Читать книгу A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688 - David Hannay - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Authorities.—Charnock continues to be of value for this reign, and indeed for the history of the navy till the end of the eighteenth century. Derrick's Rise and progress of the Royal Navy gives useful official lists. Mr. Whateley gives the substance of the rules established for the Navy Office by Elizabeth in 1560, at pp. 131–134 of his Samuel Pepys, and the World he lived in. The original is in the S. P. Dom. Elizabeth, vol. xv. The Calendars of State Papers of the reign contain much information as to the navy. More is in the great collection of Hakluyt. The Navy Record Society has published the papers referring to the Armada, while the Spanish side of the story is told in La Armada Invencible of Don Cesareo Duro—so admirably extracted and combined by Mr. Froude in his Spanish Story of the Armada. Drake's first notable cruise to the West Indies is told in the Drake Redivivus.

When Elizabeth ascended the throne, in 1559, she found the navy in the same state of weakness and confusion as all other parts of the administration. Its downward progress from the high level at which it had been left by Henry VIII. was rapid. In 1548, at the beginning of the reign of Edward VI., it had consisted of 53 vessels of 11,268 tons, carrying 237 brass guns and 1848 of iron. The crews were then estimated at 7731 men. In the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, even after her government had begun its efforts to restore the naval forces of the country, the number of vessels was only 29. From that point it gradually returned to something more like the position it had occupied under Henry VIII. In one respect, indeed, it may be said to have remained permanently inferior to his. It never reached the same number, but numbers afford only one, and not necessarily the surest, test of strength. The size and armament of the ships are often far more trustworthy indications of power than the number of vessels. During the queen's reign the average size of ships was much greater than it had been in her father's. In 1578 the navy contained 24 ships of 10,506 tons, manned by 3760 mariners, 630 gunners, and 1900 soldiers. The total force is put in Derrick's list at 6570 officers and men. If these figures are accurate, or even only approximately correct, it would appear that the staff of the navy, that is, the officers and their immediate personal attendants, must have numbered 280. Ten years later the navy had increased to 34 ships of 12,590 tons, with 6279 men. At the death of the queen the number of ships was 42, the tonnage 17,055, while the crews amounted to 8346 men, divided into 5534 mariners, 804 gunners, and 2008 soldiers. On comparing these figures with those of the navy as it stood in 1548, it will be seen that the ships of Elizabeth were on an average rather more than twice as large as those her brother had inherited from their father. The changes which had taken place in the constitution of the crews are somewhat different. The little vessels of King Edward carried nearly as many men as the much larger ships of Queen Elizabeth. No doubt, where there were more ships to man, many men were necessary, but, scattered among small vessels averaging 212 tons or thereabouts, they cannot have exerted the same power as they would have done in the better and heavier warships of Elizabeth. It is interesting to see the great change which had come over the constitution of the crews in the course of the century. In Henry's reign the soldiers were always more numerous than the sailors. During Elizabeth's the proportion was entirely reversed, and at the date of her death the mariners were almost twice as numerous as the soldiers in her sea service. In fact, the navy was becoming necessarily a more seamanlike force. The development of the ship had been steady. The mere barges of King Henry's reign had given place to vessels which were already approximating to a modern standard. Seamanship itself had grown far beyond the humble standard of the early sixteenth century. Then the seaman, at least the English seaman, was a mere coaster. When the great queen died, he was already accustomed to far-ranging voyages, and the navy was no longer expected only to carry soldiers across the Channel, and fight a force no more expert than itself, but to invade the West Indies, and at need to circumnavigate the globe. It followed that the sailor became relatively more important, and as his skill grew to be the most essential element of strength, his numbers had to be increased. Sir Walter Raleigh in the following reign summed up the changes which had taken place in his time.

"Whoever were the inventors, we find that every age has added somewhat to ships; and in my time the shape of our English ships has been greatly bettered. It is not long since the striking of the topmasts, a wonderful ease to great ships, both at sea and in the harbour, hath been devised, together with the chain-pump, which taketh up twice as much water as the ordinary one did. We have lately added the bonnet, and the drabler, to the courses; we have added studding-sails, the weighing anchor by the capstern. We have fallen into consideration of the length of cables, and by it we resist the malice of the greatest winds that can blow. Witness the Hollanders, that were wont to ride before Dunkirk with the wind at north-east, making a lee shore in all weathers; for true it is, that the length of the cable is the life of the ship in all extremities; and the reason is, that it makes so many bendings and waves, as the ship riding at that length is not able to stretch it, and nothing breaks that is not stretched."

When we speak of the greater size of Elizabeth's vessels, it must be remembered that the increase of tonnage had been among the smaller, not the greater warships. Some of King Henry's had been as large as, if not larger than, any of Queen Elizabeth's, but then she did not have the same swarm of mere cockboats. The navy was, in fact, tending to become a more uniform as well as a more seaworthy force.

The armament of these ships was still very heterogeneous, and the names of the pieces curiously fantastic. The following list gives the mere denominations of the guns:—

 Cannon

 Demi-cannon

 Culverins

 Demi-culverins

 Sakers

 Mynions

 Falcons

 Falconets

 Port-pece Halls

 Port-pece Chambers

 Fowler Halls

 Fowler Chambers and

 Curtalls.

