Pirate Nation. David Childs
and Conception was blown into Looe, where she was seized by the Admiralty agent and her crew brought in for questioning. Faced with this difficulty, Walter Ralegh wrote to the Lord Admiral, offering him a bribe of £100 to help resolve matters in the Raleghs’ favour. This ploy having failed to prevent George’s arrest, Walter Ralegh put up 500 marks to get his son released on bail, being quite happy, so it seems, to forfeit this amount when the miscreant failed to keep his appointment in court.
While all this intrigue was afoot, the Portuguese merchants remained without either their ship or their goods. Their plea to the court deserves quoting at length for it sums up the frustrations that so many felt about following the due process to no avail. They wrote:
And as against the said Walter Ralegh your said orators have no remedy or action by the civil law for the recovery of their ship and goods as they be informed by their learned council . . . and thus . . . piteously spoiled and robbed of their said ship and goods and not able by the ordinary course of law to recover the same being themselves but strangers and poor men without friendship and the said Walter Ralegh being a man of worship of great power and friendship in this country. In consideration whereof may it please your honours that the same Walter Ralegh may be constrained without further suit in law which your orators be not able for lack of money to follow either to bring the said John and George Ralegh his sons to have justice and execution of the law or himself to satisfy and recompense your said orators for their ship and goods.9
Summed up in heartfelt plea is the essential element that enabled piracy to thrive during Elizabeth’s reign, principally, that rank had more sway than right, so that the poor man, especially if he was foreign, could follow the law to the letter and yet be denied recompense.
With a father and brothers like that, the boyhood of Ralegh was not spent sitting on the sands at Budleigh Salterton listening to tales of the great blue yonder spun by some hairy old salt, but just waiting to join in the looting of passing trade. His first chance so to do came when his eccentric elder half-brother Humphrey Gilbert offered him a command on his ill-planned transatlantic expedition of 1578. And not only any command, but that of the queen’s ship, the 100-ton Falcon.
Gilbert, after much persistence, written and personal, had finally in June 1578 been issued with letters patent authorising him to seek out new lands in America. To assist him he assembled a bunch of pirates whose primary interest was loot, not lengthy voyages. They achieved neither, for having sailed from Dartmouth on 26 September 1578, the fleet, with the exception of Falcon, was back in that harbour, voyage abandoned, by 21 November.
Ralegh remained at sea, not to continue westward, but to attempt the taking of prizes in the Bay of Biscay. In this he was not successful, challenging superior forces and receiving a pasting which killed several of his crew and badly damaged the queen’s ship. It was a sobering experience. Thereafter Ralegh was inclined to send others to sea on his behalf. Even when he became heir to Gilbert’s charter, he sent others to America rather than sail himself. What he did do was to win sufficient royal favour to invest heavily in creating his own pirate fleet. By the time Gilbert was ready for a second attempt on America in 1583, Ralegh was in the position to lend him the modern equivalent of a quarter of a million pounds and his ship, the modestly named 200-ton Bark Ralegh. The ship returned safely, having abandoned the ill-fated voyage while still in European waters, so that it was only Ralegh’s investment that went west. A year later Ralegh was organising his own western voyages and appointing a fellow pirate, Richard Grenville, in command of the expedition to land settlers at Roanoke in 1585. Being a pirate, Grenville made the most of his opportunity by seizing a rich prize when homeward-bound.
George Clifford, 3rd earl of Cumberland, was the most senior and least successful of the piratocracy, being the only one who, in his own words, threw his land into the sea. However, it was his primrose path to poverty that led him down to the water’s edge and to seek salvation over the horizon. Along the way, a weakness for women, an inability to gamble well, either at cards or on horses, and a desire for finery saw him fling his fortune in all directions other than into his own pockets. His genial character and manly skills made him several times the queen’s champion at the joust, and Elizabeth took pleasure in his performance without making him a favourite, thus rewarding without enriching or clipping his wings. Needing to settle his debts, for he was an honourable man, Cumberland saw a fortune awaiting him in the hulls of foreign ships and towards them he, or his ships, set sail on numerous occasions. He had no time for, nor did his exalted position allow, an apprenticeship: he trained on the job and it showed.
