The boy's Drake; story of the great sea fighter of the sixteenth century

Front matter

OYSDRAKE

THE ST(lYOFMGlESiA:HGHTlR

THE SKlIENTHlkENTURY

Preface

This "Boy's Drake," the story of the "sea king" of the sixteenth century, the greatest navigator of his day, and the first great Enghsh admiral, whose marvellous exploits were largely in American waters, is offered as a fitting companion to the "Boy's Hakluyt." While Raleigh and Hakluyt are rightly given place in history as founders of the American colonies, to Drake might justly be accorded the distinction of the clearer of the way for these colonies. By his exploits along the Spanish Main, and his wondrous voyage circumnavigating the globe, and sailing the first English ship up the Pacific coast, he broke the Spanish monopoly and opened the Americas to all Europe. Although adventure rather than discovery, reprisals and warfare rather than exploration, inspired his voyages, he made discoveries that materially changed the narrow map of the world in his time; and with his rediscovery of California he conceived the idea of a "New England" on the Pacific coast that would rival New Spain, and, as he thought, laid the foundation for it, more than forty years before the establishment of the New England on the Atlantic side of the continent.

It is a spirited story, full of action, daring, and heroism that the contemporary accounts of Drake's achievements tell, and upon these accounts this narrative is based, passages and phrases being not infrequently quoted direct from the originals vi Preface

to infuse it with the quaint sixteenth-century flavour. Bits of history are woven in sufficient to give the events of Drake's career the proper setting.

Drake's succession of marvellous exploits are frankly detailed in these pages. Some of them were lawless, some were the acts of the buccaneer, the corsair, the sea rover; others were magnificent in conception and execution, the performance of a great naval statesman; all were dashing and brave. I have endeavoured so to present them that while my young readers are entranced with the story of his wondrous deeds, they will, at the same time, be impressed with the finer qualities of the greatest captain among Queen Elizabeth's great men.

E. M. B.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Born to the Sea 3

III. The Boy Skipper 14

II

THOUGH born to the sea, Drake's birthplace was a farm on an inland river. He was the first-born of twelve sons of yeoman parents. Some of his earlier biographers endeavoured to connect him with a titled family. Others presented him as of lowliest origin. The latter had more ground for their theory than the former. They took their cue from the phrase "mean parentage" for '' mediocre loco natus" in the first English edition of the Annales of Queen Elizabeth's reign, originally in Latin, by William Camden, a learned antiquary and historian of Drake's own time, who had the statement, he says, from Drake himself. But Camden clearly meant "middling" — the middle class. His correct placing is between the two extremes of upper and lower; he was of the higher grade of sturdy, and in his time growing sturdier, middle-class English. His immediate forebears were well-to-do country folk, who had lived on the same farm for generations.

The date of his birth was also a matter of speculation by the early biographers. Some of them held confidently to a date about the year 1540, finding their authority in legends upon contemporary portraits of Drake, and also in statements of Camden. The sifted evidence, however, amply sustains a date five years later; that is, 1545, as appears in the Annales of John Stow, the London antiquary, also contemporary with Drake. The legends on the portraits are shown to be quite untrustworthy, while the particular statement of Camden has proven to be erroneous, or a "slip of memory" on his part. So the year 1545 has come now to be generally accepted as the true date.

Drake was native of the county of Devonshire, that nursery of brave and daring British seamen of Queen Elizabeth's expansive time. Several Devon boys of his period became world famous. There was John Davis, born in 1530, who became Captain John, searcher of the elusive north-west passage to India, and discoverer of Davis Strait, between Greenland and Baffin Land. There were the brothers Hawkins, William and John (the latter born 1532), kinsmen of Drake, who became important ship-masters and merchants; the younger. Sir John, at the head of the English mercantile marine in his prime, bold as a navigator and able as a developer of the English navy. From Devon, too, came Humphrey Gilbert (born 1539), half-brother of Walter Raleigh, afterward Sir Humphrey, soldier, navigator, statesman, establisher of the first English colony in North America, at Newfoundland; and Richard Grenville (born 1541), Raleigh's cousin, afterward Sir Richard, of the "fighting Grenvilles," a naval hero of extraordinary type.

and Sir Walter Raleigh himself, courtier, soldier, adventurer, American colonizer, historian, poet, looming large among Queen Elizabeth's men, and at last brought to the block, wantonly sacrificed through the cowardice of her successor, King James, the first of the Stuarts.

