Sea fighters from Drake to Farragut

Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

I. The Hero of Sea-romance .... 3

II. Chief Pirate of Queen Elizabeth . . 14

Chapter I The Hero Of Sea-romance

No name, in England's annals of the sea, has been surrounded with so dazzling a setting of romance as that of Sir Francis Drake. During his lifetime his adventures found no place in sober history. They invaded the realm of folklore and took strong hold on the popular fancy in the shape of marvellous tales and legends. But rising out of this wonderland of romance Drake will always take his place in history as a master in strategy, one of the most skilful of navigators, the leader in the movement which established England's supremacy on the sea, and the first great admiral in the development of modern naval science, which had its cradle in England, and which substituted the sailing-navy for the ancient rowing-navy.

The stirring times into which Drake was born acted as a forcing-house for the growth of character. Boys turned into men at a bound. Bred in the nursery to the tune of war and revolution, they were trained by danger and privation to fight battles at an age when the boy of to-day is making ready for college. The youths of puritan England, rudely moulded in the preparatory school of life, were formed for a future of adventure and daring by hardships which to us appear inconceivable.

The strange mixture of lax moral standards and fierce religious passion and bigotry, the light esteem in which human life was held, the rapid succession of startling events, the persecutions carried on in the name of a holy cause, — all these things went to forge men of singular and violent contrasts. Drake, the foremost sailor of the Reformation, the chief pirate of Queen Elizabeth, one of the greatest of England's admirals, was one of these men.

Born in 1544 in the heat of the strife between catholics and protestants, little Francis drew in with his earliest breath a fierce hatred of Spain and a mastering love of the sea. His father, Edmund Drake, a zealous protestant with a gift for preaching, belonged to a small democratic party near Tavistock, in catholic Devon. The first glimpse we have of the future sea king is when his father fled with him from a sudden outburst of catholic violence and took refuge on St. Nicholas Island, in the harbor of Plymouth. The child was only six, curly-headed and blue-eyed, but his earliest memories were of hardships and danger.

When we next look for him we find him climbing the masts of his floating home, so well was destiny moulding the future man. In Chatham reach, beyond the dockyard, at the mouth of the Medway, was the anchorage of vessels when out of commission, of war-ships, and of old and useless hulks. There the protestant preacher was given an appointment, under King Edward, as "Reader of Prayers to the Royal Navy," and was assigned a rotting hulk as a dwelling-place. So the boy Francis played among the masts, his nursery was in the midst of the war-ships' guns, he fell asleep rocked by the waves to the lullaby of the sailors' songs and the rush of the tide.

Under Edward VI, and with the patronage of the powerful Earl of Bedford, the protestant preacher hoped to place his boys in the navy, but a rude change shattered this expectation at a stroke. King Edward died, " Bloody " Mary, the catholic Queen, succeeded to the English throne, and the land was threatened with a prince of Spain as husband to the Queen. Then it was that the bursting storm of the Reformation threw all England into turmoil. Edmund Drake lost his position and was forced to send his sons into the world alone, to work out their own future. Francis was apprenticed as ship-boy on a craft that carried on a coasting trade with France and Hoiland, and on this channel coaster, in privation and exposure, the sailor lad learned his severest lessons of experience. While his body was being steeled to every hardship, his spirit was trained for future revenges on the Spanish Main. Passionate tales of Inquisition horrors were told by Flemish refugees on quay and shipboard. Philip's persecutions in the Netherlands fanned the flame of the English Reformation, and Francis Drake found himself in the centre of the hottest frenzy of religious passion. It was in this school that he acquired that implacable hatred of the very name of Spain which grew to be the motive power of his career.

Meanwhile events followed one another rapidly. Bloody Mary had died, Elizabeth reigned, and the protestants were again in favor. Francis had grown from lad to youth ; his master skipper had died and had left him his little craft on which to begin life as an independent trader. Open war with Spain had not yet been declared; but cruel reprisals by private individuals on both sides were rapidly paving the way for the coming rupture. The Channel swarmed with rovers. Four hundred adventurers swept the narrow seas in search of plunder. Queen Elizabeth, in her misunderstanding with France, had let loose the privateers armed with letters of marque to worry the French by outrages on their trade. But the wild pirate crews, once started on the scent of booty, were not to be held in the leash of crown commissions.

