The Portuguese Affair (8 page)

A few hours later at dusk, we sailed into Coruña harbour, Drake joyfully in the lead, with his personal standard flying at the masthead of his flagship, the
Revenge
. We learned the next morning from the embittered and frightened inhabitants of Coruña that the Spanish garrison had been so terrified by the sight of the standard belonging to the man they called
El Dracque
– the Dragon – that they had fled at once to the walled citadel in the upper town, abandoning the port, the lower town, and the citizens to their fate. However, our first and most urgent objective was to find where the stores of food and drink were held. Our seasick and rebellious soldiers were wonderfully cheered at the sight of land and the prospect of booty. When half of them were put ashore to hunt out provisions and load them on to the ships’ boats to restock the fleet, the remainder begged to join their comrades.

While the men were being ferried ashore in the pinnaces and skiffs of the fleet, I stood on deck beside Captain Oliver, looking out over the water. To starboard and some distance away I could see a massive
castillo
, guarding the western side of the harbour.

‘Why is Sir Francis not attacking that fortress?’ I asked. It seemed the one place that threatened us.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The new fortress. The Spanish began building that island fortress two years ago, when King Philip was preparing his Armada to attack England. After mustering the following year, it was from here, the harbour at Coruña, that the Armada fleet set out.’

‘So it was built to protect this harbour,’ I said. ‘I can understand why. It’s the most important port on the northwest coast of
Spain. So why are they not using it to defend the harbour now? They have not fired a single shot at us since we arrived.’

‘Great stone-built fortresses do not arise overnight. Even now it’s incomplete.’

He studied it and gave a nod of approval. ‘It’s well placed. It lies on a small island just off that peninsula on which the town is built. From land it can only be reached by a narrow causeway, easy to defend. Do you see? Originally a small chapel to St Anthony stood on the island, so the fortress is known as the Castillo de San Antón.’

‘Our ships could attack it from the harbour, couldn’t they?’

‘Aye, they could. Have you noticed the strength of the fortifications on this side?’

From here I could see that the huge stone walls on the seaward side of the new fortress rose from the sheer rocky sides of the island, which looked impregnable.

‘The unfinished fortress is of no real importance to us at present,’ he said, ‘since we’ve been told that the Spanish garrison has abandoned it in favour of the citadel formed by the walled upper town. They believe they can hold out in safety there, while the inhabitants of the lower town suffer our attack undefended. Our ships’ guns could indeed attack the fortress from the harbour, but, as you can see, the strongest fortifications, already complete, are on the seaward side, since it’s from this direction that they would expect attack.’

‘So we will ignore it?’

‘There is no point in wasting gunpowder and shot in taking it. There seems to be only a token garrison left there, if any.’

Later I heard that one small detachment of our soldiers had been deployed near the town end of the causeway, the most vulnerable part of the fortress. Here the walls were only partially complete, for the builders had not envisaged attack from the town. The lower courses were already laid in stone, but above this nothing yet protected the landward side of the fortress but roughly constructed wooden ramparts. If our soldiers had possessed siege guns, they would have made short work of taking possession of the
castillo
, but, as the captain had said, it was not worth the wasted ammunition. If any men of the garrison had been left there, they did not show their faces.

Even so, Drake and Norreys seemed bent on capturing Coruña itself, though the seizure and occupation of any Spanish town was no part of the expedition’s orders from the Queen. Our goal was
Portugal. Taking possession of a Spanish town could serve no purpose and would cost us dear. I could not imagine how our leaders could have any hope of taking the citadel and doubted their wisdom in lingering here at all. Why did we not sail on, immediately, for Lisbon?

In the meantime, the most urgent task was to reprovision the fleet. On the Portuguese ship we could only watch what happened once the men went ashore. This was no part of Dom Antonio’s campaign of triumphant return to his kingdom. And we did watch. We watched, helpless, as our band of villains ran amok in Coruña. Instead of obeying orders and loading the boats with barrels of beef and fish and casks of wine and fresh water, that filthy rout of masterless men went berserk in the town. There were provisions a-plenty to be found, for it seemed the Spaniards had indeed been laying in supplies for a fresh Armada against
England. Before an hour was out our gallant soldiers had smashed and murdered and burned their way to the wine and were reeling in drunken splendour through the streets, looting shops and churches, raping and cutting throats as they went. From the heights of the citadel the garrison fired down on them, but our men made no attempt to counter-attack. Some of them fell, wounded or dead, rolling in the gutters amongst the spilt wine and the piles of salted sardines. Their fellows let them lie, too intent on their own drinking and looting to care what happened to the wounded and dead.

We watched in horror from the rail of the
Victory
, but there was nothing we could do. Dr Nuñez sat on a water cask with his head in his hands, groaning and muttering to himself. Dom Antonio strode angrily from one end of the ship to the other, his drawn sword in his hand, slapping it from time to time against his thigh, while Dr Lopez trotted behind him, with soothing, meaningless words. He had donned a bejewelled breastplate, an ornamental thing of little military value, but with it he still wore his square physician’s cap of purple velvet. Nothing could more clearly have spelled out our helplessness, our absurdity. This was an affair of Drake’s, not ours, just one more episode in his long personal war of attrition with Spain.

Sir John Norreys seemed helpless, for he had lost control of our untrained mob of men, his experienced soldiers far too few to marshal them into any kind of order. Drake, meanwhile, was sending fire parties in amongst the ships in the harbour, most of which were careened or laid alongside the quays under repair. Within a few hours smoke was drifting across the water toward us from those ships his sailors had managed to set on fire.

I tried speaking to Captain Oliver, who had retired to his cabin, as if to mark his wish to have no part in what was happening on shore.

‘Do you have any idea of how long we will be here, Captain?’ I asked. ‘If ever it is possible to get the men and the supplies back on board the ships?’

