Читать книгу Pirate Nation - David Childs - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThere is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1599
At the age of fourteen, the fatherless Martin Frobisher was packed off to the London home of his mother’s relative, the merchant Sir John Yorke. The poor boy’s backwardness won him no preferment as a relative of that aggressive businessman, and Yorke soon decided that he could best fulfil his obligations by sending the young man off to sea. Neither did young Martin’s age or relationship earn him an easy passage. By his later testament ‘he was on the first and second voyages in the parties of Guinea’1 which took place in 1553 and 1554 to a stretch of coastal water that was to claim many an English life through illness, famishment and fighting.
These were voyages that flouted internationally understood arrangements which recognised Portugal as holding a monopoly on trade in this region; the Portuguese agents in London objected strongly to the proposal, and even tried to kidnap the two Portuguese pilots whom the merchants had hired for their first voyage. At this obstruction the Admiralty Court weighed in, imprisoning the potential saboteurs until they repented of their acts.
After many delays the adventurers departed on 12 August 1553. Their fleet was commanded by Thomas Wyndham who, having led two trading expeditions to the Barbary Coast, was one of the few Englishmen who had sailed south of Gibraltar. The ships, comprising Lion of London, Primrose and the pinnace Moon, were crewed by 140 seamen and a number of merchants, including the apprentice Martin Frobisher.
Rather than taking the Portuguese objections seriously and acting with circumspection, Wyndham chose to accept them as a challenge, behaving with a cavalier contempt towards all from that nation whom he encountered. Having called at Madeira for victuals, he sailed and seized two Portuguese vessels just outside the harbour. He then crossed to launch a foiled raid on Deserta Island, retreating with several other ships as prizes. Unsatisfied with the completion of his trade on the Mina Coast, Wyndham subsequently ignored the advice of his Portuguese pilots, carried especially for this role, and sailed into the Bight of Benin, thus becoming one of the first Englishmen to justify the saw: ‘Beware and take care of the Bay of Benin/Where few come out although many go in.’
Wyndham, along with many of his crew, was soon fatally stricken with Benin’s portfolio of diseases, meaning that Lion had to be abandoned, as too few fit men remained to sail her. Then, possibly because the pilots had lost interest, instead of hauling out into the Atlantic to catch the favourable trade-winds, the ignorant navigators made slow passage homeward, close to the coast and feeding the trailing sharks with the bodies of their dead companions.
Forty survivors, some of them dying, worked the two frail vessels up the Thames in May 1554. As those unhappy few represented a major saving in wages, the investors were more than content with the goods that were disembarked. The voyage had been an epic of incompetence, during which the crew had endured most of the perils known to English mariners, along with some new ones. Few teenagers would have survived such a deep baptism into life afloat; few would not have been scarred by what they witnessed – Frobisher throve.2 When in November 1554 the next Guinea-bound fleet sailed from Dartmouth under the command of John Lok (whose relative, Michael, would sponsor Frobisher’s voyages to find a northwest passage), Frobisher was embarked.
This was another three-ship group with Trinity of London the admiral, being accompanied by John Evangelist and Bartholomew. Lok had learned from the earlier errors of Wyndham and his ships sailed directly to what is now the coast of Liberia to purchase pepper and gold. The local traders only insisted on one caveat: that a hostage be landed for the duration of the trading. Whether it was a short straw, a shortage of years, a desire for adventure or, given his emerging character, a wish to be rid of an awkward hand, Frobisher was the one selected to be landed. And thus it was that when a Portuguese warship hove in sight, the English weighed anchor and fled, leaving their young colleague behind them to be locked up in the infamous fort at São Jorge da Minas, where much of the high-value trading goods were stowed for safe-keeping.
For Frobisher the fort was an open prison and he charmed his jailers sufficiently to be allowed out hunting during his nine-month stay. It was probably over a year before he saw England again. For his foster-father, Sir John Yorke, he was no great loss, being expendable while at sea and an extra mouth to feed when ashore. He certainly does not seem to have considered Frobisher to be worth a ransom. Neither did he indulge in fatted calf-killing when the wanderer returned: Frobisher appears to have been denied both his share of the expedition’s profit and his back pay. A mutual good-riddance ensued.
A cloud cloaks the activities of the masterless Frobisher for the next few years, although there are some hints that he undertook another two voyages to Guinea, possibly in command. Whether or not he did, he drew the conclusion that piracy paid better and was less dangerous than attempts at semi-legitimate trading. Maybe, following his treatment, he harboured a desire to revenge himself on the merchant class who had considered his life as of so little value, in much the same way as Drake swore to be revenged on the Spanish after their treachery at San Juan de Ulua. Maybe, as a young man who could handle a ship but very little else, he followed a logical career progression. Whatever his reasoning, for the next decade Frobisher was a pirate and, being Frobisher, he made a shambles of it.
The young pirate’s initial plan does seem to have been based on a good idea. In company with the notorious pirate Henry Strangways (how did they meet?) it seems he intended to make a raid on the fortress store at São Jorge da Minas, the layout of which he would have known in great detail. Still, it was not the best-laid plan and it was totally upset when in September 1559 Strangways was brought before the Admiralty Court, accused of planning this very endeavour. On this occasion the hardened pirate might have considered himself unlucky, not only because accusations of conspiracy were more frequently linked to treasonable plots than plundering expeditions, but also because the subtle difference between breaking trade embargoes and raiding a friendly nation’s warehouses was a distinction based on political expediency, rather than illegal activity. Had the plan remained concealed and a richly rewarding raid taken place, there would have been every possibility that the right size bribe in the right podgy palms would have allowed the miscreants to escape unscathed. In the dock, Strangways laid the blame for the plan on his young friend, a ploy that earned him his pardon. After that one appearance in the court record, Frobisher exits the stage yet again making his next appearance in a farce performed in 1563.
