Mistress of the Sea (42 page)

‘From the men,’ he whispered.

Next, Captain Drake stepped forward, producing a large battered quoit with a grandiose flourish and placing it on the book as well.

‘From Her Majesty,’ he announced, and the gold was so heavy, the parson almost let it fall. The Captain chuckled, and the parson recovered, giving the ring back to Will to place on her finger, saying words in turn that filled her to glowing: ‘With this ring I thee wed: this gold and silver I thee give: with my body I thee worship . . .’

This gold and silver
– what a story lay behind it, and now it was the gift and seal of her marriage. They were wed; the bells rang out, and she and Will stepped outside to a soaring ovation. Arm in arm they proceeded, as Drake’s men lined up, drawing their swords to form an arch, and sending Peryn Fownes stumbling in momentary panic. Through this arch they walked, showered with sugared grains and petals, with a flurry of white from the doves that were released into the sky.

‘A kiss,’ the people called, and Will bent to kiss her tenderly, until the Captain intervened, clapping his hand on Will’s shoulder.

‘That’s no kiss for a mariner,’ Drake declared, pushing Will aside. ‘Here, let me show you . . .’

Drake made ready to kiss her to hoots and whistles. His merry face came closer, red and whiskered, and she would have made no objection because of the regard in which she held him, but Will took hold of the Captain and bodily pulled him away.

‘No, Captain.’ Will embraced her again, more firmly now, with the kind of hold that no one could break. ‘Let
me
show
you
. . .’

She could not hear any more for the cheering of the crowd.

On 9th August 1573, during a sermon at St Andrew’s Church in Plymouth, the news spread that Francis Drake had docked in the harbour, and one by one the entire congregation crept out to greet him, until the preacher was left quite alone – so the story goes . . .

Drake and his men returned to a hero’s welcome, their fortunes made, with a haul amounting to a significant proportion of Queen Elizabeth’s annual revenue – some estimate as much as a fifth. Of the seventy-three adventurers who had left Plymouth over a year before, no more than thirty-one arrived back, but Drake had established his reputation, and dared strike a blow for independence and religious freedom against the might of imperial Spain. The success of the enterprise heralded the beginning of the Elizabethan Golden Age, and set the course for the rise of England as a great maritime power.

I expect you will now be wondering just how much of this story is true. The answer is: a good deal; Drake’s activities in the Caribbean between 1570 and 1573 took place much as I have
described
them in
Mistress of the Sea
. Insofar as the novel concerns well-known real-life figures, the story accords with the generally accepted facts. Drake really did mount several attacks on the Spanish bullion supply in Panamá and eventually succeeded after many failures – he did raid Nombre de Dios, ally with the Cimaroons, lose many of his men to yellow fever, capture a mule-train loaded with gold and other riches, escape on an improvised raft and return to England victorious but without two of his younger brothers who died during the venture. The rout of the English fleet at San Juan de Ulúa in 1568 is also a well-documented event, and the duplicitous behaviour of the Viceroy of New Spain during this incident – treachery, as Drake saw it – was the spark that ignited his hatred of the Spanish and a determination to exact vengeance which continued for the rest of his life. Of course, he famously had the ultimate retribution after the period covered by this novel, with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

The setting for
Mistress of the Sea
is supported by such sources as there are, principally the reports of Christopher Ceely, Ellis Hixom and other members of Drake’s crew, on the basis of which Drake’s chaplain, Philip Nichols, compiled an account which was annotated and approved by Drake and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth for presentation to her on New Year’s Day, 1593. This account was later published as
Sir Francis Drake Revived
by Drake’s nephew (also Sir Francis Drake) in 1628. In conjunction with this, I have made use of the Spanish first-hand accounts which were translated by Irene A Wright and published in 1932 by the Hakluyt Society in
Spanish Documents Selected from the Archives of the Indies at Seville
. The degree of consistency between
both
English and Spanish accounts gives credibility to much of the story of Drake’s 1572-3 venture as set out in
Sir Francis Drake Revived
, even allowing for some fairly flagrant elements of exaggeration and dissembling.

For the evidence of what really took place at San Juan de Ulúa I have consulted the eye-witness reports of the gunner, Job Hortop, and the page, Miles Philips, which first appeared in Richard Hakluyt’s seminal work:
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
first published in 1589. Also in this collection was John Hawkins’s own account of his ‘unfortunate voyage’ of 1567-8. All three narratives are excellent not only for the information they contain, but also for giving the reader a real feel for the mindset, language and habits of these Elizabethan seafarers from diverse social backgrounds. Again, I have looked at the Spanish sources, and back in 1961, Rayner Unwin wrote a superb description in
The Defeat of John Hawkins
.

But this novel is not faction; it is not primarily concerned with dramatising and retelling the known and probable history.
Mistress of the Sea
is unashamedly fiction; the characters of Ellyn, Will and Kit are all imaginary, and their adventures are products of my own invention, set within the framework of the evidence for what actually happened at the time, so far as I have been able to ascertain it.

