The Life of Francis Drake

R.M.L.I.)

Chapter 1

EARLY DAYS

Francis Drake was born in a cottage on Crowndale farm near Tavistock; but in what month of what year is not known. A miniature of him, painted by Hilliard on the back of a playing-card, the Ace of Hearts, now at Knowsley, puts his birth in the year 1539. The portrait which, in the years of his greatness, hung in his dining-room at Buckland Abbey, gave it to the credit of 1541. Nuño da Silva, the Portuguese pilot, swore before the Tribunal of the Inquisition of Mexico in 1579 that Francis Drake was then a man of thirty-eight years, or within two years of that age. The portraits, indeed, are no more reliable than the statement of the pilot, for they only record the age which he was said to have reached at the time when they were painted. The most likely date of his birth can be inferred from the circumstances of his family.

The farm Crowndale was held on a lease granted by Sir John Russell to John Drake, the uncle. Edmund, John’s brother and a sailor, made his home in a cottage on the farm in the year 1544. He was entered as a householder upon the subsidy rolls of Tavistock in that year. Up to then he was a man without a history. But after settling at Crowndale he had twelve children, of whom Francis was the eldest. A man so prolific was likely to have had children before this date if he had been married before it; and Francis Drake was certainly born in wedlock at Crowndale. It is therefore a fair inference that Edmund left the sea in order to marry, settled on his brother’s farm, did marry and became the father of Francis in some month of the year 1545.

Of the social condition of the family there would be no doubt, if Francis Drake had not himself raised it. Camden, the historian, relates in his Annals that Francis, after he had returned from his voyage round the world, told him that he was not of mean parentage; and a good many people have been at the pains to argue that by mean he meant middle-class. There is no reason why we should think that he meant anything of the kind. He had made his name great; he was honoured by the friendship of the Queen; he was wealthy; he had lifted himself, the first of all Englishmen, into that small bright constellation where Cabot shone and Magellan and Columbus and Balboa; and he was very human, with his full share of man’s vanities and contradictions to counterbalance his greatness. He was not the first man who tried to lengthen the ladder of his achievement by pushing his family down a rung or two lower than the one it ought to occupy. But before he had written his name in English history he lapsed into the opposite infirmity. What we should call nowadays a County family of the name of Drake had been settled near to Tavistock ever since the reign of Edward III; between it and the farmers at Crowndale there was the most infinitesimal connection, if indeed there was any at all. Yet Francis Drake had the arms of that family stamped upon his cabin furniture in the Golden Hind and engraved upon his cannon a motto of his own devising, sic parvis magna. A trifling vanity, surprising in the character of a man with such wide aims, but it will be seen in a host of instances that Francis liked to live magnificently, like some great noble of Florence. And there was sagacity in that particular foible. For a Spanish Don would pay a fine ransom to a gentleman with less displeasure than he would pay it to a vulgarian buccaneer. The days of magnificence were still far off. Francis Drake was of neither the gentry nor the serfs. The son of Sir John Russell, Henry VIII’s friend and Lord High Admiral, young Francis Russell, who was to become the second Earl of Bedford, was his godfather at his christening; and he had a really valuable relationship to the great Plymouth family of Hawkins, merchant-adventurers and shipbuilders whose name is for all time associated with the rise of the English Navy. Francis Drake came of yeoman stock.

The link between the great family of Russell and Edmund Drake was their strong Protestantism. Edmund Drake was a lay preacher. He had got religion as so many sailors do, and religion of a violently revivalist kind. You are either saved, in a flash, by an emotional shock, or you are damned for ever and ever; and mostly you are damned. Those who can look back to a childhood sixty years ago will remember too vividly the parsons who, shedding their white surplices, donned black Geneva gowns and, mounting into their pulpits, thundered for three-quarters of an hour about the flames of hell and the wrath of God, and gave five minutes to His loving-kindness. Edmund Drake was of that brotherhood. The first chapter of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans, with its catalogue of sinners deserving death, was his favourite reading, and there were few of his congregation whom he could not bring in under one heading or the other. But rural Devon was for the most part Catholic. There had been more humanity in the rule of the monasteries than in that of the greedy Lords to whom Henry VIII had handed them over. Villagers had seen their common lands enclosed behind palisades, with mutilations or death as a penalty for breaking them down. Cloth was England’s most profitable export. To the owner of land, wool was the thing which brought in the fat return. So tillage became pasture. Moreover, great sheep-runs were more economical than ploughed fields. They needed less labour, and the peasant with his wife and his children was turned out of his tiny homestead to swell the crowd of beggars on the road.

