A sea-dog of Devon: a life of Sir John Hawkins

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Introduction

The author of this book has rightly placed John Hawkins among the first of those to whose undaunted spirit our sea supremacy is due. With Drake and RcJeigh, the Gilberts and John Davis, Hawkins was among the greatest and most resolute of those famous men of Devon who made the earliest expeditions to the unknown shores of the New World. Less bold and generous in temperament, perhaps, than Drake, less gifted as a statesman than Raleigh, without the inspiration of Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh's half-brother, but with the attractive qualities of John Davis — Hawkins deserved well of his country. He was a man of courage and resource. He possessed in a high degree administrative ability. He was a leader in an age of splendid achievements. He deserves to be better known to his countrymen in these days.

In introducing the present vigorous narrative to the reader, we shall endeavour briefly to describe the circumstances and the prevailing views of the age in which Hawkins lived. It is necessary to take account of environments in estimating character and conduct. The

X INTRODUCTION.

author undertakes to vindicate his hero from the charge of having inaugurated our British slave trade. Those who have made this reproach against Hawkins confuse the ideals of the nineteenth or twentieth century with those of the sixteenth. The great captain acted in conformity with the spirit of his age. The Portuguese and Spaniards had engaged without scruple in the slave trade. Prince Henry of Portugal, the so-called navigator, and King John II.. combined zeal for the saving of the souls of negroes with a recognition of the possibility of profiting by the labour of their bodies.

We are brought to another point which those who read the life of those valiant English seamen should bear in mind. Our great navigators — bold, enterprising, and resolute as they were — came late into the field. Both the Portuguese and the Spaniards were before us. The courageous Portuguese captains who gradually pushed along the coasts of Africa, until Bartholomew Diaz doubled the Cape of Good Hope and Vasco da Gama reached India by sea, were the pioneers of the expeditions of our East India merchants. The voyages of Columbus, the exploration of Nicuesa and Ojeda, and the supreme triumph of Vasco Nuiiez de Balboa, " the man who knew not when he was beaten," the first of white men to look upon the Pacific, revealed an El Dorado from which gold poured into the coffers of Spain. Their success stirred up the spirit of enterprise. Bold hearts in every maritime

INTRODUCTION. xi

country were eager to share the spoil. The Spaniards were not wilHng that others should have part in the advantages of trade with the newly discovered lands. Their exclusive policy led inevitably to smuggling. The measures of repression which they adopted provoked sanguinary reprisals. Hawkins and Drake were overwhelmed in the treacherous affair at San Juan de Ulloa, and barely escaped with their lives. They resolved to take vengeance, the one by subtlety, and the other by the capture of Nombre de Dios, the sacking of Vera Cruz, and the seizing of the wealth of the silver-laden mules of Spain.

Peace could be no longer maintained. There followed the fierce struggle of 1588, in which Enghshmen were proved to be the finest seamen in Europe. The Spaniards, though they had done so much to open up the New World, as seamen were not the equals of Englishmen. They were largely dependent on the skill of the navigators of Genoa and other parts of Italy. It is interesting to note that it was largely through the translation, in 1555, by Richard Eden, of the " Decades " of Peter Martyr, descriptive of Spanish and Portuguese expeditions, and in part through his rendering from the Spanish in the following year of Martin Cortes's " Arte de Navigar," published at Seville, that the voyages of our seamen were made more easy, and the first knowledge was gained of the wealth which might be acquired in the New World.

xii INTRODUCTION.

To sum up. John Hawkins is one of an illustrious band of navigators, English and foreign, to whom the opening up of trade with America is due. His professional attainments were high. He was master in seamanship, and in the art of the shipbuilder. His services were brilliant. He took a leading part in the fierce struggle with the Spaniards. In the interests of religion, and from a selfish desire to secure the monopoly in a valuable trade, they had sought to enclose the New World and bar the way to the Indies. English seamen and merchants were resolved that the barriers should be broken down.