Francis's birthplace was a cottage on his grandfather's farm called Crowndale, near by the ancient Devon town of Tavistock. The farm lay in a serene valley with pastoral surroundings, and so sequestered that it "seemed shut out from all the world." In front of the cottage meandered the river Tavy, one of the exquisitely picturesque English streams. The cottage was permitted to remain, a decaying landmark, through three centuries, or till the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when its then owner, unmindful of its memories of the great sailor, pulled it down to make way for an ox-shed. Fortunately, a little before its demolition a drawing was made of it, and this was afterward reproduced in an etching.

Crowndale had originally belonged l3 Tavistock Abbey, a Catholic monastery, which early in King Henry VIII's time was leased from the Abbot of Tavistock by Simon Drake. This Simon was an uncle of Francis's grandfather. There may have been other Drakes leasing it before Simon. At the dissolution of the monasteries (1536 and 1539) with the beginnings of the English Reformation, it passed into the hands of Sir John Russell, afterward Lord High Admiral of England (1540-42), and later first

Earl of Bedford (1550), a great Devonshire magnate; and thereafter the Drakes held it from him. Francis's grandfather, John Drake, succeeded Simon in its occupancy, and when Francis was born had it under a lease holding through the lives of himself and his wife Margery, and their eldest son John, Jr.

Francis's father was Edmund, a younger son of John and Margery. He became early a sailor by trade, while his father and elder brother carried on the farm. When he left the sea and married he returned to the old home and settled down with his bride in the cottage which it may be his father built for him. Of Francis's mother there is no record.

This quiet dwelling in the vale beside the Tavy, however, remained Francis's home only through his earliest years. He was given a good start in life with the advantage, counted high in those days, of a titled godfather. This was Lord Russell's eldest son. Sir Francis, the future Earl of Bedford, then a youth of seventeen. According to the custom of the time, young Sir Francis gave the boy his baptismal name. He was also favoured by his relation to the Hawkinses. Captain William Hawkins, the father of William and John, mariner, ship-owner, and merchant, was then a citizen of standing and wealth in the neighbouring port of Plymouth. He had been several times mayor of the city. He was that "Olde M. William Hawkins of Plimoth" whom, so the fascinating chronicler of English voyages of adventure and discovery, Richard Hakluyt, tells us. King Henry VHI highly esteemed for his "wisdom, valour, and skill in sea causes/* His father before him had served in Henry VHI's navy. Just what the relation was between the Drakes and the Hawkinses is not clear. By some of Francis's biographers, Edmund Drake is set down as first cousin to old Captain William. One ventures the guess that Edmund was his brother-in-law. Whatever the relation, the old captain's sons, boys of some thirteen and fourteen when Francis was born, called him cousin. Like the Drakes, the Hawkinses had been of Tavistock for some generations, but they had resided in Plymouth at least since the birth of William, Jr., and John.

With such patrons as the Russells, and such associations, Francis's start would seem indeed to have been most auspicious. But he was born in troublous times. His advent was in the midst of the English revolt against the Church of Rome, and those closest to him — his patrons, his father, and his uncle Hawkins — all were aggressive Protestants, open advocates of the new religion against the old. At the very time of the boy's birth Edmund Drake is represented as a lay preacher "hot for the new opinion." Soon after, his people became involved in trouble and at length in persecution, for those were the days of the martyrs, when religious zeal was fanaticism. Protestants and Catholics alike then held those of the opposite faith as infidels, to be converted by force or through torture or destroyed by the sword or at the stake. Matters came to a crisis that overwhelmed Edmund Drake and the others in

Parentage and Birthplace ii

1549, during the reign of the boy king, Edward VI, when an order went forth for the adoption of the new Protestant prayer-book on Whit-Sunday. On Whitsuntide a Cathohc insurrection broke out in the west part of England and the Protestant gentry and yeomen alike were fleeing for their lives, seeking hiding-places, some in woods and caves. Edmund Drake fled with the rest.

