Caribbean (26 page)

Throwing a few final farewell shots into Cartagena, whose citizens sighed with relief to see him go, he escaped just in time to avoid meeting a very strong Spanish fleet coming in from Spain with hundreds of well-armed soldiers. Once free of that danger, he headed west toward the Isthmus of Panamá, where he revealed his hitherto secret plans to his astonished men: “We’re going to march across the isthmus to the city of Panamá, intercept the mule train laden with gold and silver, and earn each man his fortune.” There were sixty-nine young men and boys on whom he would depend to accomplish this bold attack against a city of thousands.

The isthmus was a terrible place to cross, filled with mortal vapors, unknown animals, deadly snakes, polluted water, and some of the most obdurate Indians in the New World, armed with poisoned arrows. They were a breed apart, not Caribs from the east,
nor Arawaks from Hispaniola, nor Incas from Peru, nor Aztecs from Mexico; they were formidable and made their isthmus one of the most perilous stretches of land in the known world, but it was the link between the silver mines of Peru and the safe harbor of Nombre de Dios. It was this lifeline that Drake now proposed to sever.

But in the months since he had received the latest intelligence on Panamá, a significant change had taken place: Governor Ledesma of Cartagena had arrived to take personal responsibility for the accumulation of treasure in Panamá and its safe transfer by mule train to Nombre de Dios, where his son-in-law was awaiting it.

He had taken all practical steps, having his nephew install forts along the jungle path and training both the muleteers and their protecting soldiers in procedures for frustrating English attacks. The mule train that Governor Ledesma would be leading might be assaulted but it would not be surprised.

On the dark night of 14 February 1573, Drake, having hacked his way through uncharted jungle to avoid the blockades guarding the normal path, secreted his pitifully small contingent at the western outskirts of a little jungle village only a few miles from Panamá, each man dressed in white to avoid confusion in the night fight ahead. His orders were strict: “No man to move until the mule train has passed well beyond us. So that when we attack, it cannot scamper back to Panamá but must stand and fight us. Remember—if we take it, thousands for all!”

His daring plan would have worked except for the wise foresight of Governor Ledesma, who himself was in the lead, tall and silent and resolute.

Just before his mules started into the jungle he had a brilliant idea: “Commander! Move six of our reserve mules bearing nothing to the front, with three peons who will look like soldiers.” A stop was made to accomplish this, but as the decoy mules were about to move out, he had a second good thought: “Place bells about their necks,” and when this was done the six mules sounded like sixty.

The name of the Englishman they fooled, Robert Pike, has come down in infamy through the annals of the English navy. He heard the spurious mules approaching with their bells tinkling and their attendant soldiers marching cautiously ahead. Eager to play the hero, Pike leaped up as the mules reached him and began assaulting the three peons with loud cries of: “For St. George and England!”

Ledesma heard the strange cry, heard the mules twist in confusion, and heard a shot fired either by Pike or one of the terrified peons. In less than three seconds he uttered his command: “About! Flee!” And there in the darkness Robert Pike’s intemperate action and Governor Ledesma’s judicious one deprived Captain Francis Drake of more than fifteen million pesos.

There was nothing he could do. By the time he regrouped his men, Ledesma and his mule train were galloping back to Panamá, with swift horsemen spurring ahead to mobilize a force so large and well trained that it would have annihilated the Englishmen had the latter tried to follow. In despair at having been defrauded yet again by Ledesma and his team, Drake could do nothing but retreat through that steaming jungle to find refuge in his waiting ships.

And then, in the depth of a self-inflicted misery over his failure, he proved himself to be one of the most remarkable men of his age. He had not yet performed those feats which would make him immortal—his circumnavigation of the globe, his raid on Cádiz, and his humbling of the Spanish Armada—and so, what he did now in this remote corner of the world with only a handful of men seems all the more incredible.

First, he returned to Nombre de Dios, not boldly as before but creeping like an animal through the jungle. Then, so close to town that his men could hear its citizens at work, he waylaid the next mule train from Panamá, gaining his men a small fortune. But now he had to get his men many miles back to their ships, through that pathless jungle beset by snakes and swamps and insects and hunger, and when he returned to his ships—the original
Pasha
and the one captured earlier from the Spaniards—he realized that they were not seaworthy enough to get him back to Plymouth with his treasure. So, with a defiance that was unbelievable, he sailed back to Cartagena, where a great Spanish fleet rested in the tight inner harbor. Trusting that none of the larger ships could maneuver in time, he sailed right into the large southern harbor, negotiating the narrows of Boca Chica in full sail, spotted the kind of huge ship he needed, boarded it, fought off its sailors, and sailed insolently out of Cartagena—in one fine new ship in place of his two leaky old craft. Firing a final salute at the city which had tormented his dreams, he repeated the oath he had taken long ago at Río Hacha: “I’ll be back, Cartagena.” And off he sailed for England and the great adventures that awaited.

But when Diego Ledesma Paredes y Guzman Orvantes returned to Cartagena, he could claim the greater victory, for as he reported to his king:

Admiral Ledesma was not obligated to tell his king the whole truth—that Drake himself had sunk the
Swan
because her smallness was holding him back and, as a gesture of extreme decency, had given his
Pasha
to a group of Spanish prisoners he had been forced to detain. Nor did he explain that what he dismissed as “whatever mean ships he could muster” was really one of His Majesty’s finest galleons.

But Ledesma was careful in his letter to point out that the notable victories over Drake had been made possible only by the remarkable performances of several members of the Ledesma family. The king in his next instructions to Cartagena promoted seven of them.