By this time he had returned to Yorkshire, where his brother John had part-ownership with a John Appleyard of the modestly named ship John Appleyard aka Bark Frobisher (presumably depending whose turn it was to command). Appleyard had obtained letters of marque issued by the French Huguenot leader, the prince of Condé, which probably licensed the holder to seize only French Catholic vessels. Few pirates, many of whom could claim to be illiterate, took notice of the fine print in their authorisations, even when the caveats were backed up with the requirement to post a bond, in this case of about £50, as a guarantee of good behaviour. The Appleyard letters ordered the captains of this three-ship group not to ‘robbe, spoyle, infest, trouble, evil intreate, apprehende, ne take any Portingales, Spaniardes, or any other persouns whiche be in league and amitie with her majestie’, an undertaking that they felt would be more honoured in the breach than the observance.
There is a good indication of the company that Frobisher brothers had been keeping of late, in that their fellow commander was Peter Killigrew, a member of the piratical princes of Cornwall who dominated seaborne crime in the West Country from their stronghold of Pendennis Castle, with the added aura of untouchability that came with the appointment of Sir John Killigrew as the commissioner for piracy in Cornwall
The three ships sailed south in March and in May entered Plymouth Sound to dispose of the cargo legally taken from five French Catholic vessels. Immediately things began to unravel, for the goods were seized, the Admiralty Court justifying this action by accusing Martin Frobisher of aiding and abetting another pirate, Thomas Cobham, in a fierce fight against a Spanish ship, Katherine. Cobham claimed that he had always suspected his target to have been French and thus was quite at liberty to show his gratitude to Frobisher for Anne Appleyard’s assistance by rewarding that skipper with a part of the prize cargo of wines and tapestries, some of which was disposed of at Baltimore in Ireland, before the ship returned to Plymouth to sell the rest.
Unfortunately, the pirates’ actions had sparked off a diplomatic row. The tapestries had been sent by the Spanish ambassador in London, Guzmán de Silva, as a gift to Philip of Spain; more unfortunate still was that this was also a period in Elizabeth’s roller-coaster relationship with Spain in which she was favouring appeasement. The pirates and their plunder were both seized, with the former being sent to London under escort.
In London the brothers gave a good account of themselves, and they and their French prizes were freed. However, in their absence John Appleyard’s agent, the well-connected Thomas Bowes, had travelled to Plymouth and, quoting Privy Council authority, removed Katherine’s wine from bondage and disappeared with both the wine and, possibly, the tapestries. All was unravelling for the brothers who, no sooner than they were released, found themselves cited in a lawsuit for the recovery of the wine, instigated by their one-time partner, John Appleyard. Unable to produce the barrels, they were flung into Launceston Jail on 15 July, from where they were sent to London in September to appear before a sympathetic Privy Council, who once more ordered their release.
Not so their casual acquaintance, Cobham. On being apprehended he was taken to the Tower to endure the harshest of punishments. This began with him being stripped and hung upside down so that the soles of his feet could be beaten, a most painful torture. Then he was spreadeagled on the filthy cell floor with a sharp stone under his back and a heavy round of shot placed on his stomach. This excruciating punishment, coupled with starvation rations, would have brought about his certain death, had not friends in high places (the family name gives an indication as to whom they were) pleaded successfully for his release. Yet again it was not the seriousness of a crime that had dictated the severity of the sentence, but to whom the miscreant could turn to for support.
Undeterred by their lucky escape, the now impecunious Frobishers reverted to their chosen career and it was not long before their practice of non-selective prize-taking was again being brought to the attention of the courts. In May 1565 they were named as the plunderers of a cargo of cochineal being carried in the Spanish ship, Flying Spirit. Escaping judgement, they amassed sufficient ill-gotten funds to purchase their own craft, the 100-ton Mary Flower, a ship in which Frobisher staged one of his several fiascos.
Frobisher joined his new command on Tyneside in September. By then she had been made seaworthy and just needed victualling, a master and crew, and a fair wind to waft her southward into the predatory shipping lanes. The victualling took some time to complete, probably because of a lack of ready cash, and it was not until late December that she slipped down to the sea on the outgoing tide.
Frobisher had prepared a plausible cover-story to mask his intentions, telling the authorities that his destination was Guinea, although a crew of just thirty-six would indicate that he was not making any allowance for the high death-rate that this destination inevitably inflicted.
Not that he was going to experience such mortality. Off the Humber, Mary Flower was pounded by a storm so fierce that she lost both her sails and her masts, and only Frobisher’s skill in beaching her on the sands near Scarborough saved the crew from drowning. Once beached, the brothers’ penury resulted in their being detained, for they had insufficient funds to pay for either the ship’s repairs and refloating, or to meet the demands of creditors who had travelled down the coastal road to pay them a visit. The result was that the ship was impounded until some outstanding debts were settled.
Then, with beer, bread, biscuit and beef embarked and paid for, officers from the Court of Admiralty turned up and took Martin Frobisher into custody for questioning. Very sensibly John Frobisher did not wait for him to return, but floated off, only to meet more stormy weather. Records show that he passed into the Thames in May – the voyage from Tyneside having taken four and a half months to accomplish. What happened thereafter is not recorded but the Admiralty judge, Dr Lewes, was not convinced by Martin Frobisher’s explanation as to his lawful intentions. An attempt was made to frame him for the seizure of the Flemish ship White Unicorn, whose path approximated to that taken by Mary Flower, but when this failed to hold water he had to be released.
However fierce the force of the court’s warning to Frobisher, it does not seem to have penetrated into his consciousness. Within days, maybe hours, of being released, he had obtained letters of marque from the exiled Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny, authorising him to seize any French Catholic vessels. Such a letter acted as a passport to a new command, and it was not long before Frobisher was back at sea as captain of Robert, which was based at Rye, along with several other pirate ships.
Once again the inability to read the small print on Coligny’s commission was the undoing of Frobisher, who was soon taking prizes based on the riches rather than the religion of their owners. Protests were made and noted until, in March 1569, Frobisher was apprehended ashore and charged with the seizing of Mary of Montaigne and the disposal of her cargo of wine. Naturally, Frobisher pleaded innocence and in keeping with tradition blamed his absent partner for the deed. Although his crew turned against him and stated that he had taken a share of 50 tunnes of wine, he was released to return to his established ways. But this time he had made an implacable and industrious foe. Robert Friar, the owner of Mary’s stolen wine, turned detective and tracked down most of his missing barrels, also acquiring evidence that Frobisher, far from being innocent, had sold six barrels of the wine to a merchant in Chichester. Yet again, Dr Lewes sent his officers out to invite Frobisher to explain himself.
