Westward Ho! or the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knt. ... in the reign of ... Queen Elizabeth. Rendered into modern English by C. K

Front matter

IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. PRINTED BY E. CLAY, LONDON, FOR MACMILLAN & CO. CAMBEIDGE. SLotlSon: BELL AND DALDY, 186, FLEET STREET. fflutlln: HODGES AND SMITH. œDIntUtgl): EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. ffiUSBOto: JAMES MACLEHOSE. ffilfOtD: J. H. PARKER. [The Author rejpum-ihzjright of Translation.] ! OR, THE VOYAGES AND ADVENTUKES Of Sir AMYAS LEIGH, Kotght, ©f Bnrtougtl, in ttir tfouniq of Dcbon. IN THE REIGN OF HER MOST GLORIOUS MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH. RENDERED INTO MODERN ENOUSH Bt CHARLES KINGSLEY. Œambtfoge': MACMILLAN & CO. 1855. It " DUX FŒM1NA FACTI." Motto 0/ the Armada Medals, 1588. TO THE RAJAH SIR JAMES BROOKE, K.C.B. AND GEORGE AUGUSTUS SELWYN, D.D. BISHOP OP NEW ZEALAND, THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED, BY ONE WHO (UNKNOWN TO THEM) HAS NO OTHER METHOD OF EXPRESSING HIS ADMIRATION AND REVERENCE FOR THEIR CHARACTERS.

THAT TYPE OP ENGLISH VIRTUE, AT ONCE MANFUL AND GODLY, PRACTICAL AND ENTHUSIASTIC, PRUDENT AND SELF SACRIFICING, WHICH HE HAS TRIED TO DEPICT IN THESE PAGES, THEY HAVE EXHIBITED IN A FORM EVEN PURER AND MORE HEROIC THAN THAT IN WHICH HE HAS DREST IT, AND THAN THAT IN WHICH IT WAS EXHIBITED BY THE WORTHIES WHOM ELIZABETH, WITHOUT DISTINCTION OF RANK OR AGE, GATHERED ROUND HER IN THE EVER GLORIOUS WARS OF HER GREAT REIGN. C. K. CONTENTS TO VOL. I.

Chapter I. How Mr

OXENHAM SAW THE WHITE BIRD. The hollow oak our palace is, Our heritage the sea." All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tideriver paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge where salmon wait for Autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west. Above the town the hills close in, cushioned with deep oak woods, through which juts here and there a crag of fern-fringed slate ; below they lower, and open more and more in softlyrounded knolls, and fertile squares of red and green, till they sink into the wide expanse of hazy flats, rich salt marshes, and rolling sandhills, where Torridge joins her sister Taw, and both together flow quietly toward the broad surges of the bar, and the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell.

Pleasantly the old VOL. I. B town stands there, beneath its soft Italian sky, fanned day and night by the fresh ocean breeze, which forbids alike the keen winter frosts, and the fierce thunder heats of the midland; and pleasantly it has stood there for now, perhaps, eight hundred years, since tbe first Grenvil, cousin of the Conqueror, returning from the conquest of South Wales, drew round him trusty Saxon serfs, and free Norse rovers with their golden curls, and dark Silurian Britons from the Swansea shore, and all the mingled blood which still gives to the seaward folk of the next county their strength and intellect, and, even in these levelling days, their peculiar beauty of face and form. But at the time whereof I write, Bideford was not merely a pleasant country town, whose quay was haunted by a few coasting craft.

It was one of the chief ports of England ; it furnished seven ships to fight the Armada : even more than a century afterwards, say the chroniclers, " it sent more vessels to the northern trade, than any port in England, saving (strange juxta position !) London and Topsham," and was the centre of a local civilization and enterprise, small perhaps com pared with the vast efforts of the present day : but who dare despise the day of small things, if it has proved to be the dawn of mighty ones? And it is to the sea-life and labour of Bideford, and Dartmouth, and Topsham, and Plymouth (then a petty place), and many another little western town, that England owes the foundation of her naval' and commercial glory. It was the men of Devon, the Drakes and Hawkins', Gilberts and Raleighs, Grenviles and Oxenhams, and. a host more of " for gotten worthies," whom we shall learn one day to honour as they deserve, to whom she owes her com merce, her colonies, her very existence.