Francis Drake and John Hawkins were giants of the age, and I have tried to be faithful to the historical records concerning them both as regards what they did and said, and as regards their characters. Some of the things Drake says in
Mistress of the Sea
come directly from the early sources, for example, several of
Drake’s
responses to the Spanish ‘gentleman soldier’ on the Isla Bastimentos, after the failed attack on Nombre de Dios, are taken from
Sir Francis Drake Revived
, an account that Drake presented as his own. He may well not actually have made any remark to the effect that, before he departed, ‘He meant to reap some of the harvest which they [the Spaniards] get out of the earth, and sent into Spain to trouble all the earth!’ (meaning the gold and silver), but there is little doubt that this is the kind of remark Drake felt he
should
have made.

Drake, the man, as I found him described in the first sources, was not quite the avuncular hero who has come to be revered as Drake, the icon. He was a man of superhuman achievement, from humble beginnings, but the Drake I got to know was quintessentially ruthless. This was a leader who, by his own admission, scuttled his brother’s ship in secret so his men could not sail back home, then watched his brother labour in vain to try and save it, who almost certainly lied about the treasure he had found at Nombre de Dios (we know from the Spanish accounts that it was most unlikely there would have been any bullion left in the city at the time of the raid), and who later infamously hanged two innocent friars in retaliation for the mortal wounding of a black messenger boy after the capture of Santo Domingo, and then threatened to execute two prisoners a day until the murderer was punished or surrendered (the culprit was eventually hanged by the Spanish). The Drake who came alive for me in the accounts would stop at nothing to get what he wanted – and he would never give up. This is the Drake I portrayed in
Mistress of the Sea
: the kind of man who would always put the success of his venture before any individual concern, but who inspired absolute confidence and devotion.

Amongst the many non-fiction books about Drake and his ventures, some of the most useful I found were:
Sir Francis Drake
by John Sugden,
Sir Francis Drake, The Queen’s Pirate
by Harry Kelsey,
The Pirate Queen
by Susan Ronald and the nicely illustrated and compact
Sir Francis Drake
by Peter Whitfield.

There are other characters in
Mistress of the Sea
whose names appear in the records, but about whom little is known: those such as Ellis Hixom and Thomas Sherwell for example. With these players I have envisaged them almost from scratch. Others, such as Capitán Gonzalo de Bastidas, are inventions derived from just a smidgen of fact. There was no officer in command of the garrison at Nombre de Dios by the name of Bastidas, but there really was a Rodrigo de Bastidas (the grandfather of Capitán Bastidas in the story) who sailed with Christopher Columbus and then led his own expedition to the New World and discovered Panama, as well as claiming much of the Columbian coastline for Spain (and how could I resist a name like that?!).

A book I found invaluable in tracing the early colonial history of Panamá was
Old Panama and Castillo Del Oro
, published in 1914 by CLG Anderson (and read in one sitting at the British Library). For the Elizabethan history of Plymouth, I would recommend
A History of Plymouth
by CW Bracken (1931) (bought second hand from a bookshop by Sutton Harbour), as well as
Plymouth – An Illustrated History
by Crispin Hill, and I still keep referring to Liza Picard’s wonderful
Elizabeth’s London
for information on daily life for townsfolk in the era. Of the numerous reference works I consulted on sailing in the Age of Discovery, probably the most helpful for my purposes were:
Galleons and Galleys
by John F Guilmartin Jr (lavishly illustrated),
Sailing Ships
of
War 1400-1860
published in 1979 by Dr Frank Howard,
Spain’s Men of the Sea
by Pablo E Pérez-Mallaína and also
The Mary Rose
, a gem of a little handbook, from the Mary Rose Exhibition in Portsmouth. This brings me to the guides and maps, the notes and museum displays, the Elizabethan House run by Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery, Panamá la Vieja, the remains of the Camino Real and Las Cruces Trail in Panamá – the resources that bring the sensory experiences of time and place that much closer – because for me these are just as important as the text books.

As soon as I had the idea of writing a story with Drake’s raid on the Spanish bullion supply as a backdrop, I was determined to get to know the places involved, to walk some of the unspoilt terrain that my characters would have covered, to understand the climate and gain a feel for what it would have been like to be bitten by sandflies on a shadeless, oven-hot beach, or trudge up and down mountains, heavily burdened, through thick rainforest in near hundred per cent humidity. In this respect there was no better guide for me than Michael Turner’s
In Drake’s Wake: the Early Voyages
, because this series faithfully traces Drake’s journeys over sea and land in superb pictorial and topographical detail. ‘
Espero que encuentres lo que quieres
,’ Michael wrote in the flyleaf to his book in my possession, now extremely battered after numerous treks and thumbings. Well, I did find what I wanted, and his book was a huge help; for anyone interested in following in Drake’s footsteps, I would heartily recommend it.

Did a woman ever accompany Drake on one of his early Caribbean voyages? There’s no evidence that this happened – and there’s no evidence that it did not. For me, it would perhaps have over-stretched credulity to construct a story on the premise that
a
woman sailed aboard the
Pascoe
or the
Swan
in 1572 when that voyage is so well documented, but there are hardly any records relating to the two earlier Caribbean voyages that we know Drake made. What if a woman had been aboard then? . . . What if? . . .

‘What if?’ is how many a story begins . . .