The Pirate Queen (20 page)

Pardon to the said Drake, Hawking and Master of all felonies before 20 Oct. last. By p.s. [privy seal]
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Still, when Drake gave his family history to the chronicler, William Camden, it is doubtful that he knew his own father’s dark secret. It would have been easy enough for him to have challenged his father’s story, since the Western Rebellion occurred in the summer of 1549, not 1548. This doesn’t alter the fact that the West Country was a pretty inhospitable place for those who were staunch supporters of the “new faith” in the late 1540s. King Edward tried to make the Protestant toehold in England resemble a much sterner Lutheran movement. There was no middle ground and no compromise for Elizabeth’s younger brother. So when West Country Catholics had resisted Edward’s new rulings to remove images from all churches and chapels, withered limbs of one executed Catholic rebel or another adorned the walls of Tavistock. Body parts of those executed for disobeying a royal command were frequently exported around the county to ensure the submission of others. Within the year, the Cornish peasantry rejected the new Prayer Book—egged on by the gentry—and all hell broke loose as they marched into Devon, exercising “the uttermost of their barbarous cruelty.” Of course, they were mercilessly crushed.
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It was from their new “home” in the hull of a ship moored or beached in the River Medway in Kent, the younger Drake brothers were born and raised until there were twelve surviving sons in all. Edmund earned his crust of bread by preaching to the sailors of the Royal Navy at Gillingham. Francis, as the eldest, was expected to find employment as soon as he was able. Undoubtedly, it was in these mud flats where
the young Francis played, dodging between the king’s ships that had been brought in shore for repair. It was in Kent that he absorbed the possibilities of the sea rather than in Devon. It was in Kent that Wyatt’s Rebellion to put the Princess Elizabeth on the throne was hatched. It was Kent where the great Londoners passed on their way to the Continent or to Russia or Spain. While Mary’s inquisition raged, seizing and burning three hundred innocent mothers, fathers, bakers, butchers, and others of no political significance whatsoever—fifty-four of them were seized and murdered in Kent alone. It is no wonder that Francis Drake hated Philip of Spain, once the king consort of Queen Mary of England.

What is astounding is how his father continued to earn money during the reign of Mary and Philip reading Lutheran prayers to sailors without being counted among those seized for heresy. The family must have lived in constant fear for his life, and their own. What is certain is that Mary’s reign would have instilled even greater hatred in Drake for all Catholics. Interestingly, one of the few books Drake carried in his great voyage around the world with him was John Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
from 1563—a history of the Protestant martyrs in the reign of Queen Mary.

While Lovell was sailing on to Guinea, having offended business associates and local officials alike in the Canaries, Elizabeth had other, far more important worries at home. The Queen of Scots had been implicated in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley, and, it was rumored, had even masterminded the assassination with her lover the Earl of Bothwell. On February 24, 1567, Elizabeth wrote to Mary

Madame, My ears have been so deafened and my understanding so grieved and my heart so affrighted to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your mad husband and my killed cousin that I scarcely yet have the wits to write about it…. However, I will not at all dissemble what most people are talking about: which is that you will look through your fingers [pretend to ignore] at the revenging of this deed, and that you do not take the measures that touch those who have done as you wished, as if the thing had been entrusted in a way that the murderers felt assurance in doing it.
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There could be little doubt that Mary was plotting again, and that Elizabeth needed to find out what she was up to. Not even de Silva could get the queen’s attention in these dark days, so the fate of a small fleet off the coast of Guinea, with no apparent direct investment from the queen herself, would not have hit Elizabeth’s radar screen. And so, Lovell sailed on oblivious to the fact that he was of no concern whatsoever to his queen. After two or three months on the Guinea coast “gathering” slaves and merchandise estimated at a value of 30,000 ducats ($10.79 million or £5.83 million) through outright theft, intimidation, or, in a worst case, purchase, Lovell struck out into the Atlantic. Later, the Portuguese would complain that Lovell had attacked the “great ship
Sacharo
, loaded with slaves within sight of the island of Saint James” gravely injuring the captain and slaying many of its crew.
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The voyage was not well documented, but it’s believed that their first landfall in the West Indies was probably the island of Margarita, off the northern coast of the Spanish Main. Lovell was refused the right to trade, but he was allowed to take on fresh water, wood, and food. At Borburata, on the coast of modern Venezuela, he joined forces with two French pirate fleets that had arrived ahead of him. The more notorious of the pirate captains was Jean Bontemps, with whom Lovell had scraped an acquaintance during his other Hawkins voyages. Bontemps and Lovell sent their agents to Borburata’s governor, Pedro Ponce de León, expecting to receive a license to trade as Hawkins had done the previous year. When Ponce de León refused the license, of course under the most strict interdiction from Spain, Lovell sent an armed party ashore. They took two government officials and several other citizens of the town as hostages, and robbed two of the merchants they had kidnapped of the 500 pesos tucked away in their purses.