He hastened with his little family first to Plymouth, apparently to get under the protection of Captain Hawkins and to join the Protestant groups which were considerable in that part. In the height of the tumult the mayor opened the city's gates to the insurrectionists. Some of the bolder Protestants, presumably Captain Hawkins and Edmund Drake among them, took ground and held it for a time on the Island of St. Nicholas, afterward called Drake's island. From this shelter Edmund Drake next fled into Kent. And there, perhaps at Chatham, or below at Gillingham, which became the eastern head-quarters of the English navy, he found a permanent asylum for his family on a navy hulk which Lord Russell, or Captain Hawkins, or other friends, were able to procure for him.

Thus it was, as the chronicler relates, he came to "inhabit in the hull of a ship"; and that in this floating home "many of his younger sons were born." Of Francis's eleven brothers nearly all grew up, and following his example took to the sea.

Edmund Drake never returned to Tavistock, and with the passing of his father and brother John the family disappeared from that place. Thereafter, Francis Drake, except for the time that the family home was on the river Medway, was associated with Plymouth.

While the home was in the ship's hull Edmund Drake was employed as reader of prayers to the seamen of the navy. In the Catholic Queen Mary's reign he was under the ban in common with other aggressive Protestants. Perhaps he was secretly concerned in the Protestant rising in Kent under Sir Thomas Wyatt, in 1554, upon the queen's announcement of her design to marry young Philip II of Spain, who cried that the Spaniards were coming "to conquer the realm." But if so he saved his head. Though at this time he was wretchedly poor, he still managed to struggle along with his up-growing parcel of boys, but upon the accession of Elizabeth to the throne (1558) his fortune mended, and he was promoted from a reader of prayers to sailors to the vicarage of a lonely parish on the Medway, a few miles above Chatham comprising the ancient village of Upchurch — not Upnor, as Camden, with a slip of his quill, wrote, thus giving ground for speculation by after writers as to whether Edmund Drake was really a vicar, for there was no church at Upnor.

In this gentle occupation the "honest mariner," now turned preacher, spent tranquilly the last five years of his kindly life. He died at the close of the year 1566, when Francis was twenty-one and at sea. He was fairly educated for his time, and devout. He was his boys' only school-master. His chief text-book was the Bible — the book of all books he adjured his youngest son, whom he made his heir, to "keep in bosom and feed upon." *'Make much of it," he wrote. "This I do send thee with all the rest of my godly books."

Ill

THE BOY SKIPPER

iRANCIS DRAKE'S first playground was the river, and early he was employed upon it. At nine he was apprenticed by his father, "by reason of his poverty,'* to the master of a bark, and then his real sailor life began. The master was a veteran skipper engaged in coasting about the English Channel, and sometimes in carrying merchandise across to France and north to Zeeland.

It was a rough school of seamanship, this of a Channel coaster in those rude days. But the hardy boy was equal to it. He had acquired in his playtime a fair knowledge of river life with something of navigation, and he fell cleverly into the larger life of the sea. Such handiness did he display in his new calling, such spirit and diligence, that he quite won his master's heart. And it was not long before substantial reward came to him unexpectedly. In the midst of his apprenticeship the old skipper died, and it appeared that, "being a bachelor," he had bequeathed the bark to the boy. Thus it was that Francis became a shipmaster in his early teens, and sailed his own ship.

The Boy Skipper 15

Young Skipper Drake coasted and traded about the "narrow seas" for some time longer with profit. He had varied experiences and some adventure.