There is some uncertainty as to the weight of the shot fired by these various pieces, and the following list must be taken with some reserve, but it no doubt gives the calibres of the guns with substantial accuracy.

	Sir William Monson's Account.	According to some other Accounts.
Sorts of Ordnance.	Bore.	Weight of the Shot.	Weight of the Shot.
	inches.	lbs.	lbs.
Cannon	8	60	60 or 63
Demi-Cannon	6¾	33½	31
Cannon Petro	6	24½	24
Culverin	5½	17½	18
Demi-Culverin	4	9½	9
Falcon	2½	2	2
Falconet	2	1½	…
Minion	3½	4	4
Sacar	3½	5½	5
Rabinet	1	½	…

The quality of these guns was good. Down to the middle of the sixteenth century they were made by welding together bars of wrought iron little inferior in tensile strength to that used in very recent times for Armstrong guns. About 1550 the use of cast iron, which made it possible to turn out large numbers of guns, came in. All the changes which have taken place in the construction of weapons of war have not been in the direction of what we should consider progress. When in our own time the guns which had been sunk at Spithead, in the wreck of the Mary Rose, were dredged up, it was found that they were breech-loaders, and there is evidence that experiments in the rifling of cannon were made very early. The difficulty of making a trustworthy breech-piece accounts for the triumph of the muzzle-loader, which drove its rival out of the field for centuries. The distribution of the guns in the ships remained very much what it had been during the reign of Henry VIII.; that is to say, cannon of the most various sizes were mounted side by side on the same deck. A few specimens taken from a list attested by the auditors of the Prest and the officers of the Ordnance in 1599, printed by Derrick, will show how far this practice was carried.

Names.	Arke	White Bear	Triumph
Cannon.	4	3	4
Demi-Cannon.	4	11	3
Culverins.	12	7	17
Demi-Culverins.	12	10	8
Sakers.	6	…	6
Mynions.	…	…	…
Falcons.	…	…	…
Falconets.	…	…	…
Port-piece Halls.	4	2	1
Port-piece Chambers.	7	…	4
Fowler Halls.	2	7	5
Fowler Chambers.	4	…	20
Curtalls.	…	…	…
Total Number of Pieces of Ordnance	55	40	68

A large proportion of the pieces named here were very small, and it is doubtful what is to be understood by some of the terms. They apply doubtless often to small "murdering pieces," of about the size of a duck-gun, mounted on the cobridge heads and bulwarks, for the purpose of repelling or driving out boarders. Therefore we must not suppose that the 68 guns of the Triumph represented anything like what that figure would have meant two hundred years later. It must not be forgotten that if Elizabeth did less to increase the strength of the navy than her father, she did not inherit a treasure as he did, and neither had she the spending of the plunder of the Church. He spent his capital. She had to confine herself to income.

No administrative changes in essentials were made by Elizabeth in the organisation of the navy. The function of the officers of the Navy Office, which had not as yet been strictly defined, were settled by instructions issued by the queen in 1560. What her Government did do was to attend to the navy with enlightened care, and to select the officials with judgment. It is known that for years the business of building, refitting, and taking care of the ships of the navy, and of superintending the purchase of stores, was carried on by Sir John Hawkins, who held the posts of Treasurer and Comptroller of the Navy. Hawkins was the successor of his father-in-law, Benjamin Gonson, in the office of Treasurer. It appears that he held his post under an agreement with the queen, by which he undertook to discharge the ordinary duties of caretaking for £5714 a year, he meeting all the common charges and supplying part of the stores, while heavier and exceptional expenses, whether for building new ships or for fitting out the fleet for sea, fell to the Crown. His remuneration for the work was apparently to be derived, in addition to the fees of his offices of Treasurer and Comptroller, from what remained over and above after paying for the work, and from the privilege of disposing of condemned ships and stores. The openings for fraud in such a system are many and obvious. If his enemies are to be believed, Hawkins did not miss the opportunities afforded him. It is said that he robbed the queen directly, and that, being partner in a shipbuilding yard on the Thames, he made use of his official position to forward his private interests. But Lord Howard of Effingham bears witness that Hawkins had the ships of the queen's navy in admirable order in the Armada year, and he is undoubtedly entitled to the credit of having done much to introduce into the navy the improvements in construction and rigging detailed by Sir Walter Raleigh.

Such in its main outlines was the instrument of which the great queen, her ministers, and her captains made magnificent use. It was but modest and even weak in itself; but in truth the Royal Navy was only part of the naval force at the disposal of Elizabeth. During the forty-four years of her reign, we constantly find that the vanguard in all actions, and a great part of the main body of the queen's sea power, was formed of adventurers. In the following century, and from the time of the first Dutch war, it is possible to tell the history of the navy with rare references to the action of those volunteers who fought for their own hand as privateers. But this was by no means the case with the navy of Queen Elizabeth. The most famous of her captains gained their reputation by privateering voyages, and were only taken into her service when they were already known leaders. To the end of her long war with Spain the private ship is found fighting alongside the queen's. The most successful of her expeditions against the Spaniard, whether in Europe or in the New World, were carried out by what, according to modern practice, would be a very strange partnership between the Crown and speculators, who, no doubt, had patriotic motives, but who had also very direct interest in the pecuniary results of the campaign. In fact, the word adventurer in the language of Elizabeth's time was commonly applied, not to the sea-captains, mariners, and soldiers who assailed the Spaniard in the West Indies, but to the shipowners and capitalists who found the money for fitting out the expedition, and who claimed two-thirds of the prize as their reward.