He was apprehended in Aldeburgh to which he had come in his new ship, the prize Magdalene, which he had exchanged for Robert. It was a case of foolishness overtopping misfortune. Magdalene and her cargo of lead, ivory and wine was owned by a syndicate of merchants of Rouen who had contacts inside the Privy Council, whom they petitioned for restitution and redress. The thinking pirate would have disposed of both ship and cargo privily at Baltimore, as Frobisher had done with his earlier haul of wine, but no one ever accused Frobisher of being too bright. By now he had also to explain his involvement with the capture and ransacking of Saint John of Bordeaux and several other vessels not covered by Coligny’s letters.
Even if Dr Lewes’s patience had not run out, that of the Privy Council, anxious to keep international relations on an even keel, had. In late August the High Court of Admiralty judge was given clear direction:
We send unto you by this bearer, one of the knight Marshall’s men, Martyn Furbusher, against whom you know what grievous complaints have been made of divers and sundry piracies by him committed. We pray you therefore to send him to the Marshalsea where he may remain in sure and safe custody, until you send for him again and may upon such information as he is to be charged withal, proceed against him with severity . . .
Lewes responded by throwing Frobisher into the Marshalsea, his release dependent on the payment of a massive fine of £900, which was well outside his ability to pay. At that time a sailor on a merchant ship might receive £10 a year, a sum which a crew member of a reasonably successful pirate ship might occasionally be paid after the taking of a moderately rich cargo. When Frobisher appeared to turn traitor in 1572, he was rewarded with £20 for offering to bring three hundred English seamen over to the Spanish side. Now, incarcerated, with neither accumulated wealth nor rich relations, Frobisher faced a life sentence: many of his fellow practitioners would have been sentenced to death for lesser crimes. That he was not might be due to the fact that most of his illegally-seized vessels were foreign and not English-owned.
Yet rot inside he did not. Along his erratic and unsuccessful way he had made just the sort of contacts a pirate in distress needed. The Huguenot exiles sprang to his aid, with the Cardinal of Châtillon writing to William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, that the wife of Captain Frobisher had begged him to write and require Cecil’s aid in delivering her husband from the misery and captivity in which he found himself.3
More important was the involvement of Lord Admiral Clinton whose wife, Elizabeth Fiennes, made an offer to buy Robert, the sale of which would have made a major contribution to the fine. In the end it did not require payment, for on another February note ordering the transfer of Frobisher from the Marshalsea to the Fleet prison, above the words stating that the pirate be kept in jail until ‘he shall satisfy and pay the same’, Cecil scrawled ‘or otherwise be released by us.’ That release took place in March.
As a sign of his undeserved fortune, in October 1571 Frobisher was appointed to command Carrack Lane and a squadron of three other Portsmouth-based ships entrusted to enforce the more stringent anti-piracy laws that Elizabeth had approved as part of her attempt to clear the Channel of foreign freebooters. Now, rather than pay her professionals to do the job, she contracted out to reformed pirates, believing them to be more knowledgeable of the ways of their late colleagues, besides being the cheaper option. Cheap, but not necessarily efficacious: Frobisher cruised and failed to make contact. His obvious partiality for his past companions failed to become an embarrassment for his new employers when his task was switched to that of transporting the army and its accoutrements to Ireland. Here indeed was gainful employment, but the temptations remained, for Frobisher was now required to sail past eminently seizable, laden merchant ships, giving them a friendly salute rather than a salvo. In the end, he cracked and reverted to his old ways, escorting several French ships into Plymouth – claiming them as legitimate prizes. The arrest warrants were not long awaiting issue.
However, Frobisher had become associated with legitimate maritime tasks and had also shown himself to be most biddable in areas that required a certain derring-do. Over the next few years he entered into the murky world of treachery and double-dealing, claiming clean hands however muddied the waters through which he passed. By 1574 his unsuccessful independent piratical career was over: in future Frobisher was to serve the state, which valued the skills which they thought he must have acquired through his illegal activities. In 1576, ’77 and ’78 he made three voyages to the far north of America: the first to search for the northwest passage to Cathay; the second two to mine for gold. They were two tasks which he completed with his usual lack of success. However, others sailing astern of him on similar voyages were able to open up new opportunities for those with a lust for wealth and limited scruples. Among these were John Hawkins and the ‘master-thief’, Francis Drake.
Drake might have been a Devon man, but he spent his apprenticeship on the opposite shore, off Kent, whence his father had fled from Tavistock to avoid either prosecution or persecution or both.4 Here, on a hulk moored in the Medway, the elder Drake made a sort of living running an early mission to seamen, while apprenticing his son Francis to the master of a small bark, who taught him all the pilotage skills necessary to handle a ship safely in the featureless and mud-bank strewn waters of the Thames. When the ship owner died, he bequeathed his craft to the young man, but Drake dreamed of further horizons and together with a few of his crew sailed for Plymouth to offer his services to his distant relative, John Hawkins.
Like Sir John Yorke, John Hawkins, the son of the Plymouth merchant and convicted pirate, William Hawkins, saw trading opportunities in the steaming and unhealthy shores of Guinea. His interest, however, lay not in gold and ivory, but in a human cargo. He aimed to turn the trading voyage from simple outward and homeward legs into a triangular trade with the West Indies, as he tried to brush aside the Portuguese and Spanish monopolies on the capture and sale of slaves. With him on those voyages sailed the young Francis Drake, keen to learn the science of navigation beyond the sight of land.
In 1562 John Hawkins, after a few exploratory trading voyages as far as the Canaries, sailed on his first slaving voyage. He had planned well, establishing a partnership with a merchant family in the Canaries who would guarantee his fleet a friendly watering and recuperation stop while on passage. Just three small ships, Salomon of 140 tons, and Jonas and Swallow just 40 and 30 tons respectively, departed from Plymouth, but they were precursors of a great armada of infamy – the slave traders. Hawkins, as did those that came after, realised that if a reasonable profit was to be made from the venture, then the slaves would have to be crammed between decks which meant, paradoxically, they would suffer a high death rate. Nevertheless, although the trade might be inglorious it was not piracy. The means employed to assist the voyagers, however, were.
