The Execution of Thomas Doughty by Francis Drake

 by David Wesley Hill

I learned of the trial and execution of Thomas Doughty from The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, a history of the second circumnavigation of the globe.  Despite its title this book was not written by Drake himself but by a nephew thirty years after Drake's death.

According to The World Encompassed, Doughty and Drake were good friends and companions, but even so, Doughty apparently had been plotting against Drake since “before the voyage began, in England” and sought not only to murder “our general, and such others as were most firm and faithful to him, but also [sought] the final overthrow of the whole action.”

Eventually Doughty's transgressions became so egregious that Drake was forced to take action.  He ordered Doughty into custody and convened a formal trial.  Forty men were chosen as jurors.  “Proofs were required and alleged, so many and so evident, that the gentlemen himself [Doughty], stricken with remorse of his inconsiderate and unkind dealing, acknowledged himself to have deserved death … “

Thomas Doughty was convicted of treason by unanimous vote.  After the verdict was returned, Drake offered the guilty man three options.  "Whether you would take," he asked Doughty, "to be executed in this island? Or to be set a land on the main? Or to return into England, there to answer for your deeds before the lords of her majesty's council?"

Doughty, however, refused this leniency, replying:

"Albeit I have yielded in my heart to entertain so great a sin as whereof now I am condemned, I have a care to die a Christian man . . . If I should be set a land among infidels, how should I be able to maintain this assurance? . . . And if I should return into England, I must first have a ship, and men to conduct it . . . and who would accompany me, in so bad a message? . . . I profess with all my heart that I do embrace the first branch of your offer, desiring only this favor, that you and I might receive the holy communion again together before my death, and that I might not die, other than a gentleman's death."

Drake granted Doughty's request.  The next day they celebrated communion with Francis Fletcher, pastor of the fleet, and afterward Drake and Doughty dined together, “each cheering up the other, and taking their leave, by drinking each to other, as if some journey only had been in hand.” Then “without any dallying or delaying” Doughty knelt down, preparing his neck for the blade. His final words were instructions to the executioner to “do his office, not to fear nor spare.”

My immediate reaction to this story was that it simply was not credible.  I could not believe any man would choose death when given the alternative choice of a sea voyage home.

The queen's displeasure was a distant threat, after all, while the executioner's sword was a very near danger.  I also doubted that Doughty would value his immortal soul over his mortal life and turn down Drake's offer of exile in Peru.  Whoever this man was, it was unlikely that he was a saint.

I suspected that The World Encompassed was a fabrication either in whole or in part.  In fact the book has known to be unreliable since the mid-19th Century.

Although claiming to be "carefully collected out of the notes of Master Francis Fletcher, Preacher in this employment, and divers others his followers in the same", the parson's notes were expurgated.  This only became clear in 1854, however, when the Hakluyt Society released The World Encompassed in an edition that included Fletcher's original notes as well as an account of the voyage by John Cooke, who sailed with the adventure.

To Cooke, Francis Drake was not a charismatic leader but a villain who "in tyranny excelled all men." His appraisal of Drake was so damning that the editor apologized for printing it.

Some historians, such as Sir Julian S. Corbett in Drake and the Tudor Navy—the biography of Drake against which others are measured—admitted that Cooke's narrative, although "the one most unfavorable to Drake", was "probably the most correct, if allowance be made for the adverse construction the author puts on all Drake's actions."

Henry B. Wagner, in Sir Francis Drake's Voyage Around the World, the authoritative study of the circumnavigation, printed the complete Cooke manuscript—except for the parts about Drake and Doughty.

Zelia Nuttall, whose New Light on Drake is a masterpiece of historical detection, claimed without proof that Cooke's narrative "plainly shows that it consists of a report of the Doughty affair which was subsequently tampered with for the malicious purpose of injuring Drake's reputation."

Despite this Victorian hand-wringing, contemporary scholars have reconciled themselves to the general accuracy of Cooke's account.  The story he tells is too internally consistent for it to be made up and many of its details are verified by other sources.