The privateer may be said to have made his first appearance during the last naval war of the reign of Henry VIII. The king had issued what were called letters of marque, that is, a species of commission authorising anybody who could fit out an armed ship to plunder the French and to keep a large share of the booty. His invitation to this form of private enterprise was eagerly accepted, especially by the seamen and country gentlemen of the West of England. They fitted out ships in large numbers, and cruised with profitable results against the French trade. The experience of 1545–46 seems to have thoroughly established the taste for privateering in the western counties, and it endured without any visible sign of abatement for generations. During the reigns of Edward and Mary and the early years of Elizabeth the western sea rovers continued as busy as ever, even when the country was at peace. They had an excellent pretext in the religious dissensions which were now beginning to swallow up, or at least to colour, the political conflicts of the European powers. In Mary's reign, Devonshire gentlemen of strong Protestant sympathies betook themselves to the pious work of plundering Spaniards and the other subjects of the queen's husband. The considerable traffic between Flanders and the Basque Ports of Spain supplied them with an irresistible motive for embracing the cause of pure religion. When the Low Countries revolted against the persecuting despotism of Philip II., the Protestants, who had been for a time crushed on land, appeared on blue water under the well-known name of "The Beggars of the Sea." These landless and desperate men found sympathy and help in the west country. For many years no small part of the duty of every Spanish ambassador consisted in making unavailing protests against the outrageous piracy of the queen's subjects. In this school were trained the men who manned the ships of Hawkins and Drake.

At the same time, another influence was at work to turn the energy of Englishmen to the sea. Until the death of Mary Tudor put an end to the Burgundian alliance, that is, the close community of interests which had for long united England with the House of Hapsburg, there had been few signs of distant commercial enterprise in England. The trade to the Levant had indeed been extended, and attempts had been made to open a route by the north-east to the Spice Islands, but England seemed to be reluctant to break in upon the Portuguese monopoly of the route by the Cape and the Spanish tenure of the route by the West, until she had clearly learned by experiment that there was no third way of access she could acquire for herself. France, which was at open war with the sovereign of Spain and the Low Countries, had sent out swarms of adventurers to attack the Spaniards in the New World, but we had, when Elizabeth ascended the throne, taken no part in this warfare. No sooner was Elizabeth well settled on the throne than a great change took place.

The persecutions of Mary's reign, if they had not made England Protestant, had at least made it bitterly anti-Roman Catholic; and this, at a time when the King of Spain was the recognised protector of the Pope, meant anti-Spanish. This served to remove any disinclination to attack our old ally. At the same time, Englishmen began to be much more effectively desirous of sharing in the wealth to be obtained by trade with the New World They were impatient at the thought that they were to be for ever shut out from the commerce of the East and the West Indies by a decision of a Pope of the previous century, who had given the Spaniards everything to the west of the famous line drawn from north to south, a hundred leagues to the west of the Azores, and had left the Portuguese the exclusive right to everything in the East. We did not recognise the Pope's right to dispose of what did not belong to him, and were minded to have our share of the good things lying beyond the line. The Spaniards would hear of no such pretension, and, though they were ready enough to trade with us in Europe, insisted upon treating all seamen of other nations whom they found in America as pirates. According even to the principles of some of their own thinkers, this refusal to trade was a fair justification for a war. Elizabeth was, however, by no means prepared for open hostilities with Spain. All she would do was to refuse to recognise the right of the Spaniards to exclude her subjects from trading with the Indians. Therefore they were free in her opinion to go to the New World, and if the Spaniards refused to recognise their trade as legitimate, Elizabeth for her part was not inclined to forbid her subjects to defend themselves against what she considered unfair interference. The causes of dispute between the queen and King Philip, apart from this, were many and various. Thus it got to be known among enterprising Englishmen that if they could make their hand keep their head from the blow of the Spaniard, they had nothing to fear from the queen when they came home from poaching expeditions on his preserves. For men who had, or who only affected to have, religious motives, and who had the most genuine desire to gain riches, this hint was enough, and so the third year of the queen's reign saw the first voyage of Hawkins to the West Indies.