For had they not first crippled, by their West Indian raids, the ill gotten resources of the Spaniard, and then crushed his last huge effort in Britain's Salamis, the glorious fight of 1588, what had we been by now, but a Popish appanage of a world-tyranny as cruel as heathen Rome itself, and far more devilish ? It is in memory of these men, their voyages and their battles, their faith and their valour, their heroic lives and no less heroic deaths, that I write this book ; and if now and then I shall seem to warm into a style somewhat too stilted and pompous, let me be excused for my subject's sake, fit rather to have been sung than said, and to have proclaimed to all true English hearts, not as a novel but as an epic (which some man may yet gird himself to write), the same great message which the songs of Troy, and the Persian wars, and the trophies of Marathon and Salamis, spoke to the hearts of all true Greeks of old.

One bright summer's afternoon, in the year of grace 1575, a tall and fair boy came lingering along Bide ford quay, in bis scholar's gown, with satchel and slate b2 in hand, watching wistfully the shipping and the sailors, till, just after he had passed the bottom of tbe High Street, he came opposite to one of the many taverns which looked out upon the river. In .the open bay-window sat merchants and gentlemen, discoursing over their afternoon's draught of sack ; and outside tbe door was gathered a group of sailors, listening earnestly to some one who stood in the midst. The boy, all alive for any sea-news, must needs go up to them, and take his place among the sailor-lads who were peeping and whispering under the elbows of the men, and so came in for the following speech, delivered in a loud bold voice, with a strong Devonshire accent, and a fair sprinkling of oaths.

" If you don't believe me, go and see, or stay here and grow all over blue-mould. I tell you, as I am a gentleman, I saw it with these eyes, and so did Salva tion Yeo there, through a window in the lower room ; and we measured the heap, as I am a Christened man, seventy foot long, ten foot broad, and twelve foot high, of silver bars, and each bar between a thirty and forty pound weight. And says Captain Drake : ' There, my lads of Devon, I've brought you to the mouth of tbe world's treasure-house, and it 's your own fault now, if you don't sweep it out as empty as a stock-fish.' " " Why didn't you bring some of they home, then, Mr. Oxenham?" " Why weren't you there to help to carry them? We would have brought 'em away, safe enough, and young Drake and I had broke the door abroad already, but Captain Drake goes off in a dead faint ; and when we came to look, he had a wound in his leg you might have laid three fingers in, and bis boots were full of blood, and had been for an hour or more ; but the heart of him was that, that he never knew it till he dropped, and then his brother and I got him away to the boats, he kicking and struggling, and bidding us let him go on with the fight, though every step he took in the sand was in a pool of blood ; and so we got off.

And tell me, ye sons of shotten herrings, wasn't it worth more to save him than the dirty silver? for silver we can get again, brave boys : there's more fish in the sea than ever came out of it, and more silver in Nombre de Dios than would pave all the streets in the west country : but of such captains as Franky Drake, heaven never makes but one at a time, and if we lose him, good-bye to England's luck, say I, and who don't agree, let him choose his weapons, and I'm his man." He who delivered this harangue was a tall and sturdy personage, with a florid black-bearded face, and bold restless dark eyes, who leaned, with crossed legs and arms akimbo, against the wall of the house ; and seemed in the eyes of the school-boy a very magnifico, some prince or duke at least. . He was dressed (con trary to all sumptuary laws of the time) in a suit of crimson velvet, a little the worse, perhaps, for wear ; by his side were a long Spanish rapier and a brace of daggers, gaudy enough about the hilts; his fingers sparkled with rings ; he had two or three gold chains about his neck, and large earrings in his ears, behind one of which a red rose was stuck jauntily enough among the glossy black curls ; on his head was a broad velvet Spanish hat, in which instead of a feather was fastened with a great gold clasp a whole Quczal bird, whose gorgeous plumage of fretted golden green shone like one entire precious stone.

