goe off betwixt me and the shoare, and well knew it was a small ship of Hampton and my little Pinnace the Skout, that were in fight with a ship which they chased to windward of mee before night, and fearing their match too hard, as in truth it proved. I, for losing time let slip mine anchor, and soone came to helpe the poore little ones much over-matched. At my first comming up shee shot at me; yet forbare I, and went so neere that I spake to them, and demanding of whence they were? answere was made, of Lisbone. Then assuring my self shee was a Biscaine, and would fight well, I came close to her, and gave her my broad side, which shee so answered that I had three men killed, five or sixe shot, and my ship in sixe or seven places, some of them very dangerous. So I laid her aboard and tooke her, shee proving a ship Ship of Hamburgh, laden with Corne, Copper, Powder, and prohibited commodities. I made the more haste to end this fight, for that I would be out of the sight of the Land before day, which as I desired I was, and there met with a French man laden with Salt.11
Knowing that he had been sighted off Iberia, Cumberland attempted to take advantage of his failure by sailing fast to the Indies, leaving the Spanish to believe that he was still lying just over the horizon from Lisbon. The result was that he was able to use surprise, along with flair, daring and bold execution, to take San Juan de Puerto Rico, a feat that had eluded Drake. The reward was little, the loss of life through disease high, but the honour was great, and made the more so, for it was with the shame of that loss fresh in his ears that King Philip of Spain died on 13 July 1598. Had he lingered on he might have been cheered to learn that Cumberland, as so often, had failed to intercept his convoys off the Azores, but he did not, and the war, his war, which had begun to all intent and purpose with the defeat of the pirate John Hawkins at San Juan de Ulua in 1568, had ended for Philip, after the loss of hundreds of ships, thousands of men and millions of ducats, with the victory of the pirate George Clifford at San Juan de Puerto Rico.
Like the Ark, the Scourge was to prove the professionalism of her Deptford builders by her own longevity. In September 1600, having hung up his sea-boots, Cumberland offered the East India Company first refusal on the purchase of Malice Scourge. Following a survey to ‘search into all her defects’, an offer of £3,000 was made ‘for the said ship and all her ordnance, sails, cables, anchors and furnishings, as she now is’ (Appendix 4). Cumberland stated he would take not less than £4,000, but the company knew its man and his means, and they settled for £3,700. To prepare her for her long voyage to the Far East, she had her bottom cased in cement to prevent worm, and almost 800ft of timber replaced: much of it ‘borrowed out of her Majesty’s storehouse at Woolwich.’ To oversee the refit and then take command of the vessel, the company appointed the pirate, James Lancaster, who had already already made one voyage to the east, in 1591 in Edward Bonaventure. It had been a disastrous voyage. Lancaster had struggled to reach Penang, raiding and trading in equal measure, before turning for home that November. After refreshing his weary and depleted crew at the Cape of Good Hope, he was driven to the Indies where after much hazard he was marooned when, with just six men onboard, his ship sailed away and disappeared forever. Eventually, thanks to a passing French vessel, Lancaster and eleven colleagues managed to land back in England in May 1594. Shortly afterwards his fortune changed when he led a raid on Pernambuco in Brazil, in which so much booty was seized that the pirates could not find sufficient hulls to haul it away.12
Lancaster’s new command was relaunched in December 1600 and renamed Red Dragon. On 13 February 1601 she led a fleet of five ships out from Woolwich on the company’s first venture to the East Indies. She returned in September 1603, fully laden with spices, having proved her seaworthiness – just. For, on approaching the Cape on her return journey, Red Dragon had been struck by a storm so violent that she lost her rudder, while the mizzenmast, which was taken down to provide substitute steering, was also unshipped. The strain placed on a ship’s rudder by heavy seas made these vital components very vulnerable, mounted as they were to the hull only by a number of iron hinges which could rust unnoticed underwater. Frobisher had had a similar incident while returning home from the Labrador coast. Spanish vessels used to rove a line through the rudder, secured to the deck at both ends, so that should the fastenings snap, the rudder could be recovered. Furthermore, many also carried a spare, while the measurements of the rudder were marked out on the deck so it was easy to build a replacement. The English did not adopt these sensible measures, thus committing their rudders to the deep and themselves to the mercy of the elements. Onboard Red Dragon the crew demanded that the ship be abandoned and they be transferred to their faithful consort, Hector, but Lancaster had faith in the refitted vessel and persuaded them to stay. The next day dawned with a welcome calm and Red Dragon came home without further incident. The seamanship that Lancaster had learned as a pirate thus proved to be invaluable to him as a merchant seaman.