He gave me a bleak look. ‘I was concerned from the start that we were encumbered with this rabble. I would send my own crew ashore to secure provisions, but I dare not risk their lives amongst those drunken louts. We will never be able to reprovision until they drink themselves into a stupor and we can send reliable men to load up what we need.’ He grimaced. ‘That may take several days.’

‘But surely now Sir John will give up his plan of seizing the town,’ I said.

‘He has sent no signal to that effect.’

‘But these men are incapable–’

‘Aye, they are certainly incapable, but he has the experienced troops from the Low Countries.’

‘Only about eighteen hundred men,’ I said. ‘Enough to take possession of the undefended lower town, I suppose, but not the walled citadel, the old town up on the hill. We have no artillery.’

‘We have not,’ he agreed, ‘and the ships’ guns have not the range to reach so far. The garrison up there does have cannon. They have been firing down on our men.’

‘I have seen it. So what must we do?’

‘Await the first opportunity to reprovision, then hope we can persuade Sir John to abandon this unnecessary diversion of capturing the citadel of Coruña. Sir Francis is likely to want to do what damage he can, to both ships and town, but I doubt he will want to be held up here by a long siege.’

‘He would prefer to be at sea, hunting for the Spanish treasure ships.’ I smiled. Drake’s intentions were always easy to foresee.

He returned my smile, somewhat ruefully. ‘Aye, he would.’

Speaking to Oliver was a wasted effort. The captain himself was no better informed than I was. I returned to the foredeck and joined the other watchers there.

There was nothing for it, then, but to wait on events and hope that Sir John would change his mind or that Drake would persuade him to leave Coruña as soon as the fleet was reprovisioned. An early departure would benefit the whole expedition. As for Walsingham’s mission, in all this chaos, I could not see how I could make my way ashore and go in search of his agent Titus Allanby. I had been given very little information to guide me, apart from the fact that he was working as a tailor. I could see that it was a profession which might offer opportunities for gathering information.

Like most of the agents in the service, Allanby sent few details back to
London about where he was living or even what he was calling himself, for fear that his reports might be intercepted. It was often necessary for agents to change addresses frequently and even to change their identity. Since Allanby had been working as a tailor, he was presumably living in the lower town and not up at the citadel, unless – it suddenly occurred to me – he had secured himself a position as a tailor to the military, which would have given him better access to the kind of information Walsingham would want him to seek out. It would be difficult enough for me to go ashore into the chaos of our soldiers’ wild rampage through the streets of the lower town. To gain access to the citadel would surely be impossible. The one thing which might work in favour of my going into the town, although it was damaging to our expedition, was the continuing west wind which Drake had feared would drive us ashore on to the French coast. As long as it continued to blow so fiercely, and until we could round up our drunken troops and load our provisions, here we would stay in the harbour at Coruña. The longer we stayed, the more chance I might have of going ashore.

I would need to think of some reason which would convince either the captain of our ship or one of the senior army officers to authorise such a venture. Sir John Norreys had met me briefly the previous year in
Amsterdam, when Andrew Joplyn and I had discovered the conspiracy to supply arms and transport barges to Parma’s Spanish troops. I thought I had noticed a nod of recognition from Norreys when I had joined in the discussion about bypassing Santander and coming directly to Coruña. Perhaps, when he had managed to get the army under control, I should approach him. I could not tell him the details of my mission, for that must remain secret, but he knew I worked for Walsingham, and that might prove enough. Or I might think of some other reason for landing.

In the meantime, there was little I could do but wait and watch with the rest of the Portuguese party on deck. Norreys, in any case, had returned to his own ship before we reached Coruña and was probably now on shore himself, attempting to gain control over the rioting soldiers. He had been known for ruthlessness in his younger days, in particular against the Irish, but from all I had heard from discussions in
Seething Lane, he conducted more orderly campaigns now. In any case, he would never sanction the kind of wild disorder we were witnessing in the town, which was a serious threat to his authority and that of his officers.  I had seen some squadrons of the Low Countries troops disembarking and beginning to march through Coruña. I supposed they were attempting to round up such of the disorderly soldiers as were still on their feet and able to roll barrels to the quayside for ferrying out to the fleet. What the fate would be of the men lying insensible in the streets of the town, I could not imagine. Such flaunting of orders would normally call down the most severe of punishments, either flogging or even death, but so many of the soldiers were involved in the riotous behaviour that we could not afford to lose them all. Ever since the desertions at Plymouth, before ever we set sail, the number of our troops had been reduced below what had originally been planned.

Toward dusk some sort of order was beginning to be restored. A few barrels and sacks were loaded on to the vessels small enough to be able to moor at the quayside: skiffs and some of the smaller pinnaces. These then ferried the provisions out to the larger ships. A smell of cooking began to drift across the fleet. Either that, acting on hungry stomachs, or the actions of the professional soldiers, had brought som
e sort of discipline amongst a portion of the rabble. Others continued to roam the port. Soldiers from our own ship returned, dirty, smelling of drink and unsteady on their feet. Some, perhaps those caught in the worst acts on shore, were chained down below. The others were fed, harangued, but, for the moment, unpunished.

There was one fine Spanish galleon in the harbour, of the type Drake enjoyed sailing home to present to the Queen, laden with gold and silver from the Spanish conquests in the
New World. I thought we should see Drake putting a crew aboard her, and sailing her across to join the rest of our fleet, once they had finished setting fire to the smaller, less desirable vessels in the harbour, but for some reason Drake had not acted swiftly to secure the galleon. I had been idly watching it, for it was less gruesome than watching the activities ashore, when I noticed half a dozen men leap from her to a skiff, row in haste to the quay, then run up the hill towards the citadel. Our soldiers paid them no heed.