As he finished his speech, he took off the said hat, and looking at the bird in it — " Look ye, my lads, did you ever see such a fowl as •that before? That's' the bird which the old Indian kings of Mexico let no one wear but their own selves ; and therefore I wear it, — I, John Oxenham of South Tawton, for a sign to all brave lads of Devon, that as the Spaniards are the masters of the Indians, we 're the masters of the Spaniards : " and he replaced his hat. A murmur of applause followed : but one hinted, that he " doubted the Spaniards were too many for them." " Too many ? How many men did we take Nombre de Dios with ? Seventy-three were we, and no more, when we sailed out of Plymouth Sound ; and before we saw the Spanish main, half were ' gastados,' used up, as the Dons say, with the scurvy; and in Port Pheasant Captain Rawse of Cowes fell in with us, and that gave us some thirty bands more ; and with that handful, my lads, only fifty-three in all, we picked the lock of the new world !

And who did we lose but our trumpeter, who stood braying like an ass in the middle of the square, instead of taking care of bis neck like a Christian ? I tell you, those Spaniards are rank cowards, as all bullies are. They pray to a woman, the idola trous rascals ! and no wonder they fight like women." " You'm right, Captain," sang out a tall gaunt fellow who stood close to him ; *' one westcountryman can fight two easterlings, and an easterling can beat three Dons any day. Eh ! my lads of Devon ? " For 0 ! it's the herrings and the good brown beef, And the cider and the cream so white; 0 ! they are the making of the jolly Devon lads, For to play, and eke to fight." " Come," said Oxenham, " come along ! Who lists ? who lists ? who'll make his fortune ? " Oh, who will join, jolly mariners all?

And who will join, says he, 0 ! To fill his pockets with the good red goold, By sailing on the sea, 0 ! " "Who'll list?" cried the gaunt man again; " now's your time ! We've got forty men to Plymouth now, ready to sail the minute we get back, and we want a dozen out of you Bideford men, and just a boy or two, and then we'm off and away, and make our fortunes, or go to heaven. " Our bodies in the sea so deep, Our souls in heaven to rest ! Where valiant seamen, one and all, Hereafter shall be blest ! " " Now," said Oxenham, " you won't let the Plymouth men say that the Bideford men daren't follow them? North Devon against South, it is. Who'll join? who'll join? It is but a step of a way, after all, and sailing as smooth as a duck-pond as soon as you're past Cape Finisterre. I'll run a Clovelly herring-boat there and back for a wager of twenty pound, and never ship a bucketful all the way.

Who'll join ? Don't think you're buying a pig in a poke. I know the road, and Salvation Yeo, here, too, who was the gunner's mate, as well as I do the narrow seas, and better. You ask him to show you tbe chart of it, now, and see if he don't tell you over the ruttier as well as Drake himself." On which the gaunt man pulled from under his arm a great white buffalo horn covered with rough etchings of land and sea, and held it up to the admiring ring. " See here, boys all, and behold the pictur of the place, dra'ed out so natural as ever was life. I «-0t mun from a Portingal, down to the Azores ; and he'd pricked mun out, and pricked mun out, wheresoever he'd sailed, and whatsoever he'd seen. Take mun in your hands now, Simon Evans, take mun in your hands; look mun over, and I'll warrant you'll know the way in five minutes so well as ever a shark in the seas."

And the horn was passed from hand to hand ; while Oxenham, who saw that his heavers were becoming moved, called through the open window for a great tankard of sack, and passed that from band to band after the horn. The school-boy, who had been devouring with eyes and ears all which passed, had contrived by this time to edge himself into the inner ring, now stood face to face with the hero of the emerald crest, and got as many peeps as he could at the wonder. But when he saw the sailors, one after another, having turned it over awhile, come forward and offer to join Mr. Oxenham, his soul burnt within him for a nearer view of that wondrous horn, as magical in its effects as that of Tristrem, or the enchanters' in Ariosto ; and when the group had somewhat broken up, and Oxenham was going into the tavern with bis recruits, he asked boldly for a nearer sight of the marvel, which was granted at once.