The World Encompassed glosses over Doughty's exact position in the adventure but Cooke states explicitly that he and Drake were “equal companions and friendly gentlemen.” It is likely that Drake was in charge of the ships and the sailors while Doughty had charge of the soldiers accompanying the fleet, particularly considering that in the Cape Verde Islands Doughty led the expeditionary force dispatched to explore inland and engage the Portuguese.

Although they were apparently friends at the start of the voyage, their relationship deteriorated during the Atlantic crossing.  Whenever there was foul weather, Drake would say "Thomas Doughty was the occasion there of," and call him "a conjurer and witch” and a“seditious fellow and a very bad and lewd fellow."

Doughty himself told anyone who would listen that "the worst word that came out of his [Drake's] mouth was to be believed as soon as his oath."  At one point Drake attempted to gather testimony against Doughty from other crew members, an effort which backfired in the case of Thomas Cuttle, master of the Pelican.  After talking with Drake, Cuttle departed in fury, jumped overboard and threatened to maroon himself rather than bear false witness against Doughty.

Cooke's version of the trial also differs significantly from that in The World Encompassed.  Doughty neither admitted to any crime nor showed any remorse.  He vigorously rebutted the charges against him and was assisted with his defense by Lenard Vicary, a lawyer, whom Drake dismissed as “crafty”.

At the start of the trial, in order to secure a conviction, Drake gave the jury his word that the death penalty was off the table but after the verdict he reneged on this promise.  Nor did Drake offer Doughty leniency only to have Doughty choose death instead.  In fact it was Doughty himself who requested exile, saying, “Seeing that you would have me made away, I pray you carry me with you to Peru and there set me ashore."

Drake refused. “No, truly," he replied, "I can not answer it to her Majesty if I should so do.  But how say you, Thomas Doughty, if any man will warrant me to be safe from your hands, and will undertake to keep you sure, you shall see what I will say unto you."

John Winter, captain of the Elizabeth, volunteered to keep Doughty in custody.  After a pause, however, Drake said, "Lo, then, my masters, we must thus do: We must nail him close under the hatches and return home again without making any voyage."

This, as Drake very well understood, would mean financial ruin for both the adventure's investors, who stood to lose their capital if the ships returned to England with empty holds, and for the ordinary men, whose wages would be reduced or not paid at all. It was unsurprising that the assembly—or, as Cooke termed them, “a company of desperate bankrupts”—cried, “God forbid, good General.”  Thomas Doughty's fate was sealed.

Here the Cooke account agrees with The World Encompassed.  Doughty met his end bravely.

"Now, truly, I may say," he joked with the headsman, "as did Sir Thomas More, that he that cuts off my head shall have little honesty, my neck is so short."

From Cooke it is clear that Francis Drake and Thomas Doughty were at loggerheads for most of the voyage but it less obvious what caused the antagonism between them.  Was it Doughty's ambition, as claimed in The World Encompassed, that caused Drake to execute the man who had once been his friend—or did Drake have a more personal motive?

Both Cooke and Fletcher wrote that their enmity began when Doughty accused Drake's brother, Tom, of pilfering from the Santa Maria, the Portuguese merchant vessel captured in the Cape Verde islands.

In England, however, rumor suggested that "Thomas Doughty lived intimately with the wife of Francis Drake, and being drunk he blabbed out the matter to the husband himself. When later he realized his error and feared vengeance, he contrived in every way the ruin of the other, but he himself fell into the pit."

A more likely supposition than this adulterous speculation is that the relationship between the two commanders fractured over an issue so important that it could only be resolved by the death of one of them. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing what was at stake because to this day no one is sure of the true goals of the adventure.

Some historians believe that the voyage was a peaceful merchant expedition while others contend that its intentions were piratical from the start.  Were their investors' instructions to sail east around the Cape of Good Hope or west through  Magellan's passage?  To seek out the mythical northwest passage, the Straits of Anian?  To establish factories in the New World and found the colony of New Albion?  No one can say.

The only surviving plan of the expedition was damaged by fire.  The words that remain tease the reader by almost, but not quite, making sense.

Few questions were asked either when the Pelican—renamed the Golden Hind—returned to Plymouth harbor because she had aboard one of the greatest pirate treasures of all history.  In her hold was more money than the English government received in taxes during an entire year.