The enormous wealth of the Spanish trade courted depredation. Spanish galleons were chased and scuttled. Catholic vessels were looted. Rich cargoes of saffron, cochineal, silk, wool, gold, silver, pearls and precious stones, linen, tapestry, and wine were carried off to the pirates' lairs on the Isle of Wight, and in the creeks and inlets of the Irish coast. In revenge English ships were seized in Spanish ports, and English sailors lay in the dungeons of the Inquisition.

Drake was not the man to be left behind when others were roving the seas. He had given up independent trading. In fact, trading had become impossible. And he had entered the service of his famous kinsmen. Captain John and Captain William Hawkins, the rich ship-owners and pirate merchants of Plymouth. The chief seaport town of picturesque Devon might well have been called one of the pirate centres of the English coast. Its harbor was large and safe, and many precious cargoes, obtained by foul means as well as fair, were brought in by daring adventurers who had scoured the narrow sea in search of riches. Neither gold nor excitement were hard to find in those days, and Plymouth became, according to an old chronicler of Devon, "a port so famous that it had a kind of invitation, from the commodiousness thereof, to maritime noble actions."

These maritime actions, however, were not always noble. It was Sir John Hawkins of

Armada renown who was the first to initiate the English into "the execrable iniquities of the African slave trade," which left a " foul blot " on his famous voyages to the West Indies. The Hawkinses of Plymouth were some of the great merchant princes of the sixteenth century. William Hawkins, the father of Sir John, had been the first to carry English trade to the coast of Brazil. He also made a number of voyages to the Canary Islands, and it was on these expeditions that John Hawkins, who accompanied his father, came to know of the riches of the West Indies, and the money value of the slave trade.

John Hawkins was a son of his age, with a moral sense no stricter than that of most of his fellow-men. The slave trade was not new. Spaniards and Portuguese had practised it for generations, and the customs of the Middle Ages had long before sanctioned the use of Moslem prisoners as galley slaves. Indian slavery in the West Indies had become a crying abuse, and it was mainly to deliver the freeborn, eagle-souled Indians from the bonds of forced labor that the infei'ior-raced negro was substituted in slavery. It was Las Casas, in the fifteenth century, who, in the name of humanity, established that negro slavery which Lincoln, more than three hundred years later, abolished in the name of the same humanity.

Before the time of John Hawkins the Engflish had not yet soiled their hands with the African trade. The first venture was made in 1562 by *'the right worshipful and valiant knight, Sir John Hawkins." This was four years before Francis Drake cast in his lot with his kinsmen. Drake first followed William Hawkins and George Fenner, and took part in that glorious action when with one ship and a pinnace Fenner held a gallant stand for two days against six Portuguese gunboats and a large galleasse, and finally forced them to retire.

Afterward he sailed under Captain Lovell on the fatal expedition to the West Indies, when he had his first sight of those fabled islands, and, at Rio de la Hacha on the Spanish Main, his first experience of Spanish treachery, the memory of which never left him, and, coupled with the longing for revenge, led him back in the last years of his life to the scene of his first reverse.

In October, 1567, Drake set sail from Plymouth harbor as pilot to John Hawkins, with a squadron of six vessels armed and victualled for a long voyage, on the expedition which turned the scale of commercial supremacy and completed the antagonism of England and Spain.

In Queen Elizabeth's time neither the navy nor the maritime commerce of England were established on a regular footing. The navy, used simply as an adjunct to the army, had remained undeveloped as an independent instrument of national power, and the vastness of its resources were still undreamed of. Later on, Drake proved the wonderful possibilities of a strongly equipped fleet in war time, by turning the enemy's coast-line into the centre of hostilities, and by destroying his trade with foreign countries.