Reaching the coast of Sierra Leone, Hawkins seized his first slaves from several Portuguese vessels which he captured. And along with those four hundred slaves came a by-cargo of cloves and ivory which was sent home in a ship commanded by Hawkins’s cousin, the young Francis Drake. Hawkins himself sailed to Hispaniola where he arrived having lost about half of his slaves, but getting a good price for the survivors. With an eye to the even greater profit the sale could make, Hawkins bought all the sugar, hides, pearls and ginger available in the warehouses of Isabella. His eyes were larger than that which his ships’ holds could stomach, as a result of which he had to load two Spanish ships with the overflow and dispatch them back to Spain, with instructions to offload them through an English factor in Seville. That this arrangement would work was a naive assumption, for the cargo of both ships was impounded as contraband, one at Lisbon and one at Seville. Hawkins did not receive compensation and thus made merely a good profit rather than an extraordinary one from his voyage. The reduced return was, however, sufficient to interest the avaricious queen, who became a major partner in Hawkins’s next voyage through the loan of two of her own ships.
As his flagship Hawkins would now sail in the elderly, but capacious, 700-ton Jesus of Lubeck, purchased from Hamburg by Henry VIII in 1545. Aged she might be, but she represented the queen’s willingness to approve and invest in a voyage, the purpose of which was very apparent: the capture and illegal trading of slaves. Moreover, both the procurement and the disposal of this human cargo would involve her directly in the breaking of internationally recognised trading embargoes held by Portugal in West Africa and Spain in the West Indies. The vessel thus represented a significant shift in the move from royal indulgence of wayward seamen to royal involvement in illegal trading – the first step to the approval of piracy.
Yet outwardly the queen was still active in her pursuit of pirates, if only to calm down the exasperated and protesting ambassadors from her aggrieved European neighbours. In November 1564 she asked the Admiralty Court judge, David Lewes, to carry out an investigation into the complaints by the Spanish ambassador about piratical depredations committed at sea on the subjects of the king of Spain. As the inquiry was to involve the county commissioners against piracy, many of whom were well-known supporters of the trade, a disinterested report was most unlikely.5 She had also allayed the fears raised by the Spanish ambassador, Guzmán de Silva, about Hawkins’s intentions by telling the incredulous gentleman that Hawkins, far from being a pirate, was just an honest and wealthy trader, to which de Silva retorted that if this were so, he failed to see why the ships were carrying so many armed men.
In company with the creaking Jesus of Lubeck were Solomon and Swallow, as well as a 50-ton vessel, Tiger. Francis Drake was included in the crew of just 150 men, but still only as an ordinary seaman. Stopping to call on his friends in the Canaries, the refreshed Hawkins sailed on to the Guinea coast where he committed the first piratical act of the voyage by capturing and de-storing a small Portuguese fishing fleet. His second was the capture of some larger vessels along with their slaves and other valuable cargo, all of which was recorded by their aggrieved owners, who petitioned the Privy Council, more in hope than expectation of restitution. Further slaves, to a total of about four hundred, were captured after some severe skirmishing ashore.
This time the Atlantic crossing proved not so deadly for the slaves, possibly because the larger Jesus of Lubeck allowed for less cramped conditions below decks and the freer circulation of air. Even then, about thirty died before landfall. There just remained the problem of disposing of the remainder at a good price. To achieve that profit from communities who were well aware that they were forbidden to trade with the English required the repetitive use of a tactic, the purpose of which was well understood by both sides. First, Hawkins would state his innocence in that he had been forced westward by strong winds and now very much needed a licence to trade to obtain fresh victuals. This the local magnate would refuse to grant. Hawkins would then threaten violence, even landing an armed party to look sternly at the locals who, subdued by such a threat, would reluctantly trade, simply to spare their town and to rid themselves of the pestilent foreigner. Honour satisfied and excuses provided, an amicable exchange ensued. Once that charade was complete, trade was brisk and very, very profitable.
Guzmán de Silva reported home that Hawkins had returned with gold, pearls, hides and sugar to the value of 50,000 ducados, which, if it were so, represented a profit of 60 per cent. With such a profit available, it was worth the queen regarding the source with a merry myopia and the protestations of the Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors with a selective deafness. Hawkins could gain no more obvious approval than from her continuing to loan him her ships. Yet this time strange auguries might have been seen as prophesying doom.
In September 1567 Hawkins’s fleet of six ships was anchored in the shelter of the Cattewater below Plymouth town, waiting for a fair wind to waft them southwesterly. But even at this stage in the preparation, Hawkins was aware that the queen might be tempted to prevent his departure or to insist on certain caveats which would impinge on his profits. Chief amongst these was her usual desire to placate the Spanish, in the person of de Silva, by assuring him that Hawkins would observe the embargoes of which he was fully aware. Indeed, in a way her loan of both Jesus of Lubeck and the smaller Minion was a guarantee of Hawkins’s good behaviour, a fact about which the fleet admiral sought to reassure her, writing from the anchorage: ‘I do ascertain Your Highness that I have provision sufficient and an able army to defend our charge and to bring home (with God’s help) forty thousand marks gain without the offence of the least of any of Your Highness’ allies or friends’ – which if true would hardly have necessitated the shipping of ‘an able army’.
Hawkins’s letter-writing was interrupted by an urgent summons to come on deck. A lookout had sighted a squadron of seven Spanish warships heading down Plymouth Sound, making towards their own fleet anchorage. Hawkins took one look and ordered his crew to action stations, secure in the knowledge that the guns he had mounted could do grave damage to any vessels closing with hostile intent. At the time England and Spain were at peace but, as with rival football teams, it was not the management, but the fans that could cause trouble to erupt.
