The Pirate Queen (21 page)

Yet despite all Hawkins’s preparations and the fair wishes of the great and the good, the voyage was doomed from the outset. Within a few days of putting to sea, the fleet was scattered just north of Cape Finisterre, with only the diminutive
Angel
managing in keeping alongside the
Jesus
. The
Jesus
, despite all the repairs carried out after her last voyage, sprung leaks like a massive colander through her ancient timbers. There was one hole in the ship’s stern that was so large it needed to be plugged with chunks of baize. While the ships pitched and rolled, and the
Jesus
listed dangerously in the swelling seas, Hawkins had his mariners man the pumps and prayed they would make it through the night.

By daybreak, all were exhausted and utterly soaked through. They held no hope that they could stay afloat and, for that matter, remain alive. Hawkins gathered his crew together to pray one last time. With clasped hands and bowed heads they begged the Lord to preserve them in their hour of need, and keep the
Jesus
—which was after all named in honor of His own Son—from sinking. Emotions ran high after Hawkins’s stirring prayers, and later the crew claimed that there wasn’t a dry eye on deck. By midnight of October 10, three
days after the storm had started, the winds subsided, and Hawkins knew that the weather was clearing at last. The next morning, with the
Jesus
miraculously still afloat, he led his men in a service of thanksgiving.
⁵

Unbeknownst to Hawkins, the tiny
Judith
had sailed on southward in the great storm, and two weeks later Hawkins caught up to her in the roadstead just off Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Still, the
William and John
, the
Swallow
, the
Solomon
, and the
Minion
were missing, feared sunk. To make matters worse, Hawkins had had strained relations with the powers-that-be in Santa Cruz for some time, making it far from the safe haven he needed. When he anchored in the harbor, his great fear was that he was under surveillance, and he couldn’t shake the feeling. He was right to be wary. Lovell’s shenanigans of the previous year had not been forgotten, and the good people of Santa Cruz feared that they would be attacked by the “thieving English pirates.” Nevertheless, it was obvious to the governor that Hawkins’s ship had been badly battered in the recent storm, and he was allowed to refit.

Despite being ordered to behave themselves, the confined spaces aboard ship and perhaps their ordeal led two of Hawkins’s closest companions, Edward Dudley (captain of the soldiers of the fleet) and George Fitzwilliams, into a violent disagreement. When the men set off to row ashore to fight a duel, Hawkins rushed after them to stop it at once. He wasn’t about to allow the Spaniards to have “entertainment” at his men’s expense. When Dudley was confronted by his admiral, he struck Hawkins above the eye with his sword in the heat of the moment, and Dudley was clapped in irons on the spot. Striking a senior officer was mutiny even then, and mutiny was punishable by death.

When Dudley heard his death sentence, the hapless captain of the soldiers fell to his knees and begged Hawkins to spare his miserable life. Hawkins told him to say his prayers, and when Dudley babbled to be forgiven yet again, Hawkins helped him to his feet, saying that that would be the end of the matter. The men were relieved, and a thankful Dudley walked away a free, if chastened, man. There would be no rowdiness countenanced on this voyage.
⁶

Shortly after this incident, the
Jesus
was finally repaired, and by October 30, Hawkins reached the friendlier southern part of the
island where his partner, Pedro de Ponte, greeted him warmly. There he learned that his missing ships—the
Minion
, the
Swallow
, and the
William and John
—were all safe on the island of La Gomera, just fifteen miles west of Tenerife. The
Judith
was dispatched there, and on November 2, the ships were reunited, and their combined companies held a great celebration, firing off their guns and receiving an official welcome from the Spanish governor of the island. Meat, jugs of wine, and fresh oranges were brought on board as a gift from the town of San Sebastian.