The queen alone was given £100,000 plus a diamond cross and a crown in which were five emeralds, three of them as long as a finger and two round ones worth 20,000 crowns.  The backers of the expedition realized a return of 4,700 percent on their investments, while Drake himself became a millionaire.

Given the amount of money involved it is unsurprising no one wanted to look too deeply into the execution of Thomas Doughty.  Only Doughty's brother, John, pursued the matter, filing suit against Drake for murder. However, since the execution had taken place outside of the country, the suit could only be filed in a special court—which Elizabeth refused to appoint.

Eventually John Doughty became such a nuisance that he was jailed in Marshalsea prison.  A year later he petitioned that he be either "charged and called to answer" or be set at liberty.  This manuscript has survived. On it someone wrote: "Not to be released."  We know nothing more of John Doughty.

Perhaps the best assessment of the situation came from Don Bernardino de Mendoza, Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth's court, spymaster, and propagandist, who surreptitiously printed an account of Drake's doings in the Pacific.

"M. Drake and his company returned from this very hot and hardy service ... and brought all his treasure into England. Where he has so well welcome, and so liberal in the division of shares to some courtiers, that notwithstanding the gallows claimed his interest, it near got so great a bravado, for in very sight of Wapping [the Admiralty dock where pirates were hanged], he was at Deptford rewarded with the honor of knighthood, and in the same ship, wherewith he had been abroad aroving. And although some poor pirate or other has been cast away upon Wapping shore, yet was there seldom or never restitution. Only the ones who stole too little suffer ... "