But meanwhile the fleets of commerce and war were intermingled. Queen Elizabeth in time of peace used her men-of-war for commerce, while in war time she supplemented her scanty squadrons by merchantmen. In this way it became difficult to draw the line between official naval expeditions and private commercial enterprises, which in those days were frequently synonymous to buccaneering. It often happened that the Queen was one of the shareholders in the filibustering expeditions of Hawkins and Drake, and contributed some ships of war to the outfit. She was too much allured by the prospect of untold riches in gold, pearls, and precious stones to resist the temptation of enriching her private coffers by becoming a secret partner in the buccaneering ventures of her favorite pirates.

But while allowing her cupidity to get the better of her conscience, she was careful to assume public ignorance, and even disapproval of the practices of her unruly subjects, especially when Spanish ambassadors called peremptorily for satisfaction. And although her partners in adventure were sure of a cordial welcome to their precious cargoes, they were not always so certain as to the personal reception they might receive at the hands of the Queen. It might be the gallows ; it might be knighthood.

But the game was worth the candle, and so it was that on that October day in 1567 Hawkins and Drake sailed out of Plymouth harbor with what amounted to a naval squadron, loaded with ammunition and even field artillery, ostensibly furnished by Sir William Garrard & Co., and costing about $650,000, but provided by the Queen with two ships of war, the Minion and the Jesus. Elizabeth herself never contributed money ; she left that to the other shareholders, even to the fitting out of her own war-ships.

The squadron met with bad weather from the very first. Near Cape Finisterre a violent storm damaged and scattered many of the vessels, but they succeeded in reaching their first rendezvous at the Canary Islands. From there they sailed southward to the coast of Guinea, in western Africa, where the traders spent several months in collecting negroes. Partly by means of the sword, and partly by exchange of scarlet coats and beads, they succeeded in storing away in their holds as many as five hundred slaves. Thus equipped with trading material, they crossed over to the Caribbean Sea, reaching the West Indies in the following March.

It was not so easy as they had hoped to dispose of their cargo, for traffic with the English had been forbidden in the colonies by the Spanish government. But the blandishments of the adventurers and the cupidity of the natives combined to bring about satisfactory results, and in obstinate cases there was always the resource of arms. Rio de la Hacha, having presumptuously fired upon the pirate ships, received her recompense. The port was blockaded, the defences stormed, and the town carried by assault. Then in secret, under cover of the night, the unlawful trade began, and two hundred slaves were exchanged for gold, silver and pearls, sugar, and hide.

Hawkins and Drake were so well pleased with their valuable cargo that they decided not to venture a landing, but to sail direct for home. Unhappily they had tarried too long in those treacherous waters. Two fierce furicanos^ or hurricanes, disabled the squadron and obliged them to seek shelter in San Juan de Ulua, or Vera Cruz, the port of the City of Mexico.

In the harbor the English adventurers found a Spanish merchant fleet of twelve vessels unarmed and laden with the year's produce of the West Indies, — gold and silver to the amount of 110,000,000. It lay at anchor waiting for the escort, which was hourly expected, to convoy it on the home-bound voyage. On the following morning the fleet of Spain appeared outside the harbor. Hawkins found himself in a difficult position ; he was obliged to choose between two evils. Either he could trust to Spanish protestations and Spanish honor to be left unmolested, or he could keep the enemy's fleet from entering the harbor and leave it to the mercy of the winds and waves, to be completely destroyed by the first storm, then seize the treasure and make off for merry England. But this meant the shipwreck to Spain of more than §22,000,000, and Hawkins feared the displeasure of the Queen. It would doubtless have hurried on the rupture with Spain.

Hawkins chose to rely upon the promise of the Spaniards, and allowed the fleet to enter the harbor. His reward was treason. In spite of sacred oaths and solemn pledges, the wily Spaniards fell suddenly upon the English squadron and overwhelmed it with a vastly superior force. The resistance was desperate ; the adventurers fought for their lives, but being wholly unprepared for the dastardly attack, they could save but few of their vessels. The smaller craft were sunk, and the Jesus was so shattered that they were obliged to abandon it with all its precious spoils. The Minion, with Hawkins on board, and the little Judith, with Drake, alone escaped on that fatal night. Riddled with shot and terribly damaged, the crews half starved, they straggled homeward and crept into Plymouth harbor without a remnant of their immense cargo.

