The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (7 page)

After a botched attempt at raiding a gold-laden mule train, Drake found another ally: a Huguenot pirate named Guillaume Le Testu. Together, they seized more bars of gold and silver than they could possibly carry—and in good pirate fashion, they left some as buried treasure to dig up later. They never got it. The Spaniards launched a ferocious pursuit, recovered the buried treasure (its site betrayed by a captured Huguenot pirate), and executed Le Testu. But lucky Drake and his men escaped, and decided that after a year of suffering and fighting, it was time to head for England and a hero's welcome, for England surely did love her pirates.

For all Drake's cleverness, determination, and courage—which were duly celebrated—he rather spoiled the effect by laying claim to his late brother John's estate, despite the fact that John had left behind a young widow (whose later suit against Drake was upheld). Drake was a self-made man—and he took every advantage he could to advance that self-making.

During his adventures and sufferings in Panama, Drake had seen the Pacific Ocean (the first Englishman to do so). He was determined to see it again. After helping the Earl of Essex in a campaign in Ireland, with the
usual attendant slaughter, Drake accepted the queen's commission to sail down the east coast of South America, through the Straits of Magellan, and up the west coast of South America—ostensibly on a mission of trade, but trade in Elizabethan parlance, when it involved the New World, meant robbing Spanish ships and ports. The mission was to be led by three equal partners, Drake, John Wynter, and Thomas Doughty, though Drake was given command, and the partnership would soon unravel.

Drake's expedition set sail on 15 November 1577—and again, after storms drove it back to Plymouth, on 13 December. His flagship was the the
Pelican
, and even his own men were kept largely ignorant of the flotilla's destination. Drake did not want his piratical plans exposed, though they became apparent soon enough when the English pirates captured Spanish and Portuguese ships off the coast of Africa, taking from them what they wanted (including a Portuguese pilot) and then setting them free.

By the summer, the voyage became contentious, with Doughty accusing Drake's brother Thomas of theft and implying that Drake himself was Doughty's rightful inferior, given Doughty's superior birth and influence in Queen Elizabeth's court. In a squalid little trial, Drake found Doughty guilty of mutiny and treason, and then inveigled the crew to sentence him to death. Doughty asked that he be left onshore; but no, said Drake, he could not be left to the mercies of the Spanish. He could be kept prisoner aboard another ship, but then that ship would have to return to England and miss out on the spoils of the voyage. This too, proved unpopular; and so Doughty was ordered executed. He took it in good gentlemanly fashion, dining with Drake and sharing communion with him beforehand—all of which adds to the rather sickly pallor of the episode, which ended with Doughty's head lopped off and Drake holding it up and invoking the lesson: “This is the end of traitors.”
²

Whenever misfortune struck, in storm or strife, the crew blamed Doughty's ill-omened execution. Drake had the chaplain, who gave voice to the crew's
sense of guilt, clapped in chains, thrust below deck, and slapped with an armband that read, “Francis Fletcher, the falsest knave that liveth.”
³
Drake also declared him excommunicated. While many Protestants held that every man was his own priest, Drake apparently believed that every captain was his own pope.

After Doughty's execution, Drake rechristened the
Pelican
as the
Golden Hind
. It was certainly his ambition to fill it with gold. Drake had left England with five ships. He entered the Straits of Magellan with three, and entered the Pacific with only the
Golden Hind
; brutal storms crushed the
Marigold
in the Straits and buffeted the
Elizabeth
so badly that her captain John Wynter had to beat a retreat to England.

For both ships and ports, the coast of Chile was prime raiding territory, and Drake hit them, and dodged his pursuers (though an initial landing among the Indians had left him with arrow wounds, one just below his right eye). His big haul came near Lima, Peru, where he seized, in separate actions, two treasure ships full of gold, silver, and jewels; the second ship,
Nuestra Señora de la Concepcion,
was so laden with treasure that it took Drake's men six days to strip it and store the valuables on the
Golden Hind
.

On 26 September 1580, after circumnavigating the globe, Drake presented his glittering treasure to the queen. Drake's share made him one of the wealthiest men in England. The queen, entitled to half the expedition's plunder, was quite pleased and ennobled Drake in 1581, the same year that he, in short order, became a member of Parliament, mayor of Plymouth, and thus a man of the establishment.

Still, he remained a man of action. In 1585, Drake mounted another great raid on the Spanish. With him was Martin Frobisher—an explorer and pirate like himself—whom he made vice admiral, and more than twenty ships. They began by raiding the coast of Spain itself, then headed west, burning their way through the Cape Verde Islands (where, alas, they picked
up a deadly fever that killed hundreds of Drake's men), and then to the West Indies where they sacked Santo Domingo in January 1586, even rounding up the city's women to drop their jewels into the pirates' collection plates. It is a tribute to Drake's mastery of tactics that his plan of attack was used by Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables in 1655—with disastrous results. Not everyone had Drake's touch. Even so, his expedition—which included attacks on Cartagena, Colombia, and Saint Augustine, Florida, as well as an evacuation of the colonists of Roanoke Island—failed to turn a profit, and only about half of Drake's men returned alive. It was a tribute to Drake's own stamina that he was one of them.