***

References

The World Encompassed and Analogous Contemporary Documents concerning Sir Francis Drake's Circumnavigation of the World, ed. N. M. Penzer (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1969).
Sir Julian S. Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy (London: 1898).
New Light on Drake, ed. and tran. Zelia Nuttall (Kraus Reprint Limited:  1967).
The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, being his next Voyage to that to Nombre de Dios collated with an unpublished manuscript of Francis Fletcher, chaplain to the expedition, ed. W. S. W. Vaux (Hakluyt Society: 1854).
Henry R. Wagner, Sir Francis Drake's Voyage Around the World, Its Aims and Achievements (San Francisco:  1926).
"John Winter's Report, June 2nd 1579", in E. G. R. Taylor, "More Light on Drake", Mariner's Mirror, XVI (1930).

~~~~~~~~~~~~

David Wesley Hill is the author of At Drake's Command

At Drake's Command is now available on Kindle, and will be free on April 16th and 17th.

www.temurlonepress.com
www.atdrakescommand.com

Sir Francis Drake, the Hellburners of Holland, and the Sea of Horses

What defeated the Spanish Armada? Well, the English navy, of course, and Lord Howard, Francis Drake, John Hawkins. They sailed out of Plymouth in their gallant little ships and harried the Spanish galleons all along the Channel from the Lizard to Calais until the Spaniards had had enough. It was a great naval victory.

Well, yes, up to a point. The English ships – many of which were as big or even bigger than the Spanish – did all of that. It was a continuous naval battle lasting – with intervals – over a week. There was lots of cannon fire – particularly from the English, who probably fired about three times as many cannon balls as the Spanish. It was a major naval battle – 150 ships in the Spanish fleet, about the same in the English.

But – here’s a strange thing. Despite all those guns, and all those cannon balls, not a single ship was sunk by enemy fire on either side. Not one. Because naval gunnery simply wasn’t good enough.  And anyway, wooden ships were notoriously difficult to sink. Even in the battle of Trafalgar, when naval cannons were much more powerful, most ships were dismasted and battered into hulks, rather than being actually sunk.

So in 1588, the Armada made it all the way along the English Channel to Calais, battered, but unbeaten. The English ships were a nuisance, but the mighty Spanish fleet was still as much of a threat as it had been a week earlier. More so, in fact, because it was very close to achieving its first objective.

It’s important to understand that the Armada itself wasn’t an invasion fleet. Even though it had lots of soldiers and horses on board (more about those later) the Armada’s job was to act as an escort for another Spanish army, led by the duke of Parma, which was in Holland. Parma’s men (and horses) were supposed to cross the Channel on flat-bottomed barges, while the galleons of the Spanish Armada protected them from the English navy. The same plan that Napoleon and Hitler tried to use later.

So why did it fail?   Well, that’s where the secret weapon comes in - the terrible Hellburners of Holland. These were really scarey – the nuclear weapons of the sixteenth century. They had first appeared in 1585, at the siege of Antwerp. The Spanish army had blocked access to the city with an 800 metre long bridge made of ships tied together across the river. The Dutch needed to break this blockade, or they would starve. So on the night of 4th-5th April 1585 they sent a fleet of 32 fireships floating downstream towards the bridge. The Spanish soldiers laughed. They didn’t think it would work.

But two of these fireships, the Fortuyn and the Hoop, were different. An Italian engineer, Federigo Giambelli, had made them into bombs. Inside each ship he had built an oblong chamber with a brick floor, walls five feet thick, and a roof made of lead with tombstones piled on top. He filled each chamber with 7000 pounds of high quality gunpowder. Then he fitted a delayed action clockwork fuse, and covered the chamber with a wooden deck so the ship looked normal.

The first ship, Fortuyn, ran aground before it reached the bridge, but the Hoop crunched straight into it. Then it exploded. All that gunpowder confined in a chamber produced a COLOSSAL explosion. According to the historian John Lothrop

            ‘The Hoop disappeared, together with the men (Spanish soldiers) who had boarded her, and the blockhouse, against which she had struck, with all its garrison, while a large portion of the bridge, with all the troops stationed on it, had vanished into air. It was the work of a single instant. The Scheldt yawned to its lowest depth, and then cast its waters across the dykes … and far across the land. The earth shook as with the throb of a volcano … Houses were toppled down miles away and not a living thing … could keep its feet. The air was filled with a rain of ploughshares, grave-stones, and marble balls, intermixed with the heads, limbs and bodies of what had been human beings. Slabs of granite, vomited by the flaming ship, were found afterwards at league’s distance, buried deep in the earth. A thousand soldiers were destroyed in a second of time; many of them were torn to shreds, beyond even the semblance of humanity.’