In 1562, Hawkins, who was the son of a prosperous Plymouth merchant and shipowner, and had been bred to the sea in his father's ships in voyages to the Canaries, made the first recorded slaving venture carried through by an Englishman. He had learned enough in the Canaries to know that slaves were valuable in the West Indies, and that the Spanish planters, who were very ill supplied under the system of monopoly which prevailed in Spain, would be ready to buy negroes smuggled among them by an English trader. With the help of his father-in-law Gonson, Sir William Duckett, Sir Thomas Lodge, and Sir William Winter, all merchants and seafaring men, and some of them very directly connected with the queen's Government, he fitted out three little vessels and made a most profitable all-round voyage. First he went to the coast of Africa, where he kidnapped slaves, then he went to the Antilles and smuggled them. The second voyage, carried out in the last months of 1563 and the first of 1564, was a repetition of this on a much larger scale. Hawkins had now done so well that every confidence was felt in his capacity. Lord Robert Dudley, better known as the Earl of Leicester, became his patron. He was allowed to hire a queen's ship, the Jesus of Lubeck, an old vessel built in Germany. With a larger force Hawkins visited the coasts of Africa once more, after touching at Teneriffe, probably to make arrangements with the Spaniards associated with him in his smuggling speculations. On the coast of Senegambia he plundered Portuguese slavers who had already secured a full cargo, and then he burned, murdered, and kidnapped among the native villages until his hold was full of what in the cant of later times was called "ebony." With this cargo he made his way to the mainland of South America, after a trying voyage, in which both the kidnapped blacks and their captors suffered severely. Hawkins was borne up by a conviction that the "Lord would not suffer His elect to perish." At Borburata and Rio de la Hacha he sold the greater part of his cargo, partly by the help of the planters, who were glad enough to get the slaves, and partly by threatening to do them a displeasure if his trade was forbidden. From Rio de la Hacha, Hawkins sailed northward across the Caribbean Sea. The force of the westerly current, which is permanent in those waters, was not then known, and the smugglers were carried to the westward of the island of San Domingo. Owing to the mistake of a Spaniard whom they had among them, either as a prisoner, or, as is at least equally probable, as the agent of their associates among the Spanish planters, they fell to leeward, which in the West Indies means to westward both of San Domingo and of Jamaica. As the season was far advanced, and his vessels foul from being long at sea, Hawkins decided to make no further attempt to touch at the Spanish Antilles, which he could only have reached by beating to windward against the trade winds. He returned home by the Straits of Florida and the Banks of Newfoundland. On his way he relieved the French colony established in Florida by Ribault. It is one of the best-known events in the history of the time that this colony was not long afterwards exterminated by the Spaniard Pedro Menendes de Aviles, by methods which have, in the opinion of Protestant writers, covered his name with the infamy of extreme cruelty.

Although there had been no actual fighting in Hawkins's two expeditions, they were considered by the Spaniards as hostile. That they should have taken this view is not unreasonable, for the English rover had undoubtedly forced an entrance into their ports by threats. He himself must undoubtedly have been aware that his occupation was illegal, for on his own showing he excused his presence in Spanish ports by a tissue of lies. It was his regular practice to assert that he was sailing with a squadron of the queen's ships, and had been driven into harbour by bad weather or the want of stores. It is easy to understand that the manifest falsity of this excuse was not so obvious to the Spanish Government as it is to us. King Philip would not unnaturally believe that although the queen disavowed the actions of Hawkins publicly, she was encouraging him in private. In a sense this was true; for if the queen did not actually send Hawkins to the West Indies, she not only refused to punish him for going there, but allowed him to enjoy the fruits of his voyage, and shared in them largely herself as owner of the Jesus of Lubeck. If the sovereigns had been disposed to go to war, the excuse for hostilities was ready to their hands. But Philip was entangled in heavy expenses by the revolt in the Netherlands and his wars with the Turks, who were then at the height of their power. So he preferred to remain patient under the provocations inflicted on him by Elizabeth; and she, who had abundant troubles of her own, was equally little disposed to incur a war if it could be avoided. The struggle was left to be carried on by the subjects of both rulers in unavowed warfare, and from the nature of the case very soon took the form of piracy on one side and of savage repression on the other. Hawkins had been exasperated on his return from his second voyage by what he considered a private wrong. Ships which he had sent to Spain from the West Indies laden with colonial produce had been confiscated by the Spanish Government. At a later period he succeeded in getting back a part at least of the value of his forfeited goods by pretending to betray the queen. But between 1564 and 1567, when he sailed on his third voyage, he had other schemes for righting himself. He would have sailed sooner than he did if the queen, who was in danger from the intrigues of Mary Stuart, had not had particular reason to refrain from offending Philip too far. But in 1567 Mary had ruined her own cause by the murder of her husband, and her marriage with his murderer. The need for Philip's neutrality was not what it had been, and so Hawkins was allowed to sail, and was again permitted to hire the queen's ships. That his expedition was of the nature of an act of hostility to Spain was a matter of public notoriety. The Spanish ambassador protested against it as against other acts of piracy, but to no kind of purpose. So little was Hawkins restrained, that he was allowed to combine with some of the "Beggars of the Sea" for the purpose of plundering some Spanish ships which took refuge in Plymouth Sound while he was lying there with his squadron. In high hopes, and with the sense that, however the queen might refuse to justify his actions in form, she would certainly afford him effectual protection, Hawkins sailed on his third voyage, which ended so disastrously, in October 1567. The earlier part of the voyage was spent in the usual round of kidnapping on the coast of Africa and smuggling in the Spanish ports of the West Indies and the Main. When only a remnant of his cargo of slaves remained, Hawkins departed from his previous course and steered for the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico to the little island of St. Juan de Ulloa, which forms the harbour of La Vera Cruz, then, and now, the port of Mexico. He excused himself for sailing into this harbour by his customary fiction, alleging that his ships had been injured by bad weather, and must be refitted before he could venture to return to Europe. But this story can hardly have been told with the slightest expectation that it would be believed. Indeed, Hawkins was so thoroughly well aware that the Spaniards would see through his very transparent defence, that on his way across the Gulf of Mexico he captured a Spanish vessel, and held her crew and passengers as hostages. This was an act of undeniable piracy, and would have been so considered at any period of the world's history. In truth, it can only have been for form's sake that Hawkins put himself to the trouble of repeating his stock invention. It had come to this, that if the Spaniards were to make good their claim to keep the English from trading with their American possessions, they must show themselves strong enough to do it. For the present, Hawkins believed that the strength was on his side, and, but for an event which he cannot be blamed for not foreseeing, he might very well have turned out to be in the right.