Hawkins gazed at the mast tops of the steadily approaching fleet to see if, as custom dictated, they would dip their ensigns as a token of respect and a signal of peaceful intent. The ensigns remained close up, while there was neither a slackening of speed nor an indication of an intention to anchor in the outer harbour so, once Hawkins was sure that the insolent foreigners were within range of his guns, he fired a warning salvo in their direction. When that failed to stem the oncoming fleet or cause them to dip their ensigns, Hawkins ordered his crews to lower their sights and the second salvo hit the hulls. That was warning enough: the foreign fleet went about, dipping its ensigns as it did so, and anchored out of range of the irritated English. From their admiral an envoy was soon dispatched to voice the protests of the Spanish commander, the aristocratic Alphonse de Borgogne, at their rough reception. Hawkins countered by claiming that the insult to the Crown which the brazen entry of the foreign fleet had caused required a stern response.
Shortly after this incident Hawkins received a letter from the queen, fully endorsing his mission. Unfettered by any of the restraining caveats he had anticipated, his third and final slaving voyage got underway.
Great storms soon scattered the fleet and showed up the crankiness of the leaky and aged Jesus, but Hawkins, by dint of his carefully worded sailing orders, managed to reunite his ships in the Canaries before descending to Cabo Blanco, the landfall for all Guinea voyages, and thus the site of a small Portuguese fort. Treating the garrison with disdain, Hawkins surveyed four abandoned Portuguese ships and selected the most seaworthy to sail with him, cheekily accepting a promissory note for the sale of two of the others back to the legal owner.
After one botched slaving raid secured far fewer captives than they wished for, the English sailed on to Cabo Rojo for supplies, much of which were seized from seven Portuguese ships. A few more slave raids were then carried out, with the alerted villages yielding few recruits for Hawkins’s hold. One of these raids resulted in a rare cause of a boat capsizing: it was attacked and smashed by a herd of hippopotamus, their herbivore credentials coming into question by the claim that two of the men were eaten by the beasts.
Eventually an alliance, rather than a raid, brought Hawkins his slaves, but only after his men had witnessed a cannibalistic feast from the bodies of the slain. For the loss of some sixty men he had gained a cargo of five hundred wretches, whom he would endeavour to keep alive for the seven-week Atlantic crossing on a diet of dried beans, the very stores that had alerted de Silva to his true intentions so many months earlier in London. Given the number of slaves that he managed to sell in the Indies and the group that were left unsold, it has been estimated that around one hundred of them died on passage, a death rate that scarcely dented his profit.6
Having gone through the usual charade of threatening and cajoling the governors, by late August Hawkins had made sufficient profit to satisfy the queen, himself and the other investors so, reducing his fleet to the most seaworthy of his vessels, he led the remaining eight northeast towards the Florida Channel from where they would turn homeward. They never made it. A hurricane, the full violence of which is well-described by Rayner Unwin, fell upon the fleet, leaving in its wake a flagship that was no longer seaworthy and in desperate need of a sheltered anchorage before she foundered.7 Basing his decision on local knowledge obtained from the pilots of two captured Spanish ships, Hawkins went about and led his fleet limping back south to the island harbour of San Juan de Ulua, the port for Vera Cruz.
Unlike the welcome that had been given to the similar-sized Spanish fleet when it had entered Plymouth Sound at the start of Hawkins’s voyage, the inhabitants of San Juan fired a five-gun salute and waved and cheered as the English entered harbour: they had been mistaken for their own flota expected at any time soon. By the time the error had been realised it was too late to prevent Hawkins from berthing his ships’ bows to the jetty with kedge anchors run out to secure his stern. While this was being done he sent parties ashore to seize the nearby gun emplacements, the crews of which had conveniently fled on realising the ‘the Lutherans’ were upon them. There followed a stand-off which neither side risked upsetting and if such an armed hostility had continued it is likely that Hawkins would have managed to complete his repairs and continue his voyage unimpeded.
Then a day later, on 17 September, the balance was upset when the anticipated fleet arrived, and the authorities ashore had to inform the admiral, Fransisco de Luxan, and his very important passenger, the new viceroy of New Spain, Martín Enríquez, that their berths were occupied by English ships. No viceroy would have wished to begin his reign by accepting such a snub and when the Spanish finally entered harbour, Hawkins must have known that he faced a swift and unpleasant eviction.
It was delivered by stealth, with the Spanish sneaking soldiers and gunners as close to the alert English as they dared approach under cover. The English opened fire first, but were unable to prevent their shore parties from being overwhelmed and slaughtered. To avoid the soldiers from boarding from the jetty, the English ships cut their mooring lines and drifted into the harbour, all the time firing at close-range on the enemy ships, several of which caught fire. But Jesus was too unwieldy to manoeuvre herself out of trouble, and Hawkins ordered his men to transfer both themselves and the readily reached goods to Minion, which was lying alongside. Drake in Judith was also ordered to close to assist in the evacuation, but how long she stayed to give succour is put into doubt by Hawkins’s pithy comment that she ‘forsoke us in our great misery.’
But Hawkins was also forced to ‘forsoke’. Five ships, and the unlucky remnants of their crews, were abandoned at San Juan de Ulua, the ships to be ransacked for their riches and the men racked for their religion. Out at sea the survivors had exchanged one hell for another. Judith made haste homeward, arriving in Plymouth on 22 January 1569. A sympathetic veil has been drawn over her return passage, for it must have been a low point in the career of her captain that he was unlikely to forget.
We know more about the sad voyage of John Hawkins. With scarce enough provisions to feed her normal crew, Minion was far too overcrowded for many to survive the journey home. Hawkins was forced therefore to close the coast of Mexico and land ninety men at Campeche near the town of Tampico. Even then, with every scrap of food consumed, including the trapped rodent population, men starved. In an ironic imitation of the westward voyage, the ship left a trail of bodies in her wake, but this time they were the corpses of Englishmen not slaves.
Near Galicia Hawkins captured and emptied three Portuguese vessels of their provisions, although there is no evidence to support the claim that he cut off the limbs of their crews and flung their living torsos overboard. A few days later he anchored off Ponteverda where, deploying the only weapons he had left, charm and bluff, he managed to purchase sufficient supplies to set sail homeward. The weather, however, had more tricks to play and Minion was forced back to shelter near Vigo, from where she finally got underway on 20 January to anchor in Mounts Bay four days later.