In the volume here presented the fine career of John

Hawkins is described in a deeply interesting narrative.

The biography of such a man is full of instruction, and

necessarily embraces a general survey of the great age

in which he lived.

BRASSEY

JOHN LEYLAND.

A SEA DOG OF DEVON.

Chapter I. The Age

A Battle Incident — Drake's Overshadowing Fame — The Reformation in its Effect upon England as a Sea Power — ^The Beginnings of Naval Organisation in England — Early Assertions of Her Overlordship of the Seas — Spirit of the Elizabethan Age — The Privateers — Story of the Genoese Ducats.

On a September day of the year 1568, amid the reek of powder smoke, the roar of culverins, and the cries of wounded men between the decks of the ship Jesus of Lubek, a Sea Dog of Devon was athirst. He made a gallant figure in gay attire, for he had just risen from his courtly entertaining of a grandee of Spain. Cheering on of gunners against great odds, breathing of vengeance against a ghastly treachery, inhaling the smother of war in the tropical air of Mexico — this was thirsty work.

" He called to Samuel his page for a cup of beer," says the quaint Chronicler, "who brought it to him in a silver cup. And he, drinking to all the men, willed the gunners to stand by their ordnance lustily, like men. He had no sooner set the cup out of his hand but a demi-culverin struck away the cup and a cooper's plane that stood by the mainmast, and ran out on the other side of the ship ; which nothing dismayed our general, for he ceased not to encourage us. . . ."

If it be true that, in the moment when Death breathes upon the face of a man as he passes by, the man has vision of his life as in the flash of magic crystal, never doubt that the wind of the culverin shot cleared for an instant the red mist of battle and disclosed to John Hawkins the garden of a gabled house in Plymouth. There he saw two boys at play, their game disturbed by the coming of mariners fresh from far seas, their game forgotten as they hung upon the converse of those sailors with their father of the perils and rewards of daring men who furrowed uncharted seas in the golden west. There he saw himself, one of those wideeyed boys, flush and thrill as the microcosm of his life was suddenly revealed — glittering with shining adventure, red with the hue of war, dark with the shades of intrigue, following the star of high emprise. The boy who had stood in the garden at Plymouth was on the deck of his flagship in San Juan de Ulloa, the thunder of disastrous battle was around him, the powder smoke thickened again.

" He ceased not to encourage us, saying, ' Fear nothing, for God, who hath preserved me from this shot, will also deliver us from these traitors and villains.' "

" Fear nothing " is the keynote of Hawkins's career. " God . . . will deHver us ! " comprehends his simple philosophy. This prototype of the Sea Dogs has been unaccountably overshadowed in the general literature of the Spanish raids and the Armada time by Drake. The tremendously romantic figure of Sir Francis has obsessed the public imagination, almost to the exclusion of equally important figures among his contemporaries. There is something almost uncanny about the fascination that Drake exercised over the men of his time, and the influence of the Drake legends has persisted to our own day. " The Captain " he was called by the people of Plymouth ; the Spaniards believed him to be assisted by the infernal powers in his prodigious exploits against them. His story has become encrusted with supernatural growths: he threw chips of wood into the sea, and they sprang up stately ships of war armed and equipped at all points ; he magically brought water from Dartmoor to Plymouth in a time of drought by uttering an incantation, whereupon the stream followed his horse's hoofs from the uplands to the town. There is the legend of Drake's Drum, with which all readers of Mr. Corbett and Mr. Newbolt are familiar. I have no purpose to depreciate Drake, the Admirable Crichton of the Sixteenth Century seamen. He was a great leader and a great commander, and his influence upon the naval history of his time, and his place in the history of the world, are in no manner of question. Yet it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the almost exclusive attention given to him in the modern revival of interest in the Tudor Navy has pushed into the background many other men of large pattern, and greatest among them John Hawkins.