What has this got to do with the Armada? Well, three years later, when the Spanish Armada was anchored off Calais, waiting for the Duke of Parma’s army, the English admiral, Lord Howard, sent a fleet of 8 fireships floating towards them. This was a fairly desperate measure, after a week of inconclusive bombardment. Probably he hoped to set some Spanish ships on fire. But if he did, he was about to be disappointed.

Disappointed, because not a single Spanish ship was set on fire. The English fireships drifted harmlessly through the Spanish fleet, and burnt themselves out on the shore. All of them. So Howard had just wasted 8 of his own ships.

But he probably didn’t care – in fact he must have been delighted with the result. Because what the fireships did cause was chaos, and total, utter panic. The Spanish captains cut their cables, sailed into each other, crashed their ships on the shore, or fled out to sea. The next day there was a major battle off Gravelines, which scattered them further. Despite all the Spanish admiral’s appeals, the Armada never assembled as a disciplined force again. They gave up the idea of waiting for the Duke of Parma’s invasion force, and fled into the North Sea, losing touch with each other, and each surviving ship began its long desperate journey north, around Scotland and Ireland to their Spanish home. Lord Howard had finally won the victory which had eluded him for so long.

But what caused it? Why did the Spanish captains – all experienced seamen – panic like that? Why not just dodge the fireships and laugh at the English for wasting their own ships? Well, the answer lies in the Hellburners. Everyone had heard the horror story of the Siege of Antwerp, and the Italian engineer, Giambelli, was known to be working for Queen Elizabeth. So when the Spanish sailors saw those fireships bearing down on them, they thought they were looking at weapons of mass destruction. They were about to be vaporized.

It was a mistake, because none of the fireships were hellburners. The English navy had almost run out of gunpowder; they couldn’t have made one even if they’d wanted. But the Spanish didn’t know that. So they panicked and fled.

And the sea of horses? That’s a really sad story. Many of the Spanish ships didn’t just have men on board, they had horses too, for their officers to ride when they landed in England. But on the long journey home, they didn’t need the horses. Everyone on board was starving, and short of water. So …

A week or two after this battle, the skipper of a Hansa merchant vessel reported a strange, terrible sight. He’d sailed through an empty sea, he said, but everywhere he looked, it was alive with horses and mules, swimming desperately for their lives.

Tim Vicary writes historical novels and legal thrillers. You can read about them on his website and blog.

All images from Wikimedia commons

Sir Francis Drake and the Barrel Staves

by Tim Vicary

As part of the research for Nobody’s Slave, in which the young Francis Drake is a minor character, I read The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, by Garrett Mattingley. One of the many fascinating details in this classic book is the tale of how Sir Francis, instead of pursuing treasure as he normally did, changed the course of history by lighting a bonfire on a beach.

What bonfire was this, you ask? Was it one of the famous beacons on the cliffs of southern England, which were lit when the Armada appeared, passing the message from the Lizard in Cornwall to Whitehall in London that the long awaited menace, the dreaded Catholic invasion fleet, had at last arrived? No, it was none of these.

It was another bonfire, lit almost a year before, on a June evening on a beach in Spain. While English sailors lounged around, roasting meat, drinking beer, laughing and talking happily.

In 1587 Drake left Plymouth, in command of a large fleet, to carry the war into Spanish waters. The Armada was known to be gathering in Spanish ports, and his mission was to cripple it by sinking, burning or destroying as many ships as he could, before they ever left harbor.  He was moderately successful at this. He raided Cadiz, where he sank or burnt about 30 Spanish ships.  Then he sailed on to Portugal, where he captured the castle of Sagres where Henry the Navigator had once made his maps and planned the early voyages of discovery. Here at Sagres the men were sent ashore and the ships were ‘cleaned, fumigated and rummaged’ to make them more healthy.

But the key moment was when he captured a small fleet of transports loaded mostly with wood ‘about 16 or 17 hundred ton in weight.’ To a pirate like Drake, whose eyes glinted with Spanish gold, this may have seemed something of a disappointment at first. But he was smart enough, all the same, to know how important this cargo was, and exactly what to do with it.

The ships were loaded with barrel staves - the planks which coopers used to make barrels. We still have wooden barrels today, of course; they are used to contain wine, spirits and sometimes beer. The best ones are made of oak, and the wood used to make them – the oaken barrel staves – are carefully seasoned until most of the sap has gone out of them, and they are dry enough to hold their shape and make a barrel that is perfectly waterproof. Then the barrels are filled with port wine, whisky or brandy, to which the seasoned oak imparts a particular flavor which is prized by connoisseurs.