Chapter II Chief Pirate Of Queen Elizabeth

Drake lost no time. He rode post-haste to London to lay his grievances before the Queen, and urge her to demand redress for the outrages that had been offered him. Elizabeth lent a willing ear to the secret plans of her chief pirate. As yet she could not challenge Philip ; but the relations between England and Spain grew more strained, trade was stopped, and the Queen covertly abetted the daring schemes of reprisal planned by her foiled adventurer. Drake meant to deal a heavy blow to Spain, but he was in no hurry. He needed preparation, and his revenge could wait.

In 1570, two small vessels, the Dragon and the Swan, stole unnoticed out of Plymouth harbor bound on a secret mission. Drake was in command, and his object was to reconnoitre the West Indies and gain knowledge and information so that he might return some day and strike at their most vulnerable spot. In the following year a second expedition went out, this time with the Swan alone. In those two years Drake saw what he wanted to see, and laid his plans for the future.

CHIEF PIRATE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH 15

Prepared to put his reckless scheme into execution, on Whitsunday Eve, in 1572, Drake set sail from Plymouth at the head of a tiny squadron and a handful of men.^ The PascJia of seventy tons, Drake's flag-ship, led the van ; and the rear was brought up by the Swan, of twenty-five tons, with his brother John Drake as captain. This was all : two small vessels, one of which was less than a quarter the size of the smallest class of modern channel coasters, and the other no heavier than a revenue cutter of to-day. These toy men-of-war were fitted out with every warlike device, munition, artillery, tools, and three small pinnaces made to be taken apart and set up at short notice. The crews numbered seventy-three men, of whom only one was over thirty years of age. It seemed like a boy's crazy venture.

With a favorable wind the squadron sailed without a stop until it had its first sight of Guadaloupe, one of the Leeward Isles, in the West Indian group. On reaching Port Pheasant, a small, land-locked harbor in the Gulf of Darien on the mainland, Drake dropped anchor and started to set up his pinnaces. It was a safe bay and convenient for his purpose. While in the

1 The most interesting accounts of Drake's voyages are the original relations, written by some of his followers or contemporaries, and published in the English Garner, by Edward Arber. Vol. V, and in the volumes of the Hakluyt Society. Among modern works, Julian Corbett's Sir Francis Drake and his Drake and the Tudor Navy are stirring and comprehensive.

midst of his work, a strange squadron hove in sight. It proved to be nothing more dangerous than a vessel belonging to the well-known pirate of the Isle of Wight, Ned Horsey. Captain Ranse was in command and was bringing in a Spanish caravel and a shallop that he had captured. The two adventurers decided to join forces ; and when, seven days later, the united squadrons crept out of the hidden harbor, they presented no mean appearance.

Westward along the coast they stole toward Nombre de Dios, the treasure-house of the Spanish Main, and in a week's time a tiny force lay at midnight under the bluff, at the point of the harbor. Drake, with seventy-three men, three pinnaces, and one shallop, waited breathlessly for the breaking of the dawn, the time appointed for the attack. Twenty-four of the men were armed with muskets, the rest with pikes and bows, and four men had been selected for the marine band and provided with drums and trumpets to inspire the crew and alarm the natives.

Silently the young and untried hands waited in the shadows of the night until their nerves were strained to the highest tension. In awed whispers they retailed to one another the reports that had come to them of the strength of the town and of the Spanish troops near at hand. Then as the light of the rising moon began to illumine the sky, Drake, to break the spell, and under

CHIEF PIRATE OF QUEEI^ ELIZABETH IT

pretence that the day was daAvning, ordered the assault.