Nonetheless, later, the Spanish would complain about “outrages” perpetrated against the Church during Hawkins’s sojourn. They may have been right. For whatever reason, this voyage held a strong anti-Catholic bias. There were reports of burning images of the saints, burning the doors to the hermitage at Playa de Santiago, overturning a cross, and shooting at the church and chapel of Santa Cruz. Protestantism had well and truly overshadowed the ethos of the crew. Still, despite their acting like ruffians and pirates, Hawkins and these men thought they were gentlemen and merchant adventurers. They saw themselves as holding a simple, yet burning, piety, often praying three times daily aboard ship. Their adventure was for the good of their realm and queen, in an increasingly hostile world. It never occurred to them that they played a very real role in that increasing hostility.

For that matter, no one had as yet realized that these voyages would change England and, eventually, the world. As they increased over time and in success, their goals would become ever more commercial and, in later years, colonial. They would fundamentally change the very fabric of English society. England’s mariners were in a high risk, high reward game. The ships’ companies knew that perhaps as many as half of them wouldn’t return, but they all calculated that if they did, they would do so as wealthy men. Their adventures would mark the beginning of a new way of expression in the English language, expanding horizons for those more, or perhaps less, fortunate, who stayed at home.

The mariners’ diaries are bathed in their workaday chores, the boredom of the Doldrums, the swell of the sea, the stench and the horror of battle, and tales of vast wealth and booty. This was the time when sea shanties were first sung to help pass the long hours at
work or while waiting endlessly on a glassy sea for the wind to fill their sails. Their language was rich with the religious fervor of the day and showed their daily hopes and aspirations, their triumphs and their tribulations. And it is their very own words that help us to understand how terrifying, expanding, and exciting the world seemed to them. They themselves were often indentured in some way or another, and suffered greatly just to stay alive. For them slavery was not the heinous crime that we know it to be today, but a means for them to take one step up the social ladder by acquiring the “wealth” that slavery and these “trading” adventures brought.

These were the pioneers who—willingly or not—followed John Hawkins on his fourth slave trading voyage. At Cape Verde, they plundered Portuguese ships for African slaves already “harvested.” When this wasn’t fruitful enough, he ordered his men to “gather” slaves by direct assaults on their villages. The assaults were a disaster. In one midnight attack, Hawkins and twenty of his men were wounded by poisoned arrows the natives fired at them. Seven or eight of the mariners contracted an illness that may have been lockjaw (tetanus) and died. Considering that they captured only nine slaves, it was a terrible result.

Hawkins and his men couldn’t put the Cape Verde Islands behind them quickly enough after this debacle. While they sailed along the Guinea coast, they encountered some French pirates who had taken a Portuguese ship. Hawkins “impounded” the Portuguese
Gratia Dei
(Grace of God) and gave Francis Drake his first command as her captain.

After this, for a while, Hawkins’s voyage seemed to be improving. Along the Sierra Leone coast, where numerous rivers flow into the sea, the men set to work in shallow draft, swift ships, and, by the end of November, near Cape Roxo, captured the slaves aboard six Portuguese vessels. But events soon soured again when Drake led an expedition up the Cacheo River, capturing Portuguese ships—which had no slaves. Four Englishmen were killed, and 250 mariners and soldiers were engaged in the fruitless action.

Finally, in January 1568, Hawkins, with the help of the Sapi people, who were the native enemies of the Conga, stormed an indigenous fortified town on the island of Conga off the coast of Sierra Leone. Until that point, the queen’s slave trader had “gathered” only 150
slaves despite numerous raids. Through fierce fighting that amazed the English, the town was captured and handed over to the merciless Sapi, and the English “harvested” 250 more slaves. By February, the count had risen to 400, and Hawkins felt he could sail on to the West Indies. He had lost under a dozen men to battle, a few more to disease, and two to drowning when a hippopotamus rammed their ship.
⁷

Their Atlantic crossing bode well for the trade ahead, and the English fleet made landfall at Dominica on March 27, where they took on fresh water and wood without incident. At his next port of call, the island of Margarita, the English found the town abandoned and sacked “in a manner all spoiled and burned” with “the walls of a house scrawled in charcoal with the phrase in the French language
Vengeance for La Florida
.”
⁸
What remained of the town’s population had escaped into the interior. Hawkins sent a party after them “in peace,” and it was soon confirmed that the town had suffered a violent reprisal by the French for the murder of their colonists in Florida three years earlier. Neither Hawkins nor the Spanish had known that the Florida Indians had virtually destroyed the remaining Spanish outposts in Florida by early 1568.
⁹
Ever the crowd-pleaser, Hawkins vowed to apprehend the French corsairs, after which their Spanish hosts were so grateful that nine days of friendly trading (linen for gold) and feasting followed.