For now EngHsh adventure on the seas was reviving under the impulse of renewed efforts to expand English commerce, which hitherto, with only occasional breaks, had been confined to short voyages to the known coasts of Europe in the then little Old World of trade. Now English mariners backed by English merchants were bent upon expanding their commerce with the search for larger and richer markets, north, east, and west, in competition with their foreign rivals. Begun in young Edward's reign (i 547-53)? extended north-westward in the grim days of Mary (1553-58), the new movement received its real impetus with the incoming of Elizabeth. Soon after the start of her awakening reign broad-visioned statesmen and merchants of London, Bristol, and other large ports — "merchant adventurers" they were called — were boldly scheming to break into the monopoly of the "ocean-sea" east and west, which Portugal and Spain were maintaining. To be sure those nations yet held themselves to be protected in their monopoly by old papal acts, assuming jurisdiction over all the kingdoms of the earth. These acts were a bull of 1444, which declared Portugal in possession of all the lands her mariners had then visited on the coast of Africa and as far east as the Indies; and the greater "Bulls of Partition" of 1493, issued after the discovery of America by Columbus, by which the world discovered and to be discovered was arbitrarily divided between these two powers, all on the east of an imaginary line traced on a map from pole to pole a hundred degrees west of the Azores being assigned to Portugal and all on the west of this line to Spain. But such protection the Protestant merchant adventurers and the Protestant mariners ignored or defied. Already they had penetrated Portugal's preserves and their eyes were turning toward those of Spain.

Hearing, perhaps, of such projects as well as stories of adventures accomplished, the "narrow seas" soon became too confined for Skipper Drake, and he longed for wider scope.

Opportunity first appeared in the service, it Is supposed, of Cousin John Hawkins. This was the offer of the place of purser, or third officer, of a ship voyaging to the Biscay coast of Spain, in all likelihood one of the Hawkins brothers' fleet of trading vessels. Doubtless Drake gladly accepted the position, and doubtless, too, he satisfactorily performed its duties, but we are only told that it was "in the year 1564," when he was eighteen.

The next two years it was his good fortune to be engaged In a larger enterprise and probably as a higher ship's officer. This was a venture or ventures with a certain Captain Lovell to Guinea, on the African coast, and across the Atlantic to the West Indies. Of Captain Lovell or of this enterprise there is but scant record. Slight as this record is, it is significant as disclosing the first source of Drake's particular en-

The Boy Skipper 17

mity to all Spaniards. It is found only in a line or two of the preface of an account of a famous later voyage of his own published by his nephew and revised by himself, simply mentioning, with no details, "wrongs received at Rio de [la] Hacha with Captain John Lovell in the years [i5]65 and [i5]66/' The naval historian Corbett, in his Drake and the Tudor Navy, suggests that Lovell was one of John Hawkins's captains. If so, Drake was still in Hawkins's service.

Be this as it may, in the next year, 1567, or perhaps immediately upon his return after experiencing those unnamed wrongs on the Spanish Main, he sold his coaster and gave himself fully to a new enterprise of Hawkins's, as an investor as well as a sailor, embarking in it all of his little property. This was a venture also to the African coast and thence, as it happened, to the Spanish American possessions, though originally planned, at least ostensibly, for Africa alone — to obtain certain great treasure on the Portuguese gold coast, of which word had secretly come from some refugees who were to pilot the adventurers to it. In this enterprise he was to have command of one of the ships of the fleet assembled for it, for, no doubt, as the chronicles say, the knowledge that he had acquired in the Lovell voyages enabled him to be of especial aid to Hawkins in this greater venture.

Now, at twenty-two, he is to have a taste of sea life at its fullest, and to engage in his first naval battle.

IV First In American Waters

THE Hawkins expedition of 1567 was really a negro-kidnapping and slave-trading affair. It was ostensibly first planned only for the Portuguese gold coast of Africa, but when certain Portuguese refugee pilots who were to lead the voyagers to the treasure on the gold coast had deserted the enterprise, Hawkins had got formal leave of the queen to "load negroes in Guinea and sell them to the West Indies."