The casualty list was lengthy. The battle at San Juan de Ulua had claimed 130 English dead with fifty-two more taken prisoner, while to the ninety landed at Tampico had to be added a further forty-five who died during Minion’s voyage home. Few survived to totter ashore at Plymouth, ridge-ribbed and ragged. The two leaders applied both for restitution of goods and the repatriation of prisoners. Eventually some of the latter came home with great tales to tell, but of the former there was to be no redress, principally because the queen refused the issue of a letter of reprisal. She had her reasons. For once Elizabeth must have realised that she had allowed her ruffians to sail in her ships far too close to the wind which was by now chilling rapidly in wintry and warlike blasts from Spain
Hawkins’s and Drake’s reactions to the defeat and humiliation at San Juan de Ulua were very different. The elder man withdrew from an active career at sea to turn his fertile mind to management, including that of his own pirate vessels. In 1575 he proposed that, for an investment of £3,750, he be allowed to take three royal ships, Dreadnought, Foresight and Bull, and five merchant ships to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet, which if successful would produce, he claimed, a profit of £2 million. The plan was not approved but neither, more significantly, did Hawkins endeavour to lead an expedition for this purpose himself. Instead, he chose to employ his busy mind with internal quarrels, deliberately picking a fight with the Wynter brothers on the Navy Board by claiming malfeasance and his own ability to provide a more cost-effective, honest system of management. By 1578, with the support of Cecil, now Lord Burghley, Hawkins was Treasurer of the Navy.
Drake, his eager apprentice, sought a more confrontational role to gain his revenge. He would never more sail on a trading voyage, exchanging culverin for coin as his means of barter. Appropriately for one whose exploits would earn for him the nickname from the Spanish of El Draque, the dragon, Drake sailed again for the Indies in 1570 onboard Dragon with Swan in company. Little is known of this voyage, but when he returned to those waters the following year in Swan it was to ‘rob divers barks’ of goods to the value of at least £66,000, almost £40,000 more than the inflated claim made by John Hawkins for his losses at San Juan de Ulua. Drake had simply committed several acts of piracy, as the Panamanian authorities recognised when they wrote to King Philip informing him that they had:
Sent out three expeditions on which were expended more than 4,000 pesos; and he has always had the luck to escape. Once the fleet is gone, when the town and the port are deserted, it is plain we are going to suffer from this corsair and others, unless Your Majesty apply the remedy hoped for, by sending a couple of galleys to protect and defend this coast and the town, which is in the greatest danger.8
However, in the early 1570s the expatriate population on the Isthmus feared the violent deprivations of the permanently present cimaroons, escaped slaves, more than they did the occasional visit by a rover. Drake’s genius was to befriend the black rebels and work with them to attack their common foe for mutual advantage. Oxenham, endeavouring to repeat Drake’s success in 1576, failed and was captured and executed, largely because he upset these erstwhile allies. He also failed because Drake’s visit a few months earlier had alerted the authorities, who were ready to respond to the next assault on their trading routes. Drake himself was wise enough to avoid returning to the scenes of his earlier successes.
Drake was a great believer in seizing the moment and in the next few years the time was ripe for West-Country adventurers to enrich themselves while the queen, her council and Admiralty Court were focused on events at the other end of the Channel. These were years of moment affecting the whole of Europe as the struggle for control over the Netherlands between the Spanish occupiers and their rebellious subjects became more bloody and more expensive. It was the behaviour of pirates in the waters between Dover and Flanders that was exercising the English councillors, foreign ambassadors and the unfortunate merchants and ship owners who were struggling both to transport their cargoes unmolested and to be compensated for those goods that were being seized on a regular basis. Activities in the West Indies lay far beyond the horizon of these protagonists.
One Sunday in August 1573 the church bells of Plymouth pealed to welcome Drake home from a voyage in which he had ambushed a mule train loaded with silver bars, thrown off his pursuers and re-embarked with another fortune in his hold, but one bought at the cost of the loss of over half his crew, including two of his brothers. They would not be the last of that family to lose their lives or liberty on these ventures until Drake himself was ‘slung between the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay.’ For the moment, to avoid over-much embarrassment through the lionising of her rover, the queen was content to see Drake dispatched as the naval adviser to the earl of Essex who was trying to pacify Ireland; it also gave the council a chance to see whether he could be entrusted with the less rewarding role of loyal service to the Crown. He succeeded but his Iberian infamy remained: in1575 Philip sent Elizabeth a list of those Englishmen whom he considered to be no more than pirates – it included Sir William Wynter, a member of the Navy Board, the Drakes and the Hawkins brothers. There is no evidence to indicate that Philip was mistaken. A few years later and he might have added another name to the list.
In contrast to Francis Drake, whose family background is always shown to be modest, Walter Ralegh’s father was a country gentlemen moving in the sort of society about which Jane Austen would later write. But he was a pirate. A case brought before the Admiralty Court in 1557 is worth some examination for it is an example of the way such gentlemen pirates behaved prior to the targeting of the treasure fleets. The petition was brought by Portuguese merchants whose ship, Conception of Vienna, was seized off the Scillies on 26 August while on passage between Ireland and Portugal. Her attackers arrived in two vessels, Nicholas of Kenton, commanded by John Ralegh, and Katheryne Ralegh, whose captain was his brother George, both sons of Walter Ralegh senior. The Portingale did not surrender easily, struggling to escape all day while receiving ‘divers pieces of ordnance’. In the late afternoon she was boarded by fifteen sword-waving sailors, who forced the crew below decks and kept them battened down for nine days until the ship was driven into Cork by a gale. Here the captives were set ashore while Conception was sailed back to Cornwall, where the crew were challenged as to her identity, once by the master of another merchant ship and once by the captain of the naval vessel Anne Gallant. Unhelpful questions ceased, in the first instance with a bribe of one bale of cloth, in the second instance with a bribe of two bales of cloth. Warned by his men of the interest in the prize, Walter Ralegh told her crew to describe her as French and ordered her to be brought to Exmouth where, it being his home port, questions would not be asked. Once more the wind intervened and Conception was blown into Looe, where she was seized by the Admiralty agent and her crew brought in for questioning. Faced with this difficulty, Walter Ralegh wrote to the Lord Admiral, offering him a bribe of £100 to help resolve matters in the Raleghs’ favour. This ploy having failed to prevent George’s arrest, Walter Ralegh put up 500 marks to get his son released on bail, being quite happy, so it seems, to forfeit this amount when the miscreant failed to keep his appointment in court.