And now to bis astonished gaze displayed them selves cities and harbours, dragons and elephants, whales which fought with sharks, plate ships of Spain, islands with apes and palm-trees, each with its name over-written, and here and there, " Here is gold ;" and again, " Much gold and silver ;" inserted most probably, as the words were in English, by the hands of Mr. Oxenham himself. Lingeringly and longingly the boy turned it round and round, and thought the owner of it more fortunate than Khan or Kaiser. Oh, if he couldbut possess that horn, what needed be on earth beside to make him blest ! " I say, will you sell this?" " Yea, marry, or my own soul, if I can get the worth of it." " I want the horn, — I don't want your soul ; it's somewhat of a stale sole, for aught I know ; and there are plenty of fresh ones in the bay."

And therewith, after much fumbling, he pulled out a tester (the only one be had), and asked if that would buy it ? " That? no, nor twenty of them." The boy thought over what a good knight-errant would do in such case, and then answered, " Tell you what ; I'll fight you for it." "Thank'ee, Sir!" " Break the jackanapes' bead for him, Yeo," said Oxenham. " Call me jackanapes again, and I break your's, Sir." And the boy lifted his fist fiercely. Oxenham looked at him a minute smilingly. " Tut ! tut ! my man, hit one of your own size, if you will, and spare little folk like me!" " If I have a boy's age, Sir, I have a man's fist. I shall be fifteen years old this month, and know how to answer any one who insults me." " Fifteen, my young cockerel? you look liker twenty," said Oxenham, with an admiring glance at the lad's broad limbs, keen blue eyes, curling golden locks, and round honest face.

" Fifteen ? If I had half-a-dozen such lads as you, I would make knights of them before I died. Eh, Yeo?" " He'll do," said Yeo ; " he will make a brave game cock in a year or two, if be dares ruffle up so early at a tough old hen-master like the Captain." At which there was a general laugh, in which Oxen ham joined as loudly as any, and then bade the lad tell him why he was so keen after the horn. " Because," said he, looking up boldly, " I want to go to sea. I want to see the Indies. I want to fight the Spaniards. Though I am a gentleman's son, I'd a deal liever be a cabin-boy on board your ship." And the lad having hurried out his say fiercely enough, dropped his head again. "And you shall," cried Oxenham, with a great oath ; " and take a galleon, and dine off carbonadoed Dons. Whose son are you, my gallant fellow?"

" Mr. Leigh's, of Burrough Court." " Bless his soul ! I know him as well as I do the Eddystone, and his kitchen too. Who sups with him to-night?" " Sir Richard Grenvil." " Dick Grenvil ? I did not know he was in town. Go home, and tell your lather John Oxenham will come and keep him company. There, off with you! I'll make all straight with the good gentleman, and you shall have your venture with me ; and as for the horn, let him have the horn, Yeo, and I'll give you a noble for it." " Not a penny, noble Captain. If young master will take a poor mariner's gift, there it is, for the sake of his love to the calling, and Heaven send him luck therein." And the good fellow, with the impulsive generosity of a true sailor, thrust the horn into the boy's hands, and walked away to escape thanks. "And now," quoth Oxenham, "my merry men all, make up your minds what mannered men you be minded to be before you take your bounties.

I want none of your rascally lurching longshore vermin, whoget five pounds out of this captain, and ten out of that, and let him sail without them after all, while they are stowed away under women's mufflers, and in tavern cellars. If any man is of that humour, he had better to cut himself up, and salt himself down in a barrel for pork, before he meets me again ; for by this light, let me catch him, be it seven years hence, and if I do not cut his throat upon the streets, it's a pity ! But if any man will be true brother to me, true brother to him I'll be, come wreck or prize, storm or calm, salt water or fresh, victuals or none, share and fare alike ; and here's my hand upon it, for every man and all ; and so — " Westward ho ! with a rumbelow, And hurra for the Spanish main, 0 ! " After which oration Mr. Oxenham swaggered into the tavern, followed by his new men ; and the boy took bis way homewards, nursing his precious horn, trembling between hope and fear, and blushing with maidenly shame, and a half-sense of wrong doing at having revealed suddenly to a stranger the darling wish which he had hidden from his father and mother ever since he was ten years old.