Thus at the start it was definitely a slave-catching and trajfficking venture with the sanction of the highest authority of England. It must be understood, however, that in those days the slave-trade was by no means regarded by Christian folk in general as wicked. On the contrary, the capturing of infidel human beings and selling them for money was then almost universally held to be as honourable as barter and trade in ordinary commodities. The African slave-trade had been pursued for more than a hundred years by other peoples before the English took a hand in it. It was begun by the Portuguese before the middle of the fifteenth century, soon after the discoveries by their

First in American Waters 19

navigators along the African coast. Their first market was found in Spain. The trade was extended to Spanish America in a little more than a decade following Columbus's discoveries. By the year 151 1 Ferdinand was permitting the importation of slaves from Spain to Hispaniola (Santo Domingo) in considerable numbers. By 15 17 the trade direct with the Portuguguese settlements on the African coast had begun under license of Ferdinand's successor, the Emperor Charles V. That year this young monarch, who had come to the Spanish throne from the Netherlands, issued a patent to one of his Flemish favourites giving exclusive right to export four thousand negroes annually to Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Porto Rico. The favourite sold his license to some Genoese merchants for twenty-five thousand ducats, and these merchants started the business. So it is upon the Genoese, not the English, that rests the bad fame of having first established in regular form the commerce in slaves between Africa and America.

John Hawkins was the first English navigator to engage in this nefarious business. After the death of their father, old Captain William, which occurred in 1555, he and his brother William had continued the trade of the house to the Atlantic coast of Africa. In several voyages that John made to the Canary Islands he had observed the prosperous slave traffic between Africa and the West Indies; and being assured by the islanders "that negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola and that store of negroes might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea," he "resolved with himself to make a trial thereof."

The expedition of 1567 was his third slave-trading venture. The first was made in 1562-63 with three ships and one hundred men, and was astonishingly profitable to those who had invested in it, a notable band of the captain's "worshipful friends of London." The second voyage, made in 1564-65, was planned on a bolder scale. Now noblemen of prominence joined the investors in the first one. The queen lent one of her ships to head the fleet, which comprised four vessels. The company numbered one hundred and seventy men — "gentlemen adventurers," sailors, soldiers. A written code for the government of the fleet was prepared by Hawkins, which included these injunctions: "Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keep good company." Considering the unholy object of the enterprise — the capture of human beings and their sale into slavery — the admonitions to "serve God daily" and to "love one another" sound like a mockery to twentieth-century ears. But here again we must remember that those were benighted times. It is difficult to believe that these slavers of three hundred and fifty years ago could have been honestly devout men. But so they surely felt themselves to be. While the holds of their ships were packed thick with their wretched human freight, morning and evening prayers were held upon the decks above. For every success of whatever nature God was praised.

First in American Waters 21

When the slave-ships were long becalmed at sea and at length a breeze came up in the nick of time to save them from misery, thanksgivings v^ere offered the Heavenly Father. "Almighty God," wrote Hawkins on one such occasion, "who never suffereth His elect to perish, sent us the ordinary breeze." Although more diplomacy and show of force were required in bartering the "freight" in the West Indies (for after the first voyage Spain had promulgated stricter orders to the colonial governors to permit no English vessel to trade there in future), this second venture was as prosperous as the first one.

These successes brought Hawkins into such high favour that he was enabled easily to plan on a yet larger scale his third voyage, in which young Drake was enlisted. Meanwhile his accomplishments had been recognised, and the slave-trade practically endorsed, by the grant to him of a coat of arms: a black shield displaying a golden lion walking on waves, and above the lion golden coins, and for a crest a little black bust of a Moor in chains, "bound and captive," with golden amulets on his ears and arms.

The fleet assembled for this expedition at Plymouth. Two ships were provided from the royal navy: the "Jesus of Lubec," which had been employed in the second voyage, and the "Minion"; the others were the "William and John," owned by the Hawkins brothers and named for them; the "Swallow"; the "Judith," described as a "bark," fifty tons, owned by John Hawkins; and the "Angel," the smallest craft, of only thirty-two tons. Drake had the command of the "Judith." The complement carried was five hundred men. The "Jesus of Lubec" was the flag-ship. Hawkins was denominated "general and captain" of the expedition. The investment in it was large. The Hawkins brothers alone put in a sum equal to sixteen thousand pounds in English money of to-day, while John Hawkins's personal effects and "furniture" on the "Jesus" were valued at four thousand. And Drake, as we have seen, embarked all that he possessed.