Devonshire was ripe for a rebellion when, in 1547, Edward VI being a boy upon the throne, the Protector Somerset persuaded Parliament to repeal Henry VIII’s Act of Six Articles, and it became lawful to disbelieve the doctrine of Transubstantiation and the necessity of auricular confession. Catholics were horrified. But when two years later the same authority insisted on the use of the English Prayer-book, they took action. It was never merry world since the Bible came forth in English, said the priest of Brentwood Church; and moved by that spirit, they hunted the Protestants, Edmund Drake and his family with them, through the gates of Plymouth. The fugitives camped on the island of St. Nicholas in Plymouth Harbour — tradition ascribes to this event the name of Drake’s Island, by which it is commonly known — and there remained in danger and destitution until Sir Thomas Cotton, with a squadron of King’s ships, sailed in to their relief.

Edmund Drake never returned to Crowndale. William Hawkins came to his relative’s rescue. Edmund was carried away with his family to the Medway. Gillingham Reach was then the Tudor Navy’s home port, and Edmund was made Bible-reader to the ships. He existed, but that was all. He made his home on board of a disused hulk, and from the ages of four to ten Francis grew up with the water tinkling by the planks against which his cot was wedged and the old hulk rising and falling on the tides.

What book-teaching he ever got, he got from his father during these years. He learned to read and to write. But writing never came easily to him. Although he was always learning, always teaching himself, so far as the activity of his life allowed, he never acquired the vivid timely phrase which brought all home, as so many of his lesser contemporaries did. To the end of his life his letters were few, and those laborious. From his father too he learned that hatred of popery, and that strong sense of a personal God protecting him and his faith and his country, which was ever foremost in his thoughts. Even when an adventure failed, and he missed, say, Philip’s gold fleet by twelve hours, it was all God’s will, although, to be sure, inexplicable and strange. Events co-operated with his father’s teaching to plant deep his Protestantism in his mind. He was not so young but that the flight from Crowndale and the miserable refuge upon the island of St. Nicholas must have inspired him with a lively terror of the Catholics. And six years later the Wyatt rebellion reinforced the lesson. It had its beginning at Rochester when Mary Tudor was expecting the arrival in England of her bridegroom, Philip of Spain. It so nearly succeeded, it so completely failed, that the noise and tumult of it must have roused to alternations of enthusiasm and grief even a boy of ten on a hulk above Gillingham Reach; and the long line of men dangling in chains from gibbets on the banks of the Medway, with which the rebellion ended, may well have turned the early terror into a belief that Catholics were in their very nature cruel.

It may also be that he owed to his father the little gift of oratory which he possessed. If he could not write well, he could speak well. He could even preach a good sermon. The rhythm of the written is a very different thing from that of the spoken sentence. Francis Drake took his part in Parliament in after years, and of those speeches which he made during his voyages to his crews, enough remains to prove that the direct and strong approach, which he lost when he took a pen in his hand, came easily enough when he used his voice. Those early years on the Medway, in spite of the family’s poverty, cannot have been unhappy ones for the young Francis. A boy living on a hulk on a busy river, with the navy ships laying up or putting out; his father bustling off upon his duties and coming back with some story of the sea; and the sound of running water to drift him away into his dreams — what boy would not welcome such a life? But it came soon to an end. Edmund apprenticed him to the owner and captain of a small bark which traded between the Medway, the east coast of England and the ports of Zeeland. What age Francis had reached when he was bound apprentice is not exactly known. But he was still a boy, though one can say that on the first day when he sailed down the Medway his boyhood ended.

There were no lightships moored in the estuaries of the Thames, like the Mouse, the Swin and the Outer Gabbard, to blink the sailor safely down his Channel. No lines of buoys marked out for him a fairway. He must find his own way over sandbank and swirling current. In the fogs of winter he must pick his road across the North Sea with no more than a lump of tallow in the hollow of his lead to pilot him into his ports. He must lie to for days and days without sleep when the water was breaking on the Dogger Bank, and at night a flash of white at the level of the cross-spar was the only warning which he got that a wave was crashing down upon his deck. There was no better classroom where a lad could learn how to handle a ship than the deck of a small sailing tramp in the gales of the North Sea. But it was a hard and bitter schooling. Francis Drake was built for it, however. He was short, square-shouldered, deep-chested, with immense strength in his limbs and a fire and spirit in him to hold his powerful body to the hardest strain. But there was much more. His portraits show it, and the fine statue upon Plymouth Hoe. The round head, the genial look, the jaw of iron — others have those features too. But the individual marks of Francis Drake were the high arch of his eyebrows and the steady eager eyes which seem to be watching with something of surprise an ever-opening door.