Cumberland’s first voyage, as Purchas refers to it, sailed without the earl being onboard. Instead, he raised the money to dispatch four ships with plans for them to pass the Straits of Magellan and enter the South Seas. The admiral, commanded by Captain Robert Widrington, was Red Dragon, a 260-ton ship with a crew of 130. She left Gravesend on 26 June 1586 in company with the bark Clifford of 130 tons, with Captain Christopher Lister as vice admiral. During a wind-dictated lengthy stay at Plymouth they were joined by Captain Haws in Roe and a ‘fine’ small pinnace, Dorothy, owned, as might have been Roe, by Walter Ralegh. It seemed a fleet ideal to make passage to and cause havoc in the Spanish Pacific. Cumberland had high hopes, telling his admiral not to return home until they had £6,000 of profitable loot to unload.
The fighting, but not the fortune-making, began early. Three days after leaving Plymouth on 17 August, the group engaged sixteen hulks from Hamburg which were sailing home from Lisbon and did not wish to tarry for these pesky Englishmen. Selecting a foe, ‘Our admiral lent him a piece of ordnance which they repaid double so that we grew to some quarrel’, which the English won by boarding, only to have the time just to ‘take out of her some provisions’, before rumour of greater reward led to them endeavouring to intercept another convoy of seven ships. In this they were unsuccessful, as strong winds blew them back to Dartmouth for an enforced week’s break. After this they made passage to the Canaries, before landing in Sierra Leone where they had a St George and the Dragon-like fight with a crocodile and a less noble pillage of a native village. Then across the ocean to Brazil where they irritated a couple of townships and captured several ships loaded with appetising, but not enriching, marmalade. Their best prize ‘took fire and perished, ship, men and goods’. During this sojourn on the coast they held a major conference at which it was decided not to push southwards to the Straits of Magellan. By 29 September they were back alongside in England, giving Cumberland no reasonable return on his investment, a template for most of his subsequent efforts.
Cumberland got to sea himself the following year, when he sailed to support the English forces besieged in Sluys, only to find that he had arrived too late. Moving on to Ostend and finding that it too was soon to be besieged, he returned home in time to offer himself and Red Dragon, renamed Sampson, for service against the Armada, while he sailed in Elizabeth Bonaventure as her volunteer commander.10 In return for his contribution to that campaign, the queen loaned Cumberland Golden Lion for a piratical voyage in which he seized the slow Hare heading from Dunkirk for Spain, but was then himself driven to take shelter in Freshwater Bay off the Isle of Wight. Here, with the winds threatening to drive the ship aground, the master recommended that the mainmast be cast away but, being the queen’s property, ‘no sailor durst attempt this until his Lordship had himself stricken the first stroke.’ Safe but no longer sailable, Golden Lion limped into Portsmouth, bringing another unrewarding voyage to an end. But before that storm Cumberland had been in high spirits, writing to his wife in that spirit of optimism that endeared him not only to his queen and peers, but to subsequent generations.
Sweet Meg,
God, I must humbly thank him, hath so mightily bless me, that already I have taken a Dunkirk ship bound for Saint Lucar in Spain. I have sent Lister to see her unladen in Portsmouth, and to send all that is mine to you, which I would have you use according to your discretion, and let it be opened with secrecy. If there be anything fit to give to my Lord Chamberlain, I would have you do it, it will make him the reedier to do for me, if there be a cause. This man I have taken tells me that there are four ships now ready in Dunkirk, going for Spain. I hope within these three days to meet them, if I do, I shall make a good voyage, for all the ordnance of the galleys and rich lading. Commend me to my Lord of Warwick and my lady. Excuse