John Hawkins was much more than mariner ; but he was mariner first and other things after. This not only in point of time ; his other notable qualities and acquirements arose out of his quality and acquirement as mariner. If he became soldier, it was because maritime adventure imposed the necessity upon him. If he became diplomatist, it was to complete work begun at sea. If he became statesman, it was to administer the naval affairs of England. Wherever he was, in whatever complicated course he found himself at any time in his career, his thoughts were at sea, he dreamed of blue water, and longed to exchange the cloak of the courtier for the uniform of the captain, or the pedestal of high office for his own quarter-deck.

The life of John Hawkins is written in a hundred books : he is in the background of every naval history of the sixteenth century ; but he has never yet had a biographer. If this is not actually by way of being a reproach to his country, it is at least something strange that so striking a figure in the English school of action should have lacked a literary •. ortrait. Within the limits assigned to this volume a complete biography is impossible ; if, however, there should arise from these pages a suggestion towards a detailed " Life," they will have served a good purpose.

It has been said that modem English character was moulded in the Reformation. It is a comprehensive, but a true saying. To the national movement of the sixteenth century we owe not a little of our modern greatness, our naval position, our world-empire. Only one facet of this thought need be examined here. The Reformation was the beginning of England's " glorious isolation," and the inspiration of the great sea-conflict with the Catholic Power. The wax of the systems lasted till 1688, and in the sense that the Reformation was not complete till WilHam anH Mary signed the Declaration of Rights, the national character and destinies did not emerge from the crucible till another century had passed. But the sixteenth century struggle with Spain determined a great deal when it determined the naval supremacy of England ; it cultivated the maritime genius of the Islanders, and laid the foundations of our colonial and imperial system in West and East. The model of English seamanship was cast ; to the Spanish wars we look for the earliest precedents of modern naval traditions. How great a part the Hawkinses played in the making of the Navy, the establishment of seamanlike traditions, and the extension of the British Power in distant latitudes it will be the essay of these pages to demonstrate.

We must go back to the reign of Henry VIII. to find the genesis of the Hawkins family's connection with the Navy ; and, as it was Henry VIII. who began the work of naval organisation in the modern sense, they may be said to have had their part in the creation of the British Navy as a fighting machine. Dockyards were first provided in this reign at Deptford — scene of much of Sir John's work later on — ^Woolwich, and Portsmouth ; commissioners were first appointed to look after the financial affairs of the maritime forces ; and the status and pay of Admirals, Vice-Admirals, and inferior officers were settled. The naval spirit came into being. England assumed the sovereignty of the Northern seas, and the nation began to feel that its mission in the world was greater than to populate and administer these small islands. The ambition of maritime discovery was lively ; the need for an efficient naval force, not merely to prevent invasion of the homeland, but also to afford protection to the ever-widening interests of British commerce, began to be felt ; the modern naval policy was born.

Though under Edward and Mary the tendency was rather to reduce than to increase Henry's naval force of 12,000 tons and 8,000 men, even in the reign of the Catholic Queen the maritime prestige of England was jealously upheld. We come across a curious incident of naval etiquette during the voyage of Philip to this country to espouse the Queen. The EngHsh Lord High Admiral compelled Philip to strike the flag he was flying at his maintopmast-head in homage to the flag of England. How nauseating such a performance must have been to the proud stomach of Philip we may imagine ; the Spanish Admiral did not accede to the demand until a shot had been fired into him. Then he saw the force of the argument. Even when the Admiral had struck, English amour propre was not satisfied. The whole of the Spanish fleet of i6o vessels must strike flags and lower topsails ; and this was done before the British ships received order to salute. We have in this a precedent for action taken in later years by Sir John Hawkins himself. The story is quaintly told by Sir Richard, his son. The date is 1567, and the place Plymouth Harbour : —

"There came a fleete of Spaniards of aboue fiftie sayle of shippes, bound for Flaunders, to fetch the queen donna Anna de Austria, last wife to Philip the second of Spaine, which entred betwixt the iland and the maine, without vayling their top-sayles, or taking in of their flags : which my father Sir John Hawkins, (admirall of a fleete of her majesties shippes, then ryding in Cattwater), perceiving, commanded his gunner to shoote at the flag of the admirall, that they might thereby see their error : which, notwithstanding, they persevered arrogantly to keepe displayed ; whereupon the gunner at the next shott, lact the admirall through and through, whereby the Spaniards finding that the matter beganne to grow to earnest took in their flags and top-sayles, and so ranne to an anchor.