When he reached the age of sixteen the family fortunes changed for the better. Elizabeth in 1560 had been for two years Queen of England, and Edmund Drake exchanged the hulk upon the Medway for the Vicarage of Upchurch, a small village upon the river-bank. During the next year the owner of the trading bark died. He was a bachelor, and in recognition of the good service and friendship which his apprentice had given, he bequeathed to him his little bark and its goodwill.

But Drake’s thoughts were already set upon wider seas. When he was eighteen, he made a voyage, in what must have been for him the curious position of a purser, across the Bay of Biscay to the north coast of Spain; and the next year he sailed for the first of many times to the Spanish Main.

Chapter 2

EARLY VOYAGES AND DISAPPOINTMENTS

RIO DE LA HACHA

THE TRAGEDY OF ST. JOHN DE ULUA

DRAKE’S RETURN TO PLYMOUTH AND HAWKINS’ REPROACH

Francis Drake owed his first acquaintance with tropical waters to his relation John Hawkins. John, like many another reputable person, was engaged in the slave-trade. He captured negroes on the Guinea Coast or obtained them by an agreement with a black chieftain, sailed them across to the Spanish Main and disposed of them to the various towns. Once he had reached the Terra Firma he never had to go far. So sparsely had the land been populated, and so merciless had been its occupation by the Spaniards, that labour was always short. The trade had been forbidden by Philip to any but his own countrymen, but not out of humanity. In that odd, dull, slow, priest-ridden mind, there was hardly a corner free for humanity. Humanity implies width, and that Philip never had. Pope Alexander the Sixth had taken a pencil and divided the world south of the Azores by a line through the forty-second meridian west of Greenwich. West of that line the world was Spain’s, east of it Portugal’s. There was a certain amount of doubt as to whether the line ran north of the Azores, so much doubt indeed, that whilst Philip was the husband of Mary Tudor the London Muscovy Company had been allowed to carry on its trade. But south of the Azores he was in no perplexity. Only Spaniards must trade slaves to the Spanish Main, and since the trade was profitable, only those Spaniards who paid a heavy licence for the privilege. Hawkins, however, had refused to recognize the ban, and between him and the towns to which he brought his living cargoes a sort of convention had been established. He appeared off the port with his ship or ships and sent a polite message ashore to the Governor that he was prepared to sell.

The Governor returned an answer equally polite that by the order of his Master the King he was not allowed to buy. The correspondence was continued, again in the most civil terms. Under these sad circumstances Hawkins must land some men. On the other side, if he did, they would certainly be resisted to the last breath. Accordingly the men were landed, and a force marched out of the town. A volley was fired upon one side and answered by another. No one was hurt and the townspeople fled to the hills or woods. Hawkins then occupied the town, and under cover of the darkness the leading merchants returned. The deal was then carried through. The slaves were bought, the money paid. Hawkins sailed away, the town was undamaged, a glowing report was despatched to King Philip of the great gallantry shown by his subjects against overwhelming odds; and everybody was satisfied — except King Philip, who lost the high price of his licence and had his authority flouted into the bargain.

In the summer of 1566 Hawkins fitted out four ships for this lucrative trade, but the Spanish Ambassador got the wind of him and complained to the Queen. Hawkins, summoned before the Board of Admiralty, gave a bond for £500 that he would not go in person nor send his ships to the Spanish Indies. He did not go, but Captain John Lovell did, on November 9th, with the four ships which had belonged to Hawkins in the summer, and, except in name, still belonged to him.

Such information as exists about this voyage is vague. It is not known, indeed, in what capacity Hawkins’ young kinsman sailed or in which ship. Lovell had not the cleverness nor the manners needed for a command of this delicate kind. He captured a few ships laden with wax and ivory and negroes on his way to the Guinea Coast, as Hawkins was accustomed to do. But he killed some Portuguese, either in making these captures or in collecting the complement of his slaves from the land; and this was a mistake which Hawkins never made. From Guinea he sent back one ship to Plymouth, laden with the booty which he had taken, and with the other three he stood across the Atlantic to the Spanish Main. He visited the island of Margarita, Burboroata, Curaçao, where he got rid of some of his slaves, and finally came to Rio de la Hacha. He anchored there at an awkward moment. The Treasurer of the town, Miguel de Castellanos, was being subjected by a new Governor of Venezuela, Pedro Ponce de Leon, to an embarrassing investigation into the irregularity of his accounts. He saw in the arrival of the English trader an opportunity to prove his merits, and Captain Lovell was no match for him. Lovell landed ninety negroes. Miguel de Castellanos seized them as Crown property, sold them to the people of Rio de la Hacha, and refused to pay Lovell a farthing. Lovell was not commissioned to make war and had to go away empty-handed. The loss was serious. For according to the deposition of one W. Fowler of Ratcliffe, merchant, made at another time before the Board of Admiralty, a negro who spoke either Spanish or Portuguese was worth on the Spanish Main from five to six hundred gold pesos. Hawkins accepted the loss philosophically, attributing it to the simpleness of my deputies who knew not how to handle these matters. Young Francis Drake, however, who lost his share of the profit which otherwise the expedition would have brought to him, looked upon the mishap as a burning wrong and for many years could not hear the name of Rio de la Hacha without indignation.