Twelve men were left to hold the pinnaces, so as to make sure of a safe retreat. The rest of the company were divided into two groups, and advanced upon the Plaza from different sides. Six fire-pikes with blazing tow lighted the way, and cast a lurid glow over the streets ; the drums and trumpets sounded with maddening din. But the town had been aroused ; the great church bell was clanging out the alarm, and the people ran hither and thither, with cries and shouts that grew into a threatening roar. The soldiers had been called to arms, and at the end of the Plaza, near the Panama gate, they were drawn up to receive the attack.

A sharp volley of shot greeted Drake and his men full in the face. But the Englishmen, nothing daunted, let fly their roving arrows, and then, hand to hand, with pike and sword, they closed upon the Spaniards. Lashed by the arrows and startled by the blinding flame of the fire-pikes, the ranks of the Spaniards began to waver. Then panic seized them, their arms were thrown away, and in confusion and terror they fled through the Panama gate.

The Plaza was left in the hands of the adventurers. Drake placed a guard at the entrances, and with the rest of his men took possession of the governor's house. There, in a lower room, a blaze of treasure met their eyes. Great silver bars, seventy feet long, ten feet wide, and twelve feet high, were piled against the wall, and glinted in the light. The poor Devon lads looked in halfdazed wonder at the unaccustomed sight; but Drake ordered not a bar to be touched. Spanish soldiers were still in the town, and the treasure-house of the King stood near the water's edge, stored with far greater wonders of gold and precious stones, enough to overflow their pinnaces.

At this moment some of the men came running from the shore with the report that the pinnaces were in danger of being captured. On hearing this news, Drake ordered a party under John Oxenheim to reconnoitre the shore, and made a rendezvous at the treasure-house. Scarcely had they started when a fierce tropical storm burst suddenly over their heads. The thunder roared and the rain fell in torrents, wetting their bowstrings and ruining their powder. By the time they reached the shore, the men had lost their nerve. Even the taunts Drake hurled at them failed to restore their grit.

" I have brought you to the door of the treasure-house of the world," he cried; "blame no one but yourselves if you go away empty ! "

Then he stepped forward and ordered them to break into the treasure-house. But as he did so, he fell on his face, and the blood gushed from a

CHIEF PIRATE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH 19

wound in his leg. He had been shot early in the encounter, and had concealed it that his men might not lose heart. His followers lifted him from the ground, and against all his entreaties carried him to his boat; and to preserve their captain's life they abandoned the rich spoil which they had come so far to seek.

Mysteriously the dreaded pirate vanished from sight as suddenly as he had come. For a time he disappeared from the Spaniards' view. But in a hidden bay in the Gulf of Darien, his favorite secret retreat, other and stranger projects were being brewed. With the help of the Maroons, a savage tribe of escaped negro slaves, Drake planned to intercept the gold that was carried on mule packs across the Isthmus to be shipped to Spain. But months must pass before the opening of the dry season when the ambush could be laid, and meanwhile his pinnaces stole from the harbor, swept the seas, held up passing ships, and raided the neighboring coast.

For six months Drake lay in hiding. At first all was cheerful bustle and activity in the tropical camp. Between play and work, the summer and autumn months flew by. Then came the rainy season, and in its train suffering, misfortune, and disease. John Drake was killed in a rash encounter, Joseph Drake died of the pestilence, provisions ran short, and as the sun shone again through the murky, steaming atmosphere, scores of men dropped dead of the fever. It was a time to try the stoutest heart.

By the last of January, when news finally came that the escort fleet had arrived at Nombre de Dios and the gold was moving in the mule trains from Panama, only forty-five men had survived, out of the original seventy-three who had sailed from Plymouth eight months before. Of these, many were too ill to move, and eighteen youths formed the small band of Englishmen that started on the wild and desperate march across the Cordilleras. The rest of the party of forty -eight were Maroons.

Through the dense forests of magnificent, primeval trees, unlighted by the rays of the sun, the little band crept along the trail in deathlike silence. Four negro guides went on before and marked the path with broken boughs. A week's march brought them to the summit of the pass, and there a marvellous sight met the eyes of the great adventurer. At his feet lay the Atlantic Ocean whose waters he had roved, and on the south rolled the mighty Pacific, the fabled ocean never before seen by English eyes.