Shortly before Easter, the fleet reached Borburata, only to find that the French had beaten them to it and laid waste to the town. Houses and the church had been destroyed, and most of the inhabitants had fled inland. Soon Hawkins learned that Ponce de Léon and his family had been attacked in Coro, too, the local seat of Spain’s government. The Spanish Caribbean had changed for the worse in the two years Hawkins had been absent. But he wouldn’t allow French depredations to stop him. As resourceful as ever, Hawkins bribed two men with the reward of an African woman if they could entice the colonists back to town.

Sure enough, the townspeople trickled back in small groups, and a makeshift trading emporium was set up on the beach. Some of the wretched slaves were off-loaded and kept under guard from running away from the Spanish, and probably also from the French.
It did not bode well for a brisk trade, but Hawkins wrote off to governor Ponce de Léon in any event for his license to trade sixty slaves only. Naturally, he hauled out his usual patter that he had blown off course when he wrote that:

This voyage on the which I was ordered by the Queen’s Majesty of England, my mistress, another way and not to these parts, and the charges being made in England, before I set sail the pretence was forcibly overturned. Therefore I am commanded by the Queen’s Majesty my mistress to seek here another traffic with the wares I already had and Negroes which I should procure in Guinea, to lighten the great charges hazarded in the setting out of this navy.
¹⁰

While he awaited his answer, he ordered his ships to be careened and trimmed. Hawkins even tried to bribe the local bishop to help him get his license by the gift of two Africans and twelve silver spoons. When they were returned at the same time as the negative reply from Governor Ponce de Léon, which said, “before my eyes I saw the governor my predecessor carried away into Spain for giving licence to the country to traffic with you at your last being here, [is] an example for me that I fall not in the like or worse.”
¹¹

The settlers who had been lured back to town to trade now fled again. Hawkins sent a party of sixty men headed by his favorite henchman, Robert Barrett, to bring them back, but Barrett returned only with stolen chickens. The English remained in port, though, hopeful that furtive midnight trades might turn into something more profitable. But when trading didn’t pick up enough by the beginning of June 1568 to warrant prolonging their stay, the fleet weighed anchor and headed for Río de la Hacha.

Drake was sent ahead in the
Judith
together with the
Angel
under his command, while Hawkins took on victuals for the fleet at Curaçao. This is the first mention of Drake as captain of an English ship in Hawkins’s fleet. But, according to Job Hortop, one of Drake’s men:

The Spaniards shot three pieces at us from the shore, we requited with two of ours, and shot through the Governor’s house: we weighed anchor and anchored again without shot of the town, where we rode five days in despite of the Spaniards and their shot. In the mean space there came a carvel of advice from Santo Domingo, whom with the
Angel
and the
Judith,
we chased and drove to the shore: we fetched him from thence in spite of 200 Spanish harquebusiers’ shot, and anchored again before the town…’till our General’s coming, who anchored, landed his men, and valiantly took the town, with the loss of one man, whose name was Thomas Surgeon.
¹²

It was only by killing the defenders of Río de la Hacha, burning half the town, and letting his men loose to plunder that the local treasurer allowed the English to “trade.” The same modus operandi was used at Santa Marta, the next port west—though at Santa Marta, the town was taken by “mutual agreement” when a pretense was instigated to land 150 mariners and “shoot out of the ships half a score shot over the town for a color [a charade].”
¹³
Though trade was brisk, Hawkins still had a number of unsold Africans. And so he headed to Cartagena.