Lancaster’s stubbornness in the South Atlantic and his faith in Red Dragon served the East India Company well, for the ship made five further voyages to the East Indies before ending her days, as a good fighting vessel should, when she was attacked and sunk by a superior Dutch force in October 1619.
Yet stout timbers alone did not make a good ship: what was essential for success was a strong leader able, often by example, to encourage his men, not only in the excitement of the fight, but in the long bitter weeks of a slow homeward journey when provisions were failing. There is little doubt that this quality was possessed by Drake and, because it involved adversity, Cumberland, who met these challenges with bravery and devotion to his crew. Returning from his voyage of 1589, with his numbers inflated by the presence of some captives, he met with heavy weather which kept his Victory at sea overlong so that food, but most especially water, had to be severely rationed, Cumberland made sure that there was:
equall distribution of the small store they had as well to all his prisoners as to his owne people. By this time the lamentable cryes of the sicke and hurt men for drinke was heard in every corner of the ship: for want whereof many perished (ten or twelve every night) then otherwise had miscarried in the whole Voyage . . . His minde was yet undaunted and present, his bodily presence and preventions readie. The last of November hee spake with an English ship, which promised him the next morning two or three tunnes of Wine, but soone after unfortunately came on ground. The next day hee had some supply of Beere, but not sufficient to enable him to undertake for England. Hee therefore put into Ventre Haven [Bantry Bay], in the Westermost part in Ireland, where having well refreshed, the twentieth of December he set sayle for England.
Such experiences might have persuaded a lesser man to return to land management, which Cumberland’s neglected estates badly needed, but the earl had a spirit, ‘further kindled and enflamed by former disasters’ or, as his daughter wrote, ‘though the miseries of sickness, death, famine and many other misadventures were sufficient to have moved his Lordship to have abjured for ever those marine adventures . . . such was his natural inclination . . . he could not be diverted from attempting another sea voyage.’
The Navy Royal
Far from deprecating the desires of her private, piratically-inclined shipbuilders, Elizabeth was most willing to lend them vessels of her own, to become in fact a joint conspirator and partner. However, the queen had just one caveat when leasing out her vessels to her pirateers, but it was a bit of a stopper, for she decreed that they were not to be used for boarding, for fear of their destruction by fire, or serious injury while grappling. She did, however, also stipulate that any booty seized by her ships would be hers by right, thus requiring the return while denying the means of acquisition. She was also more willing to loan out her older models than the sleek new galleons that John Hawkins was bringing off the stocks.
Thus to Hawkins, in his earlier role as a slave trader, she loaned the old-fashioned high-sided carrack Jesus of Lubeck, which had plenty of hold room in which to cram slaves. When she proved too unseaworthy to handle the hurricane that hit Hawkins’s ships off Cuba in 1568, he was forced to turn back to shelter at San Juan de Ulua, where she received a severe mauling from the Spanish. This was the incident which provided Drake with the excuse to set out on his rampage of revenge and reprisal. If Jesus had been a more seaworthy vessel, perhaps, the course of pirate history would have been much altered. A similar ‘what if’ happened a few years later with another unseaworthy royal ship, Tyger.
Tyger had been built as a galleass in 1546, but converted to a ship in 1549. In 1584 she sailed as Grenville’s flagship in his voyage to Virginia to establish Ralegh’s pirate base at Roanoke. Here, in an attempt to pass through a gap in the Carolinas Outer Banks, ‘through the unskilfulness of the Master whose name was Fernando, the Admiral struck ground, and sunk.’ In fact she only grounded but, unlike Golden Hind, the effect was to split open her timbers, so that ‘the salt water came so abundantly into her, that the most part of his corn, salt, meat, rice, biscuit and other provisions that he should have left with them that remained behind him in that country was spoiled.’ Also lost was the seed for the crops, meaning that Ralph Lane and his 107 men would not be self-sufficient for their year-long sojourn on the shores of Virginia. This forced them to scrounge from a resentful, hostile, native population, whose subsistence economy could not support the strangers who were then reduced to grubbing roots and gathering shellfish. No wonder they abandoned their settlement when Drake offered them the opportunity so to do, just one year after they had landed so full of hope. Thus did poor ship-husbandry influence the early history of the English in America.13
Tyger’s grounding did her no permanent harm, for she was finally condemned in 1605, almost sixty years old! Sadly, she was built one year too late to feature in the wonderful, if inaccurate, roll of royal vessels, created by Anthony Anthony, Henry VIII’s armourer in 1545.