Now this young gentleman, Amyas Leigh, though come of as good blood as any in Devon, and having lived all his life in what we should even now call the very best society, and being (on account of tbe valour, courtesy, and truly noble qualities which he showed forth in his most eventful life,) chosen by me as the hero and centre of this story, was not, saving for his good looks, by any means what would be called now-a-days an " interesting" youth, still less a " highly educated" one ; for, with the exception of a little Latin, which had been driven into him by repeated blows, as if it had been a nail, he knew no books whatsoever, save his Bible, bis Prayer-book, the old " Mort d' Arthur" of Caxton's edition, which lay in the great bay window in the hall, and the translation of " Las Casas' History of the West Indies," which lay beside it, lately done into English under the title of " The Cruelties of the Spaniards."

He devoutly bebeved in fairies, whom he called pixies ; and held that they clianged babies, and made the mushroom rings on the downs to dance in. When he had warts or burns, be went to the white witch at Northam to charm them away; he thought that the sun moved round the earth, and that the moon had some kindred with a Cheshire cheese. He held that tbe swallows slept all the winter at the bottom of the horse-pond ; talked, like Raleigh, Grenvil, and other low persons, with a broad Devonshire accent ; and was in many other respects so very ignorant a youth, that any pert monitor in a national school might have bad a hearty laugh at him. Nevertheless, this ignorant young savage, " vacant of the glorious gains" of the nineteenth century, children's literature and science made easy, and, worst of all, of those improved views of English history now current among our railway essayists, which consist in believing all persons, male and female, before the year 1688, and nearly all after it, to have been either hypocrites or fools, bad learnt certain things which he would hardly have been taught just now in any school in England ; for his training had been that of the old Persians, " to speak the truth, and to draw the bow," both of which savage virtues he had acquired to perfection, as well as the equally savage ones of enduring pain cheerfully, and of believing it to be the finest thing in the world to be a gentleman ; by which word he bad been taught to understand the careful habit of causing needless pain to no human being, poor or rich, and of taking pride in giving up bis own pleasure for the sake of those wbo were weaker than himself.

Moreover, having been entrusted for the last year with the breaking of a colt, and the care of a cast of young hawks which his father had received from Lundy Isle, he had been profiting much by the means of those coarse and frivolous amusements, in perse verance, thoughtfulness, and the habit of keeping his temper ; and though he had never had a single " object lesson," or been taught to " use his intellectual powers," he knew the names and ways of every bird, and fish, and fly, and could read, as cunningly as the oldest sailor, the meaning of every drift of cloud which crossed the heavens. Lastly, he had been for some time past, on account of his extraordinary size and strength, un disputed cock of the school, and the most terrible fighter among all Bideford boys ; in which brutal habit he took much delight, and contrived, strange as it may seem, to extract from it good, not only for himself, but for others, doing justice among his school-fellows with a heavy band, and succouring the oppressed and afflicted ; so that he was the terror of all the sailor-lads, and the pride and stay of all the town's-boys and girls, and hardly considered that he had done bis duty in his calling if he went home without beating a big lad for bullying a little one.

For the rest, he never thought about thinking, or felt about feebng ; and had no ambi tion whatsoever beyond pleasing bis father and mother, getting by honest means the maximum of " red quar rendera" and mazard cherries, and going to sea when he was big enough. Neither was he what would be now-a-days called by many a pious child ; for though he said his Creed and Lord's Prayer night and morning, and went to the service at the church every forenoon, and read the day's Psalms with his mother every evening, and had learnt from her and from his father (as he proved well in after life), that it was infinitely noble to do right, and infinitely base to do wrong, yet (the age of children's religious books not having yet dawned on the world,) he knew nothing more of theology, or of his own soul, than is contained in the Church Catechism.