On reflection, this must have smacked too much of sheer piracy for Lovell, and so the two “robbed” hostages were granted twenty-six slaves in exchange, and everyone was set free. To make everything kosher, the local officials demanded that the merchants—not Lovell or Bontemps—pay a fine to the crown before they would be allowed to take possession of their slaves, thereby settling all tax matters and making everyone happy.
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The next we hear of Lovell is on May 18, 1567, when the English fleet—alone—arrived in Río de la Hacha. Again, a representative was sent ashore to ask for a license to trade. The pliable local treasurer, Miguel de Castellanos, who had negotiated the year before with Hawkins, agreed to trade despite Philip’s interdiction. But the locals—including de Castellanos’s brother Balthasar—refused to trade, since they feared royal retribution from the king. So Lovell simply unloaded around ninety slaves and sailed away in the middle of the night.

When the good citizens of Río de la Hacha had their feet metaphorically put to the fire by the Inquisition a few months later, they changed their tune. One weary inquisitor even commented that he hated to make the colonists testify under oath since they would “only perjure themselves.”
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According to the new story, Bontemps seemed still to be traveling with Lovell, and had arrived first with his fleet. When the colonists had met the French pirate with armed resistance, he had been driven off. When Lovell arrived, claiming he wanted to trade, and was told that it wouldn’t be allowed, the Englishman sent a reply threatening to lay waste to the town and kill all the townspeople. The Spaniards claimed that they had defended the town against the interlopers, and had killed or wounded a number of the English. The slaves whom Lovell had off-loaded a few days later were in fact “old and weak and on the point of dying.” Being good Christians, they nursed the slaves back to health, so surely, they argued with their inquisitors, they should be rewarded with them as payment for their admirable defense of the town and obeying the king’s orders.
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The investigation concluded that the colonists had probably bought the slaves in one or more midnight trades, but since they all told the same story, there was little the inquisitors could do about it.

Lovell’s voyage is chronicled only once more by the good people of Río de la Hacha, when they claim that he had gone on to Española where he “wrought great evil and destruction.”
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If this had been, in fact, true, the voyage would hardly have been largely ignored back home. By the time his fleet pulled into Plymouth harbor in September 1567, Lovell had already been consigned to an anonymous watery history. John Hawkins, on the other hand, had other fish he was frying.

11. The Troublesome Voyage of John Hawkins

An hundred iron pointed darts they fling,

An hundred stones fly whistling by his ears,

An hundred deadly dinted staves they bring,

Yet neither darts, nor stones, nor staves, he fears;

But through the air his plumed crest he rears;

And in derision ’scapes away….

—CHARLES FITZGEFFREY,
Sir Francis Drake
, 1596

W
hile Lovell and his men had been risking life and limb for Hawkins and his investors, the queen had appointed her trailblazing sea captain to the office of clerk of the ships of the Royal Navy, on the condition that his position would be taken up once George Winter retired. Winter understandably clung tightly to his post for another twelve years or so, but the title—and the weight it carried—wielded all the influence Hawkins needed in London’s naval society for his next venture.