Filled with awe and a great wonder he "besought Almighty God, of His goodness, to give him life and leave to sail once in an English ship on that sea ! " After years of waiting, his desire was to be finally granted, and this day marked a period in his life of greater importance than all

CHIEF PIRATE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH 21

the reckless escapades of piracy and ambuscade in which his spirit revelled.

Fired with a new hope, he now flung himself down the steep descent to Panama, and on the Nombre de Dios road lay in ambush with his men. The mule trains, laden with gold and jewels, were hourly expected. Through long, weary hours they waited, crouching in the tall grass, silent and breathless.

Presently the tinkle of mule bells came faintly down the road, and the hearts of the Devon lads beat quicker at the thought of the fabulous wealth that lay within their grasp. The moment was at hand for which they had endured months of waiting and of incredible hardships ; but the curiosity of one man spoiled the well-laid scheme, and all because he had drunk too deeply of clear aqua vitce. The name of Robert Pike gained unenvied notoriety. He had received orders to lie close to the ground and keep motionless. The safety of the whole party depended on secrecy. But, eager to see with his own eyes whether the coveted treasure was nearing the ambuscade, he raised himself above the protecting grass. He was seen by the enemy, and the alarm was given.

Craftily the Spaniards sent the victual train ahead, while the precious gold packs turned back toward Panama. When Drake and his men, with shouts and cries, leaped from the thicket and fell upon the heavily laden mules, they found not a grain of the rich and coveted booty.

The famous march and ambuscade had failed, but Drake's temper was not one to be tamely thwarted. He now planned a second journey, this time along the coast from Rio Francisco to Nombre de Dios. Meanwhile he played a bewildering game on the Spaniards. He appeared and vanished as if by enchantment. One day he captured and sacked Venta Crux. Within a fortnight he threatened the port of Veragua. His agile pinnaces sped here and there, eastward and westward, picking up Spanish frigates. No one knew where El Braqiie might next appear.

On the morning of the 1st of April a mule train, laden with gold and silver, was travelling along the road to Venta Crux. A mile from the town, within earshot of the carpenters working at the docks, lay an English ambuscade. The mule bells tinkled on the road from Panama. Suddenly the dead silence was broken by a frightful din. The foremost and hindmost mules were seized, and the rest lay down. Volleys of bullets and arrows spread terror among the guard of soldiers. In a panic they fled, leaving the mules and their precious burdens in the hands of the victors.

Swiftly and dexterously the silver bars were hidden in the burrows of the land-crabs, or buried under the gravel of the river bed. The gold was stowed away in shirts and pockets, and with forced marches the Devon lads returned to Rio Francisco. But their pinnaces were nowhere to be

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seen. Instead, seven Spanish craft rode in the harbor, and all hope of safety seemed for the moment gone. But when the whole company despaired, Drake's ingenuity found a way of escape.

A raft was built from drifted tree trunks, and, with a biscuit sack for a sail and a tree for a rudder, Drake with three men started on a wild sail over an angry sea lashed into high waves by a fierce wind. The scorching sun beat down upon them, the waves dashed to their shoulders ; they sat for six hours in water to their waists, until their strength was almost exhausted. As night came on, in a quiet cove behind a point of land, where they had retreated for shelter, the pinnaces were found. That night Drake rowed back to Rio Francisco, recovered the silver which had been hidden in the holes and sand, took in his men and the treasure, and at the first gray streaks of dawn set sail to join the larger ships.

A fortnight later the English lads started on their homeward journey, laden with a rich booty ; for, besides the treasure of gold and silver, they had overhauled two hundred vessels in the Caribbean Sea. After a prosperous home voyage, they sighted the harbor of Plymouth on Sunday, the 9th of August, 1573. It was church time when the little ships sailed into port, but so great was the joy at their return that the congregations hurried down to the docks to greet the successful adventurers.