The six gallant ships, practically a naval squadron, sailed out of Plymouth harbour on the second day of October, 1567, in fine array, with Hawkins's promise to Queen Elizabeth to bring back home "a profit (with God's help) of forty thousand marks without offence to her friends and allies"; and with Drake, now twenty-two, ambitious for adventure, and "burning," incidentally, "to win compensation for the wrongs," whatever they were, "that he had suffered with Captain Lovell at Rio de la Hacha" on the Spanish Main in America.

STORMING RIO DE LA HACHA

ONCE off the Guinea coast Drake's adventures began. Whenever a Portuguese ship v^as sighted she was given chase and overhauled. Somewhere between the Canaries and Cape Blanco the "Minion" captured a "caravel," which, being a "smart" new vessel, was added to the squadron, and Drake was transferred from the httle " Judith " to her command. She was the "Grace of God" by name and a good specimen of her class of ship. The caravel of that day is described as a fast-sailing, weatherly vessel for ocean navigation. It had a single deck and half-deck, a square stern and forecastle, and was usually rigged with four masts and bowsprit, the foremast carrying two square sails and each of the others a lateen. When taken, the "Grace of God" was found in the hands of a French Protestant privateer or pirate, one Captain Bland, who had himself captured her from her Portuguese master. He surrendered her philosophically, and joined his fortunes to the expedition.

More Portuguese caravels, and all having human freight, were taken in the negro hunt on the rivers along the coast from Rio Grande to Sierra Leone, and their negroes shifted to the ships of the fleet. Yet by mid- January the whole number of slaves collected in one way and another amounted to scarcely one hundred and fifty, while the fleet's forces had become reduced by the loss of not a few men by sickness and poisoned arrows in fights in the slave hunts. In this situation, and since the season was advancing, it was seriously proposed to end the voyage at Elmina and there force the sale of their cargoes, both negroes and merchandise, that they had brought out. But while the matter was debating a native "king" at war with another chief sought the Englishmen's assistance in an assault upon a town of the rival chief. This village, he told them, contained some eight thousand inhabitants, and he promised to turn over to them all of the natives his fighters might capture. The offer was accepted and a successful assault ensued by land and sea. Hawkins himself headed a force of two hundred of his men in the land attack, and Drake may have had a part in the assault from the water. The result of the aff'air was the addition of some three hundred men, women, and children to the fleet's stock. The native "king" and his men had captured some six hundred, but of these none was received by the English, for the wily monarch, like those Arabs of whom we have read, quietly broke camp in the night after the assault and stole away, taking all his captives with him.

Storming Rio de la Hacha 25

However, with their own captives they now had a sufficient number to warrant the continuation of the voyage as projected. In the Rio Grande, where the fleet rendezvoused for the western voyage, the French Captain Bland was given charge of the "Grace of God," and Drake returned to the command of the "Judith."

About two months — fifty-five days really — were consumed In the toilsome passage across to the West Indies. The Island of Dominica was first made, and here the trading began. Thence the fleet coasted from place to place, the Englishmen pursuing their traffic, but "somewhat hardly" In the face of the orders against all trading of English ships In Spanish America, which the colonial governors dared not disobey without at least a show of resistance. At Burburata, on the coast of Venezuela, they tarried two months, trimming and dressing the ships. In those days, before the coppering of ships' bottoms and "antl-fouling" compositions were known, vessels after six months of sailing in tropical waters became so clogged that careening — bringing a ship to lie on one side for cleansing, calking, or repairing — was absolutely necessary. Another stop of some days was made at the Island of Curasao, where fresh provisions were taken on. While tarrying here the general commissioned Drake to go forward with his "Judith" and the "Angel" to Rio de la Hacha, probably to make a reconnoissance.

This was Drake's opportunity and he grasped it with alacrity. And with what reckless audacity he executed this commission the story of his performance at the outset discloses.

Arriving before the little town, then a sprawling place of scattered, hut-like houses, he found that it had been re-enforced since his previous visit with Captain Lovell. Every approach was guarded by new works, and a hundred "harquebusiers" — soldiers armed with a form of gun known as a harquebus — had been added to the garrison.