While all this intrigue was afoot, the Portuguese merchants remained without either their ship or their goods. Their plea to the court deserves quoting at length for it sums up the frustrations that so many felt about following the due process to no avail. They wrote:
And as against the said Walter Ralegh your said orators have no remedy or action by the civil law for the recovery of their ship and goods as they be informed by their learned council . . . and thus . . . piteously spoiled and robbed of their said ship and goods and not able by the ordinary course of law to recover the same being themselves but strangers and poor men without friendship and the said Walter Ralegh being a man of worship of great power and friendship in this country. In consideration whereof may it please your honours that the same Walter Ralegh may be constrained without further suit in law which your orators be not able for lack of money to follow either to bring the said John and George Ralegh his sons to have justice and execution of the law or himself to satisfy and recompense your said orators for their ship and goods.9
Summed up in heartfelt plea is the essential element that enabled piracy to thrive during Elizabeth’s reign, principally, that rank had more sway than right, so that the poor man, especially if he was foreign, could follow the law to the letter and yet be denied recompense.
With a father and brothers like that, the boyhood of Ralegh was not spent sitting on the sands at Budleigh Salterton listening to tales of the great blue yonder spun by some hairy old salt, but just waiting to join in the looting of passing trade. His first chance so to do came when his eccentric elder half-brother Humphrey Gilbert offered him a command on his ill-planned transatlantic expedition of 1578. And not only any command, but that of the queen’s ship, the 100-ton Falcon.
Gilbert, after much persistence, written and personal, had finally in June 1578 been issued with letters patent authorising him to seek out new lands in America. To assist him he assembled a bunch of pirates whose primary interest was loot, not lengthy voyages. They achieved neither, for having sailed from Dartmouth on 26 September 1578, the fleet, with the exception of Falcon, was back in that harbour, voyage abandoned, by 21 November.
Ralegh remained at sea, not to continue westward, but to attempt the taking of prizes in the Bay of Biscay. In this he was not successful, challenging superior forces and receiving a pasting which killed several of his crew and badly damaged the queen’s ship. It was a sobering experience. Thereafter Ralegh was inclined to send others to sea on his behalf. Even when he became heir to Gilbert’s charter, he sent others to America rather than sail himself. What he did do was to win sufficient royal favour to invest heavily in creating his own pirate fleet. By the time Gilbert was ready for a second attempt on America in 1583, Ralegh was in the position to lend him the modern equivalent of a quarter of a million pounds and his ship, the modestly named 200-ton Bark Ralegh. The ship returned safely, having abandoned the ill-fated voyage while still in European waters, so that it was only Ralegh’s investment that went west. A year later Ralegh was organising his own western voyages and appointing a fellow pirate, Richard Grenville, in command of the expedition to land settlers at Roanoke in 1585. Being a pirate, Grenville made the most of his opportunity by seizing a rich prize when homeward-bound.
George Clifford, 3rd earl of Cumberland, was the most senior and least successful of the piratocracy, being the only one who, in his own words, threw his land into the sea. However, it was his primrose path to poverty that led him down to the water’s edge and to seek salvation over the horizon. Along the way, a weakness for women, an inability to gamble well, either at cards or on horses, and a desire for finery saw him fling his fortune in all directions other than into his own pockets. His genial character and manly skills made him several times the queen’s champion at the joust, and Elizabeth took pleasure in his performance without making him a favourite, thus rewarding without enriching or clipping his wings. Needing to settle his debts, for he was an honourable man, Cumberland saw a fortune awaiting him in the hulls of foreign ships and towards them he, or his ships, set sail on numerous occasions. He had no time for, nor did his exalted position allow, an apprenticeship: he trained on the job and it showed.
Cumberland’s first voyage, as Purchas refers to it, sailed without the earl being onboard. Instead, he raised the money to dispatch four ships with plans for them to pass the Straits of Magellan and enter the South Seas. The admiral, commanded by Captain Robert Widrington, was Red Dragon, a 260-ton ship with a crew of 130. She left Gravesend on 26 June 1586 in company with the bark Clifford of 130 tons, with Captain Christopher Lister as vice admiral. During a wind-dictated lengthy stay at Plymouth they were joined by Captain Haws in Roe and a ‘fine’ small pinnace, Dorothy, owned, as might have been Roe, by Walter Ralegh. It seemed a fleet ideal to make passage to and cause havoc in the Spanish Pacific. Cumberland had high hopes, telling his admiral not to return home until they had £6,000 of profitable loot to unload.
The fighting, but not the fortune-making, began early. Three days after leaving Plymouth on 17 August, the group engaged sixteen hulks from Hamburg which were sailing home from Lisbon and did not wish to tarry for these pesky Englishmen. Selecting a foe, ‘Our admiral lent him a piece of ordnance which they repaid double so that we grew to some quarrel’, which the English won by boarding, only to have the time just to ‘take out of her some provisions’, before rumour of greater reward led to them endeavouring to intercept another convoy of seven ships. In this they were unsuccessful, as strong winds blew them back to Dartmouth for an enforced week’s break. After this they made passage to the Canaries, before landing in Sierra Leone where they had a St George and the Dragon-like fight with a crocodile and a less noble pillage of a native village. Then across the ocean to Brazil where they irritated a couple of townships and captured several ships loaded with appetising, but not enriching, marmalade. Their best prize ‘took fire and perished, ship, men and goods’. During this sojourn on the coast they held a major conference at which it was decided not to push southwards to the Straits of Magellan. By 29 September they were back alongside in England, giving Cumberland no reasonable return on his investment, a template for most of his subsequent efforts.