For this fourth, last, and most impressive slaving voyage, Hawkins’s joint stock company investors were even more remarkable than before. The queen; Leicester; the Earl of Pembroke; and Leicester’s brother, the Earl of Warwick, were the most prominent from the court itself. But the one astonishing name on the list of investors is that of William Cecil. It seems that even he overcame his habitual “distaste for such ventures” by investing a small sum himself, possibly due to the financial debacle he was facing in his investment in the Muscovy Company.
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Among the naval backers, the lord admiral, Edward Fiennes de Clinton, invested along with Sir William Winter and William’s brother, George. Hawkins’s elder brother, William, was a major player, too. The merchants in the syndicate included the usual suspects from the City of London headed by the ubiquitous Sir William Garrard, Sir Lionel Duckett,
and Rowland Heyward. In fact, in the confession of one of Hawkins’s captured mariners, Thomas Fuller, he claimed that there were thirty merchants in all investing in the voyage, represented by a dozen or so agents aboard the vessels themselves. The most prominent of these seafaring merchants was Anthony Godard from Plymouth, who was fluent in French and Spanish, and of great value to Hawkins aboard his flagship.
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While Hawkins was ordering those who had excelled themselves in the Lovell expedition aboard his ships (and there weren’t many) for his new adventure, his officers were also busy scouring the port for all the young and fit hopefuls of Plymouth to press-gang into service. Years later, on his return from the West Indies, a young man named William Cornelius, who had been a mariner aboard sardine ships to Flanders until that fateful day in the autumn of 1567, claimed that “one day as he was going along the street unsuspectingly they fell upon him suddenly and hurried him on board as they were short of people owing to the fact that they were going to Guinea which had a reputation of being an unhealthy country where they would die from fever and that they had taken him as many others.”
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Once again, the queen’s own investment in the new adventure was through her ships rather than ready cash. And again, the
Jesus of Lubeck
—newly refitted since her last voyage at Hawkins’s own expense—was the fleet’s admiral. The queen also ventured the 300-ton
Minion
; and John Hampton, newly returned from the Lovell voyage, became her master, with John Garrett as his mate. The other four ships in the fleet belonged jointly to John Hawkins and his elder brother, William. The aptly named
William and John
was a 150-ton vessel and had the returning Thomas Bolton as her master with the former captain of the
Solomon
, James Raunce, as the ship’s mate. The rebuke in this demotion for Raunce was an unspoken warning to all. The 30-ton pinnace
Swallow
, virtually new when she set out on Lovell’s voyage, was still in good condition and was also prepared to sail. The last two ships, the 50-ton bark
Judith
and the 32-ton
Angel,
completed the fleet. At the time of sailing, neither the captain of the
Judith
nor that of the
Angel
had been named. Hawkins had at his command some 1,333 tons of shipping positively bristling with firepower in what was, in all but name, a national undertaking.
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Aside from the merchants, admiral, his captains, and crew, the
fleet also carried an orchestra of sorts: a six-man band with at least two fiddlers, a bass viol player, and organist. Entertainment for the captain and all those who shared his table was essential for the gentlemen adventurers—and as essential as their gold plate to eat off of—especially since they would be gone for a year or more.

And so, within a month of Lovell’s return, on October 2, 1567, Hawkins was at sea again. This time, though, it was as a captain of a fleet of state with the flag of St. George hoisted atop his mainmast, the queen’s colors alongside the national flag; and the queen’s commission in his pocket. But Hawkins hadn’t obtained these symbols of national honor lightly. In the queen’s presence chamber, he once again faithfully, or perhaps faithlessly, promised Elizabeth that his adventure would not offend England’s friends and allies, and that he would not harm any subjects of the King of Spain. The charade was more likely to allow Elizabeth to disavow any knowledge of his actions than be believed by England’s savvy queen. Certainly de Silva didn’t believe it, and he made Cecil swear “a great oath” that the sea dog Hawkins was not heading back to the West Indies.