"The general! presently sent his boat, with a principal!

personage to expostulate the cause and reason of that proceeding ; but my father would not permit him to come into his ship, nor to heare his message ; but by another Gentleman commanded him to returne, and to tell his general, that in as much as in the queenes port and chamber, he had neglected to do the acknowledgment and reverence which all owe unto her majestie (especially her ships being present), and comming with so great a navie, he could not but give suspetion by such proceeding of malicious intention, and therefore required him, that within twelve hours he should depart the port, upon paine to be held as a common enemy, and to proceed against him with force."

This dispute was in the end adjusted without any such extreme measures ; the Spaniard acknowledged himself to be in fault, and the proceedings concluded with " the auncient amities renewed, by feasting each other aboord and ashore." The temper of the incident is significant of the British determination thus early that no Power, however great and aggressive, should be allowed to assume an overlordship of the seas. It took a long time to convince Philip that the English meant what these things implied ; " Achines de Plimua," as Hawkins was called in Spain, had to raid him here and there to assert the right of free commerce for Englishmen ; Drake had to singe his beard in the harbour of Cadiz ; Howard, Hawkins, Drake, and the rest, had to scatter and destroy his mighty Armada before the truth was borne in upon him.

Perfect daring, the supreme self-confidence that comes of faith in a national cause and complete knowledge of the meEins by which it may be best promoted — these were the characteristics of the great seamen of Queen Elizabeth. But these quahties in their highest manifestation — seen in the achievements of Hawkins and his companions — were not the spontaneous creation of one generation ; they were a heritage which the EHzabethans developed as we know how. It was not until the end of the fifteenth century that the English gave their minds to maritime discovery. The Wars of the Roses had been too absorbing and exhausting to permit of any external enterprise. But the era of internal peace that was inaugurated with the Tudors liberated a tremendous force of character and gallantry, which soon began to expend itself in sea-adventures. British seamen followed the Portuguese into distant seas, and ere a century had passed they had outstripped all predecessors and competitors in the boldness of their designs and the glory of their achievements.

A great deal of the work of expansion, conquest, and discovery was done by adventurers whose connection with the national Navy was loose enough ; so far as the Hawkinses were concerned, though they came to the front in the first instance as merchant adventurers and the patrons of privateers, their association with the Navy was close. In those days of Henry VIII, when, as already set out, the real foundations of the modern Navy system were laid, the first Hawkins who takes rank as a great seaman was an officer of the Navy. His lo A SEA DOG OF DEVON.

son John became the great " admirall " and Treasurer of the Navy ; his grandson Richard also attained the highest naval rank. They were all distinguished scions of the great race of Plymouth seamen. They were adventurers, but much more ; they were merchants whose genius and industry raised their fortunes so that of their wealth they could supply what the parsimony of their sovereign left lacking on occasions ; they could share in the greatest financial enterprises of their time. They were daring sailors, but much more ; they were, if not courtiers, yet skilled men in statecraft, and leaders commanding a devotion that amounted almost to idolatry. They were the epitome of the spirit of their age.