The squadron Hawkins took to La Vera Cruz on the 16th of September 1568 consisted of some ten or a dozen vessels, for he had been joined in the West Indies by French rovers. With this force it would have been easy for him to overpower any resistance the Spaniards could offer. There was at that time no fortress on the island of St. Juan de Ulloa, and the town of La Vera Cruz was not yet built. A few sheds, used only during the time that the yearly convoy of merchant ships from Spain was in the harbour, was all that stood upon the beach. When Hawkins made his appearance outside the harbour, he had no difficulty in frightening the local officials into letting him anchor. But in the course of negotiations with them he learned a piece of news which caused him well-grounded anxiety. On his first appearance off the harbour, the Spaniards had mistaken him for a convoy expected from Spain, bringing the new Viceroy, Don Martin Henriquez: of course, if this appeared, the position would be disagreeably complicated. But it was now too late for Hawkins to go back, so he took up his place in the harbour. In a few days the fleet from Spain made its appearance. It consisted almost wholly of merchant ships, but there was one heavy galleon of war which served as the flagship of the Spanish admiral, Francisco de Lujan. Hawkins could probably have kept the Spaniards out of the harbour easily enough, but in the autumn months the coast of Mexico is liable to furious gales of the nature of hurricanes, called Northers. If one of these had burst while the Spaniards were outside the island of St. Juan de Ulloa, the whole Spanish squadron must have perished. As it was estimated to be worth £1,850,000, and carried hundreds of his subjects, including so great an officer as the Viceroy of Mexico, this would have been an outrage King Philip could not possibly have endured. Hawkins must have been very well aware that if the queen did not happen to wish for a war with Spain at the moment when he returned to England after such an exploit, she would hang him without the slightest scruple for causing her the trouble. On the other hand, if he once allowed the Spaniards to get inside the harbour, there was every probability that they would cut his throat with the least possible delay. In the dreadful fix in which he now found himself, Hawkins hit upon a middle course. He allowed the Spaniards to come in, after exacting from them a promise that they would suffer him to trade in safety and depart in peace. It is hardly credible that the Englishman can have supposed that a promise extorted in such a fashion would have been observed. If he did, his confidence did not last long, for, in his own narrative of what our ancestors called "the treachery of the Spaniards," he confesses that he was extremely nervous. From the day after Don Francisco de Lujan had moored his ships beside the English on the island of St. Juan de Ulloa, he was in constant expectation of a sudden attack, and on the third day it came. The English had insisted upon keeping possession of the island, but the men who had been appointed to stand on guard broke into a panic and fled, leaving the guns mounted for the protection of the English ships to be turned upon them by the Spaniards. The panic spread to the ships. The crews cast off their moorings and endeavoured to fly, but, attacked as they were by the battery on the island and by the Spanish ships, they were all destroyed except two—the Minion, in which Hawkins made his own escape, and the Judith, commanded by his cousin, Francis Drake.

This, the treachery of the Spaniards, makes a great epoch in the history of the naval adventures of Elizabeth's reign. It killed for ever the hope of establishing a peaceful trade with the Spanish possessions in the West Indies. It showed our men that if they were to have their share of the wealth of the New World, it must be got sword in hand. Hawkins, in whom there seems to have been very much more of the fox than the lion, did not again appear in the West Indies, till he came there to die in the disastrous failure of 1594. But the work was taken up by other hands. The strongest and the most famous were Francis Drake's. After two small voyages, probably smuggling ventures with slaves, in 1570 and 1571, Drake boldly entered the West Indies to plunder in 1572 with two very small vessels, the Pasha of Plymouth, of 72 tons, and the Swan, of 25. This was a pure-and-simple buccaneering venture, conducted with spirit and skill, and finally with success. He was, indeed, beaten off at Nombre de Dios, which the historian of his voyage mendaciously asserts to have been a town as big as Plymouth. It was, in fact, a mere temporary trading station, consisting of a storehouse and twenty or thirty wood huts in a very unhealthy position, and was afterwards given up by the Spaniards in favour of Porto Bello. But after this check, and some months of cruising on the coast, made melancholy by the loss of a brother and nearly half his crews in scuffles with the Spaniards or by fever, Drake had the good fortune to capture a recua, the Spanish name for a string of pack mules laden with gold. The profits of the voyage were immense, and the audacity of it, not unnaturally somewhat exaggerated by his countrymen, gained Drake great renown. But the real fruits of his invasion of the West Indies were seen in the voyage of circumnavigation which followed in 1577 and 1578. A detailed history of this famous enterprise would be out of place here. It belongs, properly speaking, to discovery, and such feats as the capture of Spanish merchant ships and of the galleon Cacafuego hardly entitle it to rank among the exploits of the navy. The importance of the voyage lies mainly in the immense stimulus it gave to the enterprise of the whole nation, and in this, that it was an unmistakable proclamation to the whole world that England had both the will and the power to set at nought the pretensions of the Spaniards and the Portuguese to debar all rivals from the free use of the ocean.