It is a question, however, on the whole, whether, though grossly ignorant (according to our modern notions) in science and religion, he was altogether untrained in manhood, virtue, and godliness ; and whether the bar baric narrowness of his Information was not somewhat counterbalanced both in him and in the rest of his generation by the depth, and breadth, and healthiness of his Education. So let us watch him up the hill as he goes hugging his horn, to tell all that has passed to his mother, from whom he never had hidden anything in his life, save only that sea-fever ; and that only because he foreknew that it would give her pain ; and because, moreover, being a prudent and sensible lad, he knew that he was not yet old enough to go, and that, as he expressed it to her that afternoon, " there was no use hollaing till he was out of the wood."

So he goes up between the rich lane-banks, heavy with drooping ferns and honeysuckle ; out upon the windy down toward the old Court, nestled amid its ring of wind-clipt oaks; through the grey gateway into the home close ; and then he pauses a moment to look around ; first at the wide bay to the westward, with its southern wall of purple cliffs ; then at the dim Isle of Lundy far away at sea ; then at the cliffs and downs of Morte and Braunton, right in front of him ; then at the vast yellow sheet of rolling sandhill, and green alluvial plain dotted with red cattle, at his feet, through which the silver estuary winds onward toward the sea. Beneath him on bis right, the Torridge, like a land-locked lake, sleeps broad and bright between the old park of Tapeley and the charmed rock of the Hubbastone, where, seven hundred years ago, the Norse rovers landed to lay siege to Kenwith Castle, a mile away on his left hand ; and not three fields away, are the old stones of " The Bloody Corner," where the retreating Danes, cut off from their ships, made their last fruitless stand against the Saxon sheriff and tbe valiant men of Devon.

Within that charmed rock, so Torridge boatmen tell, sleeps now the old Norse Viking in his leaden coffin, with all his fairy treasure and his crown of gold ; and as the boy looks at the spot, he fancies, and almost hopes, that tbe day may come when he shall have to do bis duty against the invader as boldly as tbe men of Devon did then. And past him, far below, upon the soft south-eastern VOL. i. C breeze, the stately ships go sliding out to sea. When shall he sail in them, and see the wonders of the deep ? And as he stands there with beating heart and kindling eye, the cool breeze whistbng through his long fair curls, he is a symbol, though he knows it not, of brave young England longing to wing its way out of its island prison to discover and to traffic, to colonize and to civilize, until no .wind can sweep the earth which does not bear the echoes of an English voice.

Patience, young Amyas! Thou too shalt forth, and westward ho, beyond thy wildest dreams ; and see brave sights, and do brave deeds, which no man has since the foundation of the world. Thou, too, shalt face invaders stronger and more cruel far than Dane or Norman, and bear thy part in that great Titan strife before the renown of which the name of Salamis shall fade away ! Mr. Oxenham came that evening to supper as he had promised : but as people supped in those days in much the same manner as they do now, we may drop tbe thread of the story for a few hours, and take it up again after supper is over. " Come now, Dick Grenvil, do thou talk the good man round, and I'll warrant myself to talk round the good wife." The personage whom Oxenham addressed thus familiarly, answered by a somewhat sarcastic smile, and, " Mr. Oxenham gives Dick Grenvil (with just enough emphasis on the " Mr." and the " Dick," to hint that a liberty had been taken with him), "overmuch credit with the men.

Mr. Oxenham's credit with fair ladies, none can doubt. Friend Leigh, is Heard's great ship home yet from the Straits?" The speaker, known well in those days as Sir Richard Grenvile, Granville, Greenvil, Greenfield, with two or three other variations, was one of those truly heroical personages whom Providence, fitting always the men to their age and their work, bad sent upon the earth whereof it takes right good' care, not in England only, but in Spain and Italy, in Germany and the Netherlands, and wherever, in short, great men and great deeds were needed to lift the mediæval world into the modern. And, among all the heroic faces which the painters of that age have preserved, none, perhaps, hardly ex cepting Shakspeare's or Spenser's, Alva's or Parma's, is more heroic than that of Richard Grenvil, as it stands in Prince's " Worthies of Devon ; " of a Spanish type, perhaps, (or more truly speaking, a Cornish,) rather than an English, with just enough of the British element in it, to give delicacy to its massiveness.