What that spirit was may be read in the eloquent words of Froude. It was the spirit of liberty, of independence, of freedom ; the world was opening wide before Englishmen ; the ocean-sea was giving up to them its remotest secrets. That which stood between them and the fairest prospects that the earth could offer was the power of Spain ; that power it was which also menaced their civil and religious liberties at home. It was Spain that intrigued with Mary Queen of Scots and stirred up rebellion ni Ireland; it was Spain that threw English seamen and traders into the prisons of the Inquisition, starved and tortured them, or burned tliem at the stake. The story of the illicit war on the Spanish possessions, preceding the licit

THE AGE. II

war that culminated in the Armada, is the story of a nation s great uprismg and outcry against the pretensions of " Popish tyranny " and Spanish ImperiaHsm. The leaders and the spokesmen were the seamen of the West. In the Western seas, in the Spanish ports, they took their price for the massacres of Smithfield, for the horrors to which their brothers and friends had been subjected in Spanish prisons ; they damaged the possessions and harassed the subjects of the State which was their nation's enemy ; they began the long process of destroying the proud, vainglorious power of Spain.

It is not to be pretended that altruistic motives, or even patriotism, alone ruled the conduct of the adventurers of the West. Their imagination was fired by hope of rich reward for those who would dare venture ; plunder played its part in their endeavours ; the love of adventure for adventure's sake was also potent. Some facts and many fictions were circulated in England relating to the wealth the Spaniards derived from their possessions in the West Indies and on the Pacific Coast ; El Dorado beckoned. These excited the desires of merchants, speculators and soldiers of fortune. But any impartial reading of the original papers of the time, written by the sailors themselves or their chroniclers, must convince that to regard them as mere buccaneers and pirates is to entertain a sorry misconception. A great deal of the work done by the Hawkinses, for in- . stance, was in the nature of perfectly fair trading, and would do no shame to honest merchants and shipowners of our day. And so far as the spoihng of Spanish ships and the capture of Spanish treasure was concerned, it is to be remembered that Spain was The Enemy, and that these men fully believed themselves to be serving God and their Queen what time they also helped themselves to the contents of Philip's galleons. They did unto Philip as they knew Philip would do unto them if he might.

In any estimate of the events of this period, the fact must be constantly kept in view that the warfare between the English privateers — whether equipped with the Royal assistance and consent or not — and the Spaniards was but emblematic of the greater conflict between the two systems striving for mastery on the continent of Europe. If a blow could be struck in any part of the world at a Spanish ship, it was a blow at the Arch-Enemy, a blow at the Catholic system, a blow at the Power which would have imposed the Inquisition on the whole world. English seamen knew the Inquisition, how relentlessly it struck down the unhappy Protestant who got within its reach. " It was not necessary that a poor sailor should have been found teaching heresy. It was enough if he had an English Bible and Prayer Book with him in his kit ; and stories would come into Dartmouth or Plymouth how some lad that everybody knew — Bill or Jack or Tom, who had wife or father or mother among them, perhaps — had been seized hold of for no other crime, been flung into a dungeon, tortured, starved, set to work in the galleys, or burned in a fool's coat, as they called it, at an auto-de-fe at Seville."* Galleons burning to the water's edge, rifled treasuries of Spanish gold, fierce fights at sea, raids on Spanish colonial towns — these made answer to the auto-de-fe ; and a man of Plymouth or Dartmouth sailed into the powder murk with no less heart because of the fate of Bill or Jack or Tom whom he had known in the High Street or the Butterwalk, or had accompanied to St. Andrew's or St. Saviour's, or had joined in dance and carouse at the Midsummer Night's Wake.

Who shall doubt the sincerity of a man like John Hawkins when, writing to Burleigh, he says : " I have briefly considered upon a substantial course and the material reasons that by mine own experience I know (with God's assistance) will strongly annoy and offend the King of Spain, the mortal enemy of our religion and the present government of the realm of England " .''t Hawkins was no sniveller, no hypocrite ; when he invoked the Divine assistance for a project of annoying and offending PhiHp as the mortal enemy of the Enghsh church and nation, he believed that he would get it, and acted in that belief. It is time to destroy the impression that the seamen out of the West were no better

* Froude : " English Seamen."

t Hawkins to Lord Burleigh. State Papers, than pirates and corsairs, and that their only motive was plunder. They were devout and God-fearing men in their fashion, and they made no doubt that their warfare was religious as well as political and personal. Hawkins's saiHng orders to his crews in 1564 form no bad rule of conduct : " Serve God daily ; love one another ; preserve your victuals ; beware of fire ; and keep good company."