People in the sixteenth century knew all about this, of course; but they didn’t just keep wine and spirits in oak barrels.  They also used them for water, flour, dried biscuit, salt fish, salt meat – in fact every kind of food, drink and supplies which they wanted to preserve and transport. This was particularly important to sailors. Food kept in a barrel was as vital to them as tinned or frozen food is to us. Without it, sixteenth century sailors had to rely on catching fish, or butchering live animals which they took with them on board.

So all these barrel staves which Sir Francis Drake had captured were vital supplies for the Spanish Armada. They couldn’t easily be replaced. It takes many months, even in the warmth of Spain, for oak to season properly, and this cargo was nearly a year’s supply, from the whole of southern Spain and Portugal.  And you can’t make good barrels out of unseasoned oak. If you try, the green wood is likely to crack or split, so that the contents leak out, or the air gets in and starts fungus, mould and decay.

There’s one other important difference between wood that has been left to season for a year, and fresh cut wood that still has the sap in it. As anyone who has a fire or a wood-burning stove will know, the seasoned wood burns much better. That’s what Sir Francis Drake did; he burnt the lot. ‘All of which I commanded to be consumed into smoke and ashes by fire.’ So we can imagine, perhaps, the satisfied smile on the faces of the English sailors, as they warmed themselves around the blaze of this enormous bonfire. Probably they had a barbecue, like anyone with a bonfire on a beach. They roasted meat, laughed and sang. While the poor Spanish merchants and sailors watched, full of anger and despair.

The Armada still sailed, of course. But much later than King Philip had intended. And even then, many of the barrels on its ships were made of green, half-seasoned wood. Barrels which split and cracked and leaked, so that when the tired, hungry sailors opened them, the contents were damp, moldy or rotten. But the sailors had nothing else, so they had eat it, or go without. And if you eat moldy food, you get sick.  

So as the Armada sailed through the storms of the Bay of Biscay, up the channel to their failed rendezvous with Parma, and then away around the north of Scotland and wild Atlantic Irish coast towards home, the poor starving Spanish sailors, increasingly sick and hungry, had yet another reason to curse the one Englishman whom they loathed above all others – Sir Francis Drake. El Draque.

And all because he lit a bonfire on a summer’s beach, a year before!

Tim's book featuring Francis Drake, Nobody's Slave, is available on Amazon UK, Amazon US , and Smashwords.  Other books on Tim's website

All images from Wikimedia Commons.

Sir Francis Drake and the African Slaves, by Tim Vicary

As a boy, growing up in Devon, I was taught that Francis Drake and John Hawkins were great Elizabethan heroes.  Drake was the first Englishman to sail around the world, to return with untold riches and be knighted by Queen Elizabeth on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind; Hawkins was the founder of the Royal Navy, the man who designed and built the fast, weatherly galleons which sailed rings around the Spanish Armada.

These men were pioneers, adventurers, founders of the British Empire. Everything they did seemed admirable. They had saved the nation once; if England were ever in danger of invasion again all we had to do was to sound Drake’s Drum (which was hidden somewhere in Plymouth) and like King Arthur, he would rise from the dead and sail back to our rescue. As schoolboys, we basked in the reflected glory of these men. The symbol for the county of Devon was an Elizabethan galleon – Drake’s ship - sailing proudly across a blue sea.

It’s different today. Look up Devon County Council on the web and what do you find? No ship – just a logo of two green leaves. Terrific. (So Devon has trees and the rest of England does not?) But it’s a sign of the times. The environment is fashionable, the British Empire is no longer something to be proud of. 

Do today’s school children learn much about Francis Drake and John Hawkins? I wonder. If they do, I’m sure they are taught a different version of British history differently to the one I learned; and to an extent, that’s quite right. For Sir Francis Drake was not just a hero; he was also a pirate and a thief. He was licensed by the Queen to steal, burn and destroy Spanish ships and colonies in the New World. He was as feared and hated by the Spanish just as much as the Vikings once were by English monks, or Somali pirates are by sailors today.  

So what about his cousin, Sir John Hawkins, the founder of the British Navy, the man who built Queen Elizabeth’s galleons to defend us against the Spanish Armada? Surely he was no pirate; he was a respectable merchant, a shipowner,  a businessman, a senior civil servant.

Well, yes. He was all of those things. But he was a slave trader too. That’s where much of his wealth came from.

Oh dear. If there’s one thing that’s really really bad about the British Empire, that has be it: the slave trade. African prisoners torn from their homes, chained and packed like sardines into the stinking holds of wooden ships for month-long voyages across the heaving Atlantic. Then poked and prodded, naked and trembling, in a marketplace where they stood waiting to be sold.

Everyone knows this. I’m sure if there’s one thing that British school children DO learn about in their history lessons it’s the slave trade. And quite right too. It was horrible. It was also one of the greatest forced migrations in history. It’s because of the slave trade that British and American classrooms today don’t just contain white children who can identify with men like Drake and Hawkins, but also black children whose African ancestors were enslaved by men just like them.