After Drake's return from ploughing a furrow round the world, we need not treat the actions of the adventurers as standing apart. Although open war with Spain did not come for several years, it was known to be inevitable by both countries. The most famous leaders among the western seamen were retained for the queen's service. Throughout the years in which the maritime strength of England had been growing by its own intrinsic strength, and her seamen had been gaining both in skill and confidence, the Royal Navy, in the strict sense of the word, had played a subordinate part. It was not yet expected to afford protection to English traders beyond the four seas of Britain. Of what was its proper work, it had had little to do.

In 1560 Sir William Winter had been despatched to the coast of Scotland to aid the Lords of the Congregation in their struggle against the French regent, Mary of Guise. In 1562–3 another English squadron had been employed to help the French Huguenots by conveying the detachment of English soldiers who were sent under command of Ambrose Dudley to Havre. In 1573 it was found necessary to employ the queen's ships against our late allies, the Huguenots, Sea Rovers, and the Beggars of the Sea, who, having pretty effectually destroyed Spanish commerce in the Channel, were driven to plunder their Protestant friends as an alternative to starvation. But as the struggle with Spain grew nearer open national war, the navy found more perilous work than this. In 1579 a squadron of the queen's vessels did good service by capturing the Spanish ships which had landed the soldiers of the Pope at Smerwick in Ireland. Even yet the queen shrank from making a direct attack on Spain, and preferred to injure her enemy by assisting his rebellious subjects in the Low Countries. At last, when, under the sting of multiplying provocations, Philip was known to be making ready in his own slow way for a decisive attempt to crush England for good, Elizabeth and her Council decided upon delivering a direct blow.

The manner of the doing of the thing was a curious example of the partnership between the queen and her subjects. In 1585 an expedition was organised to sweep the West Indies. The calculation was, that an invasion of this part of his dominions would cause the King of Spain more harm than a direct attack at home, since he drew by far the best part of his revenue from the American mines. The English seamen were not yet sufficiently acquainted with the details of the Spanish establishments in America to deliver their stroke in the most effectual manner. For one thing, they altogether over-estimated the importance of the towns in the West Indian Islands. Yet, in principle, the policy of the expedition was perfectly sound. To cripple the King of Spain before his invading fleet was under way, was a far more effectual course than to wait for him in the Channel; and there is no doubt that the five-and-twenty ships put under the command of Drake in the autumn of 1585, to attack the island of San Domingo and Carthagena, did delay the sailing of the Armada, besides inflicting great discredit on the King of Spain.

In this fleet only a minority of the ships actually belonged to the queen, the others being the property of men in business, who entered into this warlike operation as a speculation. Unity of command was provided for by the appointment of Drake, both as the queen's admiral and as the privateer admiral, if such an expression is to be admitted. Martin Frobisher, chiefly known hitherto as an explorer who had attempted to discover a North-West Passage, was appointed vice-admiral. The command of the troops was given to Christopher Carleill, an officer of much experience both at sea and in the wars of the Low Countries. The fleet sailed from Plymouth on the 14th of September, and touched on the coast of Spain on the way out. It was characteristic of the time that we did not profess to be at war with the King of Spain in Spain, but only in America. Therefore there was a good deal of rather polite negotiation between the English leaders and the Marquis of Zerralbo, the King of Spain's governor of Galicia. This did not prevent our seamen from plundering a Spanish ship in which they discovered a tempting consignment of church plate; but casual acts of piracy of this kind were too much in the habits of the time to be counted an unpardonable infraction of the peace. From Vigo the English fleet sailed to the Canaries, and from thence to Santiago in the Cape de Verd Islands. At this place it made a too prolonged stay, in the hope of extorting a ransom, but the Spanish authorities took refuge in the hills of the centre of the island, and could neither be threatened nor cajoled into giving themselves up. This was no doubt a serious disappointment to Drake in his character of agent for the adventurers, and it was not the last; for though the political results of the cruise were great, as a financial speculation it proved to be a failure. From Santiago the fleet stretched across the Atlantic to the island of San Domingo, and captured the city of the same name with very little difficulty. The Spanish towns had not hitherto been subject to any attack more formidable than that of native Indians, and were not seriously fortified. They fell easily before the assault of the 1200 well-appointed soldiers Carleill could land from the ships.

San Domingo proved a great disappointment to the captors. It had at one time been the seat of a considerable export trade of bullion from the mines of the island. But, though our men did not know it, these had been long exhausted or deserted in favour of the far richer mines of Mexico and Peru.