On 15 March 1587, Drake received the queen's commission to raid Spain, especially its ports where it was preparing for an invasion of England. Drake struck Cadiz on Spain's southwest coast, pillaging merchant ships (more than twenty), fighting boldly “for our gracious Queen and country against Antichrist and his members,”
⁴
blasting everything in sight in Cadiz harbor, and then burning and looting along the Portuguese coast and the Azores. In Drake's famous phrase, he was “singeing the beard of the King of Spain.”

In Spain they called Drake “el Draque,” the Dragon, and King Philip II offered a reward of 20,000 ducats (about $10 million today) for anyone who could douse his flames. But if Drake was a dragon, it was part of the patriotic
myth that he was a phlegmatic English one. On 19 July 1588, news reached Drake at Plymouth that the Spanish Armada had been spotted off the coast of Cornwall. Drake, the popular story goes, was playing bowls with his colleagues.

Drake had actually advocated a strike on the Spanish before they embarked for England. It was obviously too late for that now. Drake was vice admiral of Elizabeth's fleet under Lord Howard of Effingham. In a splendid show of ceremony and respect, Drake lowered his admiral's flag when Howard's ship first came into view, and Howard raised his as Drake's was lowered. A series of fires over England—lighted beacons—alerted England's captains to the invasion, and in the weeks that followed, the English sea dogs darted between the Spanish ships, utterly routing them, leaving a storm to finish them off. When the fight was over, Philip II's ships looked like they'd been through a nautical bonfire of the vanities, galleons shattered and sunk or wrecked along the shores of Ireland; as many as 20,000 Spaniards lost; and amidst the carnage and catastrophe stood Drake on his quarterdeck. In true entrepreneurial fashion he had managed not only to fight the Spaniards, but to grab captives to be ransomed and a treasure chest of gold to be divided with the Crown.

Such enterprise did not endear Drake to some of his captains—Martin Frobisher, for one, loathed Drake's swashbuckling greed (though Elizabeth's depleted treasury relied on it)—and the great glory of victory was marred somewhat by the exchequer's inability to promptly pay the men who had saved England, and by an outburst of disease that ravaged the sailors, with thousands dying of dysentery or typhus. Worse, at least for Drake, was that when the queen assigned him the task of finishing off the remnants of the Spanish fleet the following year, he failed utterly—indeed he was distracted with a hapless siege of Corunna, and an equally hapless attempt to liberate Portugal from Spain—and lost royal favor.

It was not until 1595 that Drake—now well over fifty, and feeling it—was able to outfit another expedition against Panama with royal approval and investment. It started badly, with Drake quarreling with John Hawkins, and it got worse, with Hawkins succumbing to a mortal illness, the campaign proving a bloody failure, and Drake himself dying of dysentery—or as one of his officers, Sir Thomas Baskerville said, “as I think through grief.” Drake's last wish was to be buckled into his armor “that he might die like a soldier.”
⁶
He was buried at sea off the Panamanian coast in a lead-lined coffin that, to the delight of thrill-seeking divers, has never been found.

The English do love their rogues, and in Drake they had a brilliant one. Spain, with the approval of the pope, had claimed the New World as its own. Drake put paid to that pretension, and in the process opened up the New World to English imperialism. In the popular mind he was a patriot, a hero, and a godly Protestant—and of course, a pirate, which only added to his charm. He stood for freedom (or for looting), against a Spain that was
“Fast-bound in misery and iron, with chains / Of Priest and King and feudal servitude.” Drake was the

It was Drake who had led “a force of nigh three thousand men wherewith to singe / The beard o' the King of Spain”
⁷
—and what could be better than that?

“Got a little Captain in you?”

 

 

H
enry Morgan—now known more for his rum than anything else—was a Welshman whose uncles fought on opposite sides of the English Civil War (1641–1652). Uncle Edward served with the gallant, high Anglican Royalists, the Cavaliers; Uncle Thomas served with the puritanical Protestant Parliamentarians, the Roundheads. The latter won, unfortunately, and under Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1653–58) they proved to be extremely aggressive in foreign policy. Under the guidance of an apostate Catholic priest turned Protestant chaplain, Thomas Gage, Cromwell endorsed a strategy to bedevil Spain in the New World, of which Gage had some knowledge. The strategy was “the Western Design.” It was, in essence, a plan to revive the glorious days of Sir Francis Drake of more than half a century before; the goal of “the Western Design,” however, was not just to raid the Spanish Main, but to seize it and the Spanish West Indies.