You might think John Hawkins was ashamed of being a slave trader, but he wasn’t. Not at all. After all he hadn’t started it; the Portuguese were selling slaves long before him; they regarded the whole of the west African seaboard as exclusively their own, granted to them by the Pope. They sold slaves across the Atlantic to Spanish colonists in New Spain, the part of the New World the Pope had granted exclusively to them. Hawkins was just trying to get some of this commerce for himself, in the spirit of free trade. He made three slave-trading voyages, and he was so successful that he commissioned a coat of arms, proudly featuring – of all things – a black man bound with a rope.

Not very politically correct. Not the sort of public relations we can celebrate in our schools today, where racism is rightly regarded with anathema. And it wasn’t just John Hawkins who was involved with this; his young cousin Francis Drake sailed with him too, on the third and most troublesome of his three slaving voyages.

Clearly, these men were no angels. They were slave-traders, pirates, thieves – how can we possibly regard them as heroes? Surely we should just condemn them outright; and say there was nothing good about their lives at all?

 Well, perhaps. But perhaps not. These men, like most historical figures, were more complex than they first appear.

John Hawkins was both a slave trader AND the Treasurer of Queen Elizabeth’s Navy. He was the man who commissioned and built the ships which defeated the Spanish Armada. And by doing that, he saved many English men from becoming slaves themselves, bound for years to an oar in a Spanish galley, or being burned alive by the Inquisition at an Auto-da-Fe.

Francis Drake was both a pirate AND a great explorer, consummate navigator, circumnavigator of the world. He, like Hawkins, saved England from invasion by Spain.

But the life of Francis Drake also shows us something else. Astonishingly, it seems that it was possible to be both a slave trader AND the friend of escaped African slaves!

Here is the evidence. In 1567 the young Francis Drake sailed to Sierra Leone in a fleet commanded by his cousin, John Hawkins. Here they bought, stole and captured some 500 African slaves which they transported to the Spanish Main and sold to Spanish colonists. But although the colonists were happy to buy the slaves, they were less happy about the vendor; their King, Philip of Spain, had made it very clear that English and French merchants should be kept out of his New World Empire, and treated as pirates.

So when Hawkins’s fleet was caught in a hurricane, and forced to seek shelter in the Spanish port of San Juan de Ulloa, he knew he was in trouble. While he was there, repairing his ships, the new Viceroy arrived from Spain with a fleet of 13 ships. At first, Hawkins negotiated an uneasy truce with the Viceroy: hostages were exchanged, and the Spanish fleet entered the harbor, mooring a short distance from the English. But the Spanish Viceroy had no intention of doing deals with a pirate. The truce was broken, and after a fierce battle most the English ships were sunk or captured. Hawkins escaped in one ship, Drake in another. Hawkins’s ship, the Minion, was so overcrowded with sailors from his other ships that he was forced to maroon several hundred men on land, where they were taken prisoner by the Spanish. When the Minion eventually reached England, only 15 men were still alive on board.

This incident made it crystal clear, as the Spanish Viceroy intended, that there was no possibility of English merchants trading with the Spanish colonists. Over the next few years Hawkins tried to negotiate with Spain for the return of his imprisoned sailors, even pretending, at times, that he was a Catholic. But Francis Drake took a more direct method. Since it was no longer possible to trade with the Spanish colonists, he decided to raid them instead. He set out to steal the gold and silver from the mines of South America which made the Spanish king so rich.

Francis Drake was very successful at this. In fact, he became one of the most successful pirates in all history. Historians estimate that each shareholder in his voyage of circumnavigation round the world made a profit of £47 for each £1 they invested. Queen Elizabeth got more money from that one pirate ship, than all other Exchequer receipts for a year.

But Francis Drake couldn’t have done all this on his own. Many of his most successful raids were due to some very important allies – the Cimarrons. These Cimarrons were escaped African slaves; people exactly like those whom he and John Hawkins had captured in Sierra Leone. Some of them may have actually travelled in Hawkins’s ships. But a lot of the Africans who were sold as slaves to the colonists had escaped. So many of them escaped, in fact, that they became a major threat to the Spanish colonists – just as big a threat as the English and French pirates. But unlike the pirates, the Cimarrons didn’t want gold and silver; they didn’t have much use for it.  They wanted freedom, and revenge, and the ability to defeat their Spanish masters.