A year after Tyger returned to England, having made the fleet’s admiral, Richard Grenville, a fortune when he seized the laggardly unescorted treasure ship Santa Maria on the voyage home, Ralegh ordered from the yard at Deptford a flagship for his growing private pirate fleet, the great Ark Ralegh which, at 555 tons, would be one of the largest ships constructed in England to that date. Her keel length was 103ft, her beam 37ft and she had a draught of 16ft. A fully rigged, four-masted vessel, she needed a crew of 250 seamen and thirty-two gunners to sail and man her forty-two guns, distributed on two gun decks.
Ironically, but indicatively, Ark Ralegh was never deployed as the flagship of her eponymous owner’s pirate fleet, nor loaned for any of his pirateering voyages. She was too grand for the queen not to covet and before her maiden voyage, the more elderly maiden, Elizabeth, wheedled it out of Ralegh’s possession with the sweetest smile that ever twisted an arm and had her transferred into her own navy, in an arrangement with which Ralegh could only gallantly consent. Renamed Ark Royal, she became the first of a many an illustrious Royal Navy ship to bear that name, winning her first battle honours just two years later as Howard’s flagship in the fight against the Spanish Armada. The Lord Admiral was in no doubt as to the bargain Elizabeth had procured telling her ‘that her money was well given . . . for I think her the odd ship in the world for all conditions; and truly I think that there can be no great ship make me change and go out of her.’ The fact that the queen had not paid a single penny for her does not detract from Howard’s enthusiasm.
In 1596 Howard again flew his flag in Ark Royal when he led the raid on Cadiz, but she saw little action after that date. During the reign of James I she had both a name change, becoming Anne Royal, after his Danish queen, and a refit, overseen in 1608 by the famous shipwright Phineas Pett. But her days of glory were over. In 1625 she sailed again to Cadiz as the flagship of Lord Wimbledon on that ignominious failed expedition. After that she remained idle but seaworthy until she stove in her timbers with an unsecured anchor and sank in the Medway in 1636, only to be raised and almost immediately condemned, being broken up in 1638.
The queen’s ships that did sail under pirate command had limited success. In 1593 Elizabeth loaned Cumberland several vessels as part of a strong squadron despatched to ‘invade, and destroy the powers, forces, preparations and provisions of the King of Spain.’ Two of the royal ships, Golden Lion and Bonaventure, would have been a match for any Spaniard that they encountered. The former, a bulky 560 tons, had been built in 1582 and was fitted with four demi-cannon, eight culverin, fourteen demi-culverin, nine sakers, one minion and eight fowlers. Bonaventure, with an 80ft keel length, was 20ft shorter than Lion, but carried a similar armament. Both ships had a crew of about 250 men which represented a wage and victualling bill of £379 3s a month, a price that explains why so many vessels sailed poorly provisioned and why Cumberland preferred organising his own supplies. Whoever the supplier, the costs were never negligible and frequently not covered by the residual return once charges and expenses had been met (Appendix 5). Victualling proved not to be a problem on this voyage, for a serious illness led Cumberland to abandon the voyage and return home. Thus the queen’s ships missed an opportunity to prove their worth against a Spanish fleet and extract a vengeance for Revenge.
Cumberland, being a charmer, a champion and a close relative, benefited greatly from the loan of the queen’s ships. In 1591, two years after his horrendous return voyage in her 565-ton Victory which was recounted earlier, he sailed with a small squadron to patrol off the coast of Spain while Lord Thomas Howard and Grenville lay in wait for the flota off the Azores. Cumberland himself commanded the 600-ton queen’s ship, Garland, which had a keel length of 95ft, a beam of 33ft and a draught of 17ft. Her impressive armament included sixteen culverins, fourteen demi-culverins, four sakers, two fowlers and two port pieces. In company sailed Cumberland’s own Samson, Golden Noble commanded by Monson as rear admiral, Allagarta, and the pinnace Discovery. It was on this voyage that Monson was captured, escorting a group of prizes homeward, which were recaptured by the untaken ships in their convoy, with Cumberland unable, for lack of wind and the fact that Garland was ‘evil of sail’, to come to his vice admiral’s rescue. As a result Monson spent a year in the galleys and prison before organising his escape, an episode in his career for which he took a while to forgive Cumberland. On the positive side of this voyage, Cumberland dispatched Discovery westward to warn Howard of the departure of Admiral Alonso de Bazan’s powerful fleet sailing to bring him to battle. As a result, Howard managed to get his ships out of Flores Bay moments before the Spaniards arrived, leaving just Grenville in Revenge to stay behind for death and glory, having given a fine, but foolish, demonstration of English firepower.
a Another Spanish prisoner records fifteen pieces of artillery onboard.
b Similar suffering was endured by the crew of the Bristol pirate ship Delight whose crew wrote a petition outlining why they had behaved mutinously in the Straits in February 1589.