To come even closer to this question of the morality of the plunder accomplished on the high seas, the case must be judged by the ruling ethic of the age ; and the privateers had fair precedent for everything they did in the notorious instance of the Genoese ducats. It was in 1568 that Philip, pressed by the necessities of the war in the Netherlands, borrowed half a million sterling from two banking-houses of Genoa. The money, despatched by several ships, was to be delivered to the Duke of Alva at Antwerp. The privateers of the Channel, with their headquarters at Plymouth, obtained information of the approach of the treasure-ships, gave chase to them, and drove them to various harbours for shelter, so that Alva's war-chest, instead of arriving safely at Antwerp, was distributed in the ports of Plymouth, Southampton, and Fowey. One of the vessels, commanded by Capitan Diaz, sailed into a hornets' nest in Plymouth Sound, where were numerous ships of the Prince of Conde's private fleet and Enghsh vessels flying his flag. William Hawkins, mayor of the town, brother of John Hawkins, was awaiting the arrival of the latter from San Juan de Ulloa.* The Spaniards under Diaz knew all about the treachery proposed, if not of the actual disaster that had befallen Hawkins ; and the Spanish captain was naturally anxious to prevent the news from reaching Plymouth's ears. He therefore made up a cock-and-bull story for local consumption to the effect that John Hawkins's expedition had been completely successful, and that he was returning laden with fabulous riches ; " the worst boy in those ships might be a captain for riches."

Unfortunately for Sefior Diaz, not long after his own arrival came the veritable news of San Juan ; and English indignation vented itself upon him and his treasure. William Hawkins implored permission to make war on the ducats that Diaz carried in order that he might himself be recompensed for his losses in the ill-fated expedition. He did not get it, but the government landed the money and conveyed it to London by road. There the agent of the Genoese bankers found that Queen Elizabeth's security was better than King Philip's, and decided to lend it to the English government. Consequently, half the wealth designed to assist in the shedding of Protestant blood in the Low Countries was sent to the Protestant Prince of Orange, and the other half went to the support of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth's Navy.

* See Chapter IX.

It is a curious attitude of mind that questions the wisdom of such a proceeding. True, England was not now nominally at war with Spain, but the conditions of war existed very completely in everything but name, and the name itself was added at the very end of the contest a few years later. The English people were certainly at war with Spain, and the systems represented by Philip and Elizabeth were in the throes of a struggle for life and death. Without the seamanship, the bravery, the daring of the privateers, without the experience they had gained in all parts of the Western world, it is not unlikely that the history of 1588 might have read very differently, and the Great Deliverance would have been impossible. Men must be judged by the light of their age ; England, judging the sea-dogs of Elizabeth by the light of the sixteenth century, has approved them brave patriots and dauntless heroes, and enshrined them in imperishable memory.

Chapter II. The Family Of Hawkins

William Hawkins, Father of John— First of His Three Voyages to Brazil— His Second Voyage— Brings back a Native Prince — His Third Voyage — Marries the Daughter and Heiress of Roger Trelawny — An Appreciation of His Character.

" Old Master William Hawkyns,"* as Hakluyt calls him, father of Sir John, was a great sea captain who in 1 513 was probably master of The Great Galley, second ship in Henry's Navy. In later years his seamanlike skill, his knowledge of the world, his adventurous disposition, and his genius for business obtained for him the distinguished favour of bluff King Hal. It is not possible to ascertain just how the friendship between the sovereign and the Plymouth sailor grew up. "King Harry loved a man," quotes Froude ; and adds: " He knew a man when he saw one. He made acquaintance with sea-captains at Portsmouth and Southampton. In some way or other he came to know one Mr. WiUiam Hawkins, of Plymouth, and held him in especial esteem." But we can hardly be in doubt that it was through his qualities and reputation as a seaman that