Cumberland got to sea himself the following year, when he sailed to support the English forces besieged in Sluys, only to find that he had arrived too late. Moving on to Ostend and finding that it too was soon to be besieged, he returned home in time to offer himself and Red Dragon, renamed Sampson, for service against the Armada, while he sailed in Elizabeth Bonaventure as her volunteer commander.10 In return for his contribution to that campaign, the queen loaned Cumberland Golden Lion for a piratical voyage in which he seized the slow Hare heading from Dunkirk for Spain, but was then himself driven to take shelter in Freshwater Bay off the Isle of Wight. Here, with the winds threatening to drive the ship aground, the master recommended that the mainmast be cast away but, being the queen’s property, ‘no sailor durst attempt this until his Lordship had himself stricken the first stroke.’ Safe but no longer sailable, Golden Lion limped into Portsmouth, bringing another unrewarding voyage to an end. But before that storm Cumberland had been in high spirits, writing to his wife in that spirit of optimism that endeared him not only to his queen and peers, but to subsequent generations.
Sweet Meg,
God, I must humbly thank him, hath so mightily bless me, that already I have taken a Dunkirk ship bound for Saint Lucar in Spain. I have sent Lister to see her unladen in Portsmouth, and to send all that is mine to you, which I would have you use according to your discretion, and let it be opened with secrecy. If there be anything fit to give to my Lord Chamberlain, I would have you do it, it will make him the reedier to do for me, if there be a cause. This man I have taken tells me that there are four ships now ready in Dunkirk, going for Spain. I hope within these three days to meet them, if I do, I shall make a good voyage, for all the ordnance of the galleys and rich lading. Commend me to my Lord of Warwick and my lady. Excuse me for not writing to them but I have scanty leisure to write to you.
Thus with God’s blessing to our little ones, and hearty prayers for their well being, I commit you all to God.
Yours only now and ever,
George Cumberland
That one prize scarcely earned Cumberland the praise granted to him in a letter to Essex in June 1588, in which the writer refers to Cumberland as ‘the English Lord that doth great harm to the Spanish at sea’, but it might have been the source of the ‘jewel of gold like a sacrifice’ and the ‘pair of bracelets’ which he and his wife presented to the queen on the following New Year’s Day. That aside, those voyages, along with his contribution against the Armada, equipped Cumberland, or so he believed, with the necessary experience to expand his horizons and ambitions: in 1589 he was to make his first voyage to the Azores hunting ground.
Nine years earlier, while Gilbert and Ralegh were floundering in the western Atlantic; while John Hawkins was beginning his reforms as the new Treasurer of the Navy; while Frobisher was experiencing failure in the frozen north; while the teenage, newly-married Cumberland was establishing himself in his northern estates, plain Francis Drake was engaged in the voyage that would forever change English aspirations on the rewards for roving. Before he could do this, however, he had to make sure that he had a ship that would suit his purposes, and by this time his career had advanced sufficiently for him to be able to build bespoke.
With the punishment for piracy being to be hanged in chains at Wapping, most practitioners were either foolhardy, desperate or the possessor of influential friends. (Author collection)
Before the English established trading links with the Far East, their preferred method of acquiring oriental exotica was to forcibly remove it from returning merchantmen like the ones depicted here. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Without the need for wharfage or alongside berths, pirates were able to unload while anchored in any friendly, quiet cove or creek. This picture purports to show the return of Sir Edward Michaelbourne, after a piratical, interloping voyage to the Far East in 1606. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
The circumnavigators Drake and Cavendish and the doyen of English transoceanic travel, John Hawkins, all relied on piracy to replenish their ships and return a profit. (Author collection)
The Portuguese trading fort of Sao Jorge da Mina provided an open prison for Frobisher and later a point of contact for Hawkins when he entered the slave trading business. (Author collection)
Contrary to Victorian romantic notions, Ralegh’s boyhood was not spent listening to salty tales of adventure, but in a household that practised piracy. (Author collection)
Until Hawkins, Drake and their fellow pirateers learned the art of navigation, there would have been no Englishman qualified to pose for portraits such as this, showing a professional navigating officer with globe and dividers. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
This drawing of Golden Hind reflects both the smallness of the vessel and its movement even in a modest sea. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
By the time that the queen loaned Jesus of Lubeck to John Hawkins, the ship was an old and cranky vessel; nonetheless, its presence in his fleet indicated her open approval of both piracy and slave-trading. (Peter Kirsch)
Ark Ralegh was too magnificent a vessel for the commoner, Ralegh, to retain as his pirate flagship, and he was soon forced to donate her to the queen. (Author collection)
Pirate ships deployed far from home needed to find secluded harbours where their ships could have their bottoms, scraped clean of weed, inspected for worm, and be tarred and caulked. (Author collection)
Scourge of Malice, as magnificent a ship as Ralegh’s Ark, remained in the earl of Cumberland’s fleet until he sold it to the East India Company, in whose service, renamed Red Dragon, and commanded by Lancaster, an ex-pirate, she continued her career of attacking Portuguese carracks, as this contemporary print shows. (RN Museum, Portsmouth)
A replica of Elizabeth that sailed with Grenville to establish the pirate base at Roanoke that became England’s first, but short-lived, settlement in the Americas. (Author collection)
In 1607 the ex-pirate, Christopher Newport, in Susan Constant, led a small fleet of three ships into the Chesapeake and founded Jamestown, England’s first permanent settlement in America. (Author collection)
The culverin or demi-culverin was the professional pirate’s heavy weapon of choice, although it could only be carried in larger vessels whose exploits were, probably, state-approved. (Mary Rose Trust)
This saker, at St Mawes Fort, Cornwall, is presumed to have come from the ship carrying the goods of the incoming Venetian ambassador to London. Most embarrassingly, it was sunk by pirates. (Author collection)
Bows and arrows, spears and grenades, such as those shown here, could be modified to hurl incendiaries into a potential prize. Unfortunately for prey and predator alike the resulting conflagration could easily get out of control, destroying the former and threatening the latter. (Author collection)
The upper deck of the replica Golden Hind at Brixham, showing the small-calibre guns that could be safely carried higher up in a light vessel. (Author collection)