The well-to-do inhabitants of San Domingo were planters who had little ready money, or the lawyers of the Court of Appeal. After several weeks spent in haggling, and in burning part of the town, the English were constrained to accept of 25,000 ducats of 5s. 6d. each as ransom for the town, a much smaller sum than they had hoped to obtain. From San Domingo they went on to Carthagena on the mainland of South America, at that time a small unfortified town of a few hundred inhabitants. Entering the land-locked harbour by the Boca Grande, the English made themselves masters of Carthagena, after storming its only defence—a wooden stockade. Here their experience at San Domingo was repeated. The Spaniards had received warning of the approach of a hostile expedition, and had had time to remove their bullion into the country. After a good deal more haggling, 110,000 ducats were extorted as the ransom of the town. The results of the expedition had been disappointing, but the fleet had nothing for it but to return home without further delay. A fever had broken out at Santiago, and the health of the crews had suffered still more severely from the tropical malaria of the coast. Including those who fell in action, it was calculated that more than half of the men forming the expedition lost their lives. The total product of the cruise was £60,000. Of this, £40,000 was due to the adventurers, and the remaining third was to be divided between the soldiers and sailors who manned the ships. This can have given only about £6 a head to those who had risked their lives and had survived the fevers and the weapons of the Spaniards. The adventurers cannot have done much more than cover the expenses of fitting out their ships.

We are now approaching perhaps the most famous passage, and certainly the most picturesque, in the naval history of England. From the beginning of 1586 England was threatened by invasion from Spain, throughout 1587 she was taking measures to avert the danger, and in 1588 the great Armada, which has been baptized in sarcasm with the name of Invincible, actually approached our shores, and then passed away to destruction without having as much as burned one sheepcote in this island.

It was the habit of Philip II. to be very slow in his preparations. His flatterers, knowing the kind of praise that would give him pleasure, described him as thorough and prudent. In point of fact, the course he followed was singularly inefficient and practically rather rash. It would have cost Philip less, and would have redounded much more to his glory, if he had armed three or four well-appointed squadrons of active ships to protect his galleons on their way across the Atlantic, and to keep the West Indies clear of invaders. It must be obvious that if fifteen or twenty Spanish warships had made their appearance in the neighbourhood of San Domingo while the English soldiers were disembarked for the purpose of attacking the town, the squadron could hardly have escaped destruction, and in that case the soldiers must sooner or later have shared the fate of those members of Hawkins's crew who were left behind in Mexico in 1567, to the "little mercy" of the Spaniards. But when a small active squadron would have been of immense service to Philip, he had nothing but the first beginnings of the raw material of the great fleet with which he intended one day to exterminate the power of Elizabeth. His admiral, Don Álvaro de Bazan, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, told him, when the news of the sailing of the expedition of 1585 came, that there was nothing to prevent Drake from sweeping the West Indies, or from entering the Pacific, and there doing as he pleased with the ill-armed and unprepared Spanish settlements. King Philip had ships and guns and men enough among his subjects, but when they were wanted, the guns were not in the ships and the crews were not collected. Thus the "potent" King of Spain, as he was called, and as he might have been with better management, had to sit helpless while a privateering fleet ranged at will through his possessions and plundered his subjects. As it was in 1585, so it was in 1586 and 1587: Philip was toiling laboriously to collect his armament, but as he would not put the various parts together till he had collected all he wanted, no portion of his inchoate fighting forces was ready on a sudden call.

There are few more ludicrous passages in history than the cruise of Drake in 1587. Queen Elizabeth and her ministers were aware that preparations were being made for an invasion of England. Although the queen's passion for intrigue induced her to keep up a laborious show of friendly negotiations with the Prince of Parma, Philip's viceroy in the Low Countries, she did not in practice forget that she was at war. In the spring of 1587 she decided to despatch Sir Francis Drake for the purpose of looking into the preparations reported to be making in the Spanish ports. As in 1585, the queen bore only a part of the expenses. Of the thirty ships despatched, four, the Bonaventure, the Lion, the Dreadnought, and the Rainbow, with two pinnaces attached as tenders, belonged to the Royal Navy; the others were "tall ships" of London, not hired by the queen, but joined in partnership with her for the purpose of making what profit they could by plundering the Spaniards.

Drake sailed from Plymouth early in April, and in the 40th degree of latitude he learned from two German merchant ships that great quantities of naval stores were being collected at Cadiz to be transported to Lisbon, where the King of Spain's "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," Don Álvaro de Bazan, had his headquarters. Portugal, it may not be superfluous to remind the reader, had been annexed a few years before by Philip II., who claimed to be the heir of Dom Sebastian, slain at the battle of Alcázar el Kebir, and it continued to be joined to the many other crowns of the King of Spain till 1640. Drake immediately made for Cadiz, where he found the outer harbour crowded with ships. These were the vessels which were designed to take part in the invasion of England. But, by a piece of ineptitude of a kind not at all rare in Philip's reign, they were for the most part unmanned. It was easy work for the thirty efficient ships to capture, burn, sink, or drive on shore such of these vessels as were not able to make a timely escape into the inner harbour. The work was done thoroughly, and to the no small profit of the adventurers. Enormous quantities of booty were transferred from the Spanish to the English ships; and although they were subject to an irritating fire from the distant Spanish batteries, and to attack by the galleys, the English sailors met with little difficulty in the discharge of their task. The work was hard, and the men are said to have been really glad when the Spaniards set fire to the vessels which had not yet fallen into our hands, and thereby put a stop to the toil of collecting more plunder. Nothing more disgraceful to the management of Philip II., nothing which more fully revealed the essential weakness of his power, could well have happened. From Cadiz Drake stretched along the coast to Lisbon, landing as he pleased, and plundering as he thought fit. At the mouth of the Tagus he anchored and sent in a challenge to the Marquis of Santa Cruz. But the king's admiral, though he was a man of great natural courage and of an enterprising character, could not accept it, for his vessels were in no condition to take the sea without the stores burned at Cadiz. From Cascaes Drake stood across to the Azores, and lay there undisturbed on the track of the carracks, the great merchant ships employed by the Portuguese at that time in the trade with the East Indies. One of these, named the St. Philip, fell into his hands. She was the first of these ships ever taken by us, and the sight of her cargo must have had a good deal to do with arousing the desire of English merchants to share in the trade of the East. This capture, added to the plunder taken at Cadiz, secured the profits of the voyage, and therefore Drake made sail for England with his fleet and the prize, where they all arrived "to their own profit and due commendation, and the great admiration of the whole kingdom."