All the accounts suggest that Francis Drake got on really well with these people. In a famous raid in Panama Drake presented the Cimarron leader, Pedro, with a gold encrusted scimitar which had previously belonged to Henry II, king of France. A true pirate’s sword! His Cimarron allies also took him to a hilltop in Panama, and showed him a famous tree. They climbed this tree with Francis Drake and his friend, John Oxenham, and showed them a marvelous sight: the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Pacific to the west. It was this vision which inspired Drake’s later voyage round Cape Horn.

Some of these Africans liked Drake so much that they even chose to sail with him. As the wounded Drake was getting back into his pinnace after a raid on Nombre de Dios in 1573, a black man called out to him from the shore: ‘Are you Francis Drake? Then I am coming with you!’ This man, an escaped African slave called Diego, became one of Drake’s longest-serving seamen, and stayed with him until he died on the Golden Hind’s round-the-world voyage six years later. And in 1586, at the siege of Santo Domingo, Drake sent a different black servant to receive a Spanish officer who carried a flag of truce. When the Spaniard, apparently insulted by this, callously ran the black man through with his sword, Drake was so incensed that he insisted that the Spanish hanged their own officer before any further negotiations took place.

So perhaps, even though he was once a slave-trader, we can exonerate Drake from the modern slur of racism. Slavery, after all, was common in the sixteenth century, and not necessarily linked to race. Thousands of slaves were chained to the oars of the galleys on both sides, Spanish and Turkish, at the battle of Lepanto; that was how Mediterranean sea-battles were fought. Moorish sailors from North Africa raided the coasts of Cornwall and southern Ireland for slaves to sell in the markets of Constantinople. For sailors and people who lived near the coast, slavery was an unfortunate hazard of life. It could happen at any time, out of the blue, and transform a person’s life forever.

For someone writing a historical novel about Drake and Hawkins today, what does all this mean? Surely the story can’t, or shouldn’t, be only about the heroic English sailors, as books were when I was young. John Hawkins’s third slave-trading voyage transformed the lives of hundreds of unlucky Africans – more Africans, probably, than there were English sailors on his ships. So in a novel about these events, surely the Africans should have a prominent place too. What was life like for them, as well as for the English sailors who captured them?

In my book, Nobody’s Slave, I try to imagine what this may have been like. Nobody’s Slave is the story of two teenage boys, one African, one English, whose lives collide on John Hawkins’s third slave-trading voyage. I have tried to write an adventure story which, I hope, can be read by anyone, white or black, as part of our shared and troublesome history. It’s a work of fiction, but all the main events really happened; they are based on original sources, and as true and accurate as I can make them.

Sources:  Much of the original source material can be found in The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, by Richard Hakluyt. Hawkins’ own account of his voyage (written and approved by John Sparke, who sailed with him) is in Volume 7; two other very colorful accounts, by Miles Philips and Job Hortob, both of whom sailed with Hawkins and were captured by the Spanish, are in Volume 6.

Links: Amazon US

Amazon UK

Tim’s website

The Mayflower steps - Plymouth

by Jenna Dawlish

This is a short "tourist guide" to the Mayflower Steps in Plymouth, Devon most famous for being the place where the Mayflower set sail in 1620 (below). I thought those Americans who read this blog may like to see the place where the Mayflower set sail.

The steps are marked by the stone archway with a platform over the sea. There are British and American flags flying either side of the arch.

Plymouth has been an important port since tudor times, and is also famous as the place where Sir Francis Drake sailed from many times. It's also where the "Tolpuddle Martyrs" arrived back from their imprisonment in Australia in 1838 - their crime - being in a Trade Union. (The Tolpuddle Martyrs are famous in England as being trade union hero's though in fact they were not executed, and therefore not really martyrs, just transported to Australia).

The Mayflower steps have a fantastic view out to sea, with a lovely plaque curved in the arch of the monument rail that reads:

As one small candle may light a thousand,

So the light here kindled hath shone to many yea,

In some sorte to our whole nation.

In my last visit to Plymouth I recorded a short video with my iPhone showing the panoramic view near the steps. The exact place where the Mayflower steps are about 35 seconds in, look for the white flag poles with the UK and US flags. It was quite windy that day (as you will hear!).

Plymouth today is one of two large cities in Devon. It is a bustling place with tourist attractions, museums and historic buildings and well worth a visit if you are in the UK. Many Americans come to Plymouth each year to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Late edit: I've posted twice about my favourite show Horrible Histories, there is a new series out this week in the UK. By co-incidence one of the new songs is about the Mayflower and the pilgrim fathers:

Jenna Dawlish

Jenna Dawlish is the author of two Victorian Novels: Love Engineered and Sprig of Thyme.