Now came those watershed years when in the lives of great nations some begin to ascend, others to decline. At first none is aware that the shift in power is under way, for the signals are so slight that only a speculative genius could detect their significance. Six men in a small town in the Netherlands finally dare to oppose their Spanish governor and are executed. In the distant Celebes a sultan acquires unexpected power and decides to trade with whatever European ships struggle into his domain. In a small German town a man devises a better way to cut type, and at his press books are printed faster.

In the 1580s, Spain and England were involved in this shift of power, for in the dark, gloomy rooms of the Escorial, King Philip II slowly, patiently conceives and perfects a massive operation which he calls only “The Enterprise of England.” By it he intends to settle once and for all his decades-long competition with his sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth.

But she is not idling away her time, waiting for the enemy to strike.
Under the inspired direction of John Hawkins, she is assembling a fleet of swift, small ships of a radical new design, and assembling the great heroes of England to man them: Howard, Frobisher, Hawkins and, above all, Drake. Every nation in Europe who had spies in either Spain or England knew that an immense confrontation between Spain and England, between Philip and Elizabeth, was imminent.

Governor Ledesma, safe within his walled capital of Cartagena, received news of crucial events that were about to determine the fate of Europe via two ways: reports from Spain alerting him to this possible danger, or warning him about real ones, or simply conveying empire gossip; he also entertained travelers making their way from one Spanish possession to another, and often these men and women provided insights that not even the king in Madrid would have had, or would have listened to if he did have them.

In early January 1578, one of King Philip’s swift postal frigates arrived in Cartagena with a copy of the somewhat confused instructions which were being delivered to all Caribbean cities:

The timetable of reaction was identical in all the sites mentioned. First month: keen apprehension. Second month: some relief in knowing that if Drake was in the Caribbean, at least he wasn’t attacking
our
city. Third month: total perplexity, with everyone asking: “Where can that El Draque be?”

It was almost a year before intelligence from Spain finally dispelled the mystery:

But in early 1579 there came to Cartagena from Panamá via one of the treasure ships sailing from Nombre de Dios, a Señora Cristóbal, sister-in-law of the famous shipowner San Juan de Anton, merchant and government official of Lima in Peru, and she was talkative. As a friend of Don Diego’s wife, she naturally stayed at the residence of the Ledesmas, and while there, she spoke incessantly of great events along the west coast of South America, reporting on diverse incidents about which King Philip apparently did not know.

“Contradictions! Contradictions! You, Admiral Ledesma, know better than most what a cruel monster El Draque is supposed to be, how he burns and slays, so that Spanish children are warned to be obedient lest El Draque come for them. A thousand tales are told at night about his evil acts. But I can tell you as a principal authority, for I was there and I met scores who had dealings with him, that in neither Chile nor Peru did he burn or slay. Two hundred sailors and merchants will testify that when they and their ships were captured on the high seas or while dozing in some hidden port, he gave them back their ships after valuables had been transferred to his and saw to it that they had ample food to reach home. Of course, he sometimes chopped down their masts, and on one occasion he wrapped all their sails around their anchor chains and tossed the whole to the bottom of the sea lest they try to follow him or speed ahead to warn others of his coming. He is a terror, no question about that, but he is not a brutal savage like a Frenchman and he does obey the established laws of the sea.”

Prompted by Don Diego, she went on to relate her version of
what happened at Santiago in Chile: “All official reports about what happened there are filled with lies. Out of the blue, Drake in his
Golden Hind
arrived at Valparaíso, the port city near Santiago, and within a few minutes had captured the place, which is not surprising, since at the first sight of the strange English ship, everyone in the harbor town, and I do mean everyone, for later I talked with many of these people, fled into the hills. Valparaíso was completely sacked but not burned, and no lives were lost. But what has been kept secret so far is that from Valparaíso, and the settlements leading to Santiago, Drake took a fortune in wealth of all kinds. One English sailor told my brother-in-law while he was a captive on Drake’s ship: ‘We took so much loot at Valparaíso that we could have turned back at that spot and gone home wealthy men, all of us,’ and as a joke Drake allowed Don San Juan to go down into the hold of the
Golden Hind
and see for himself the great bales of stolen wealth loaded at that port. My brother-in-law said it was tremendous, enough, as he expressed it, ‘to adorn a dozen cathedrals.’ And remember, Valparaíso was only one of his many stops along the coast. Heaven knows what he stole at other towns I haven’t even heard of.”

Admiral Ledesma, leaning forward in his chair, was mesmerized by what his visitor was saying, for he could not hear enough about the behavior of his mortal enemy: “Tell me, what happened when Drake captured your family’s ship, the
Cacafuego
?” At the mention of this famous vessel, Señora Cristóbal threw up her hands and chortled: “It was, as I’m sure you know better than me, properly christened
Señora de la Concepción
, a name singing with piety and grace. It was a noble ship, still is, because although Drake captured it, he handed it back to Don San Juan. It was known, still is, I believe, as the Glory of the Pacific, none bigger, none grander. I sailed on it several times, Lima to Panamá and back, and my cabin was better equipped than my bedroom at home. The name by which it became vulgarly known,
Cacafuego
, is such a terrible embarrassment that I am ashamed even to say it. Who knows how it got such a disgraceful name, I’m sure I don’t. Our beautiful ship, besmeared so horribly.
^*1
But that’s what they call it and that’s what Drake called it when he dogged it for five days on its way to Panamá with riches …”