This check did not make Philip any wiser than before, but neither did it in any way damp his determination to collect such a fleet as should make an end of the English pirates. He began the work of getting his stores together again with imperturbable patient industry. Drake described his feat in the outer harbour of Cadiz as the singeing of the King of Spain's beard, and the phrase was accurate as well as humorous. He had insulted the enemy, and had done him as much injury as would compel him to abstain from action for the time being, but he had not seriously crippled his power. By the spring of the following year the Spanish fleet was ready for service, and if Don Álvaro de Bazan had lived, it might have sailed sooner than it actually did. The old man's own plan, communicated to the king some years before, had been to embark a sufficient army in Spain, and sail direct to the coast of England, but the resources of King Philip were not adequate to a scheme of the scale proposed by his admiral. He had to maintain an army under the Prince of Parma in Flanders, and could not meet the expense of organising another. He had therefore decided to make the fleet he was collecting in Spain co-operate with the army he already had in the Low Countries. It was indeed to carry reinforcements to the Prince of Parma, but it was on him that the task of providing an army for the invasion of England was to be laid. The Spaniards have always counted it fortunate for England that the Marquis de Santa Cruz died on the 9th February 1588. Perhaps it was, though it may be doubted whether the very complicated task set by the king could have been successfully performed even by him. To bring a fleet from Spain into the Channel, to carry it to the Low Countries, to embark an army there and transport it to the coast of England, would have made a long and complicated operation, to be conducted in difficult seas, of which the Spaniards had little knowledge, and in the face of the most determined opposition from Dutch and English seamen. However that may be, the Spaniards were deprived of such chance of victory as they might have had under the command of the "Iron Marquis" by his death; and then the king, acting on motives which are not a little mysterious, selected from among his subjects as leader of this great enterprise perhaps the gentleman who was more fitted than any other then living to lead it to ruin. This was Don Alonso Perez de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia. He was a youngish man, small, of a swarthy complexion, and somewhat bandy-legged, who, according to his own candid and somewhat pitiful confession to the king, knew nothing of war by land or sea, was always sea-sick when he went in a vessel, and never failed to catch cold. What qualification he had, beyond his illustrious lineage and his great estates, for a high command nobody has ever been able to discover. These were no doubt to be taken into account at a time when obedience was more readily rendered to a gentleman of great social position than to others; but there were men of the duke's own rank among Philip's subjects who had served, and were at least not manifestly unfit for the post. But the king chose the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and, overcoming his manifest reluctance to take the command, sent him to succeed the Marquis de Santa Cruz. It was in reality consistent enough with the duke's first unwillingness to take the post, that, once in it, he had not the smallest hesitation in contradicting the advice and overruling the decisions of his veteran predecessor. He declared that what had seemed enough for Santa Cruz was not enough; he wanted more ships, more men, more stores; and thus the fleet, which ought to have started in February, did not leave the Tagus till May. During all this time the stores already collected began to go rotten and had to be replaced. The pressed-men ran, and others had to be found; and so delay bred delay, and the months passed in mere waste alike of time and material.

On our own side there were also defects of management, not, however, attributable to the officers in command, but partly to the poverty of the queen's Government, and partly to the vacillations of the queen. Elizabeth, it must not be forgotten, was a very poor sovereign, and the maintenance of a great fleet was a heavy drain upon her resources. Moreover, she had an artistic love of tricks. She could not be thoroughly persuaded that it was hopeless to expect to avert the Spanish invasion by artful diplomacy. Therefore, between her impatience under the expenses of the fleet and her profound belief in her own cleverness, she vacillated all through the spring of that eventful year. Her ships had been brought into excellent order by John Hawkins. Her subjects were full of zeal; and although the smaller ports met the demand for ships with loud complaints of poverty and of the ruin of their trade by war, yet London freely offered twice as many vessels and men as the Crown asked for, while the nobles and those adventurers of the stamp of Drake and Hawkins, who had grown rich at the expense of the Spaniards, were active in fitting out vessels and collecting crews. The queen's Lord High Admiral, Charles Howard, Lord Effingham, was as fit a man for the place as could have been found. He had, it is true, no experience in war; and it does not appear, from anything recorded of him, that he was a man of much ability. But he had character and tact, and the happy faculty of allowing himself to be guided by his abler and more experienced subordinates, without suffering his authority to be diminished.