Hawkins did not employ Captain Lovell again, but a little more than a year after Drake’s return he gave him another chance. And this time young Drake at the age of twenty-two sailed in command of his own ship. It was a small bark the Judith, of fifty tons, but he must have sold his little Zeeland ship and added to what that brought in all the small gain he had made from his two earlier voyages, in order to acquire it. In the prospect, however, the risk was well worthwhile. For the expedition was launched by men of high standing in the City of London, and the Queen herself was concerned in its success. Young Francis Drake at the age of twenty-two was thus already on the edge of great affairs. Sir William Garrard, Knight — it should be understood that Knighthood in the days of Elizabeth was a high honour and charily given — and Roland Heyward, Alderman, were the chief Directors of the Company which promoted it. There were to be six ships, with John Hawkins as their General, and the outlay in stores and merchandise reached a figure of between a hundred and sixty and a hundred and seventy thousand pounds in money at its present value. Da Silva, the Ambassador, once more took alarm. Some evil thing was being planned against his master. He sought an audience of the Queen and was rallied for his distrust. He may have been appeased, he probably was not, but when he learned that two of Her Majesty’s great ships of war, the Jesus of Lübeck and the Minion, were sailing from Chatham to Plymouth for repairs, he became quite certain that dirty work was on foot and that the Queen was in it up to her starched ruff. He obtained a second audience and was assured categorically that there was no threat of harm to the King of Spain in any expedition which was being planned. He had publicly to accept the reassurance. Privately he wrote to King Philip that he did not believe a word which the Queen said. Yet he was not altogether right.

The Queen was undoubtedly concerned in this voyage. She was lending to John Hawkins two ships of the Royal Navy. There was nothing unusual in this arrangement. The party to whom the ships were lent must repair, man and victual them. If the voyage paid a dividend, then a reduction was made on the amount of the Queen’s benefit to cover those expenses. If the venture ended in a loss, the authors of the venture must bear the cost. In this case Queen Elizabeth would have made a singularly good bargain if the venture had been successful. The Jesus had been bought from Lübeck by Henry VIII in 1544. She was now thirty years old — a big ship of seven hundred tons, with an armament of twenty-two big guns and forty-two lighter ones, very costly to repair and already condemned as not worth repair. The Minion, a smaller ship but still a great ship, of three hundred and fifty tons, was in hardly a better case. These ships arrived in Plymouth and under the experienced eyes of Hawkins what could be done to make them seaworthy was done. The William and John of one hundred and fifty tons, the Swallow of one hundred tons, Drake’s ship, the Judith, a bark of fifty tons, and the Angel of thirty-two tons, completed an imposing fleet of six ships. Da Silva was right, therefore, in inferring that some considerable adventure was projected and that the Queen herself had a share in it. He was quite wrong, however, in believing that the venture was one directed against the prosperity of Spain. It meant a breach of the Spanish regulations, but if it was successful, Spain would have shared in the benefit. For although on a bigger scale than that which Lovell had commanded, it was an expedition of the same kind.

It is difficult nowadays to accept the fact that the Queen had an investment in the slave-trade and that men of high honour like John Hawkins made it their regular business. Before we can begin, we have to wipe from our consciousness the high value which we put on human life. To the greater part of the race, especially in those early years of Elizabeth’s reign, life was not a great thing to lose. The amenities which now make it enjoyable and the drugs which make pain endurable were not known, whereas a belief in a glorious existence beyond the grave was more vivid and real. That was true on land, and still more true on the sea. A hundred men would be crowded into a ship which would not now be allowed to carry twenty. They were young men and boys for the most part and for the most part they died young men and boys. Disease set in inevitably. Scurvy, typhus and no doubt meningitis ran through the ship like the black plague. There were no lavatories, no refrigerators, no cold-storage rooms. Their food crawled with worms, their water rotted, they died like flies. For instance, on the first voyage to the Gold Coast in the year 1553, Mr. Thomas Wyndham with a Portuguese pilot Antonio Pinteado, sailed from Portsmouth with two ships, the Primrose and the Lion, and a pinnace Moon manned by one hundred and forty sailors. Wyndham died, Pinteado died and of the one hundred and forty men, only forty survivors came back to England, and these with their bodies undermined by fever. But the gold, ivory and pepper with which these forty men returned was held to more than counterbalance the loss of the others.