Pirate Nation. David Childs
voyage which would make his name, Drake needed a ship which, requiring few to man her, could nonetheless sail fast enough to overhaul her potential prey. Yet she needed to be deep-draughted and beamy so that she could hold both sufficient stores and a great deal of booty. Weaponry sufficient to awe she needed, but not of such power that they might sink a potential prize. Drake named his ship Pelican, which might have been an appropriate name for a ship designed to swallow up a large haul of plunder, yet she proved so capable of managing her incredible task that she fully deserved her name-change to the sleeker Golden Hind (Golden Fleece might have been even more appropriate!).
No plans of the ship survive, if any ever existed, for this was an age where the shipwright’s practised eye was the equal of the draughtsman’s sharpened pen. The few drawings that purport to show her are neither detailed nor accurate, but luckily we have a short description of her which was written by a Portuguese pilot, Nuña da Silva, whom Drake captured off the Cape Verde Islands in January 1578 and found so professionally useful that he did not release him until he was departing from Guatulco on the Pacific coast of New Spain in April 1579. Golden Hind, da Silva wrote, was:
in a great measure stout and strong. She has two sheathings, one as perfectly finished as the other. She is fit for warfare and is a ship of the French pattern, well fitted out and finished with a good mast, tackle and double sails. She is a good sailer and the rudder governs her well. She is not new, nor is she coppered nor ballasted. She has seven armed port-holes on each side, and inside she carries eighteen pieces of artillery, thirteen being of bronze and the rest of cast ironaa . . . This vessel is waterfast when she is navigated with the wind astern and this is not violent, but when the sea is high, as she has to labour, she leaks not a little whether sailing before the wind or with the bowlines hauled out. Taking it all in all, she is a ship which is in a fit condition to make a couple of voyages from Portugal to Brazil.3
Another Spanish prisoner records fifteen pieces of artillery onboard.
It might be a brief description – certainly with that information alone it would not be possible to make a drawing, let alone a reconstruction of the vessel, but fortunately sufficient contemporary sketches of sailing ships and shipwrights’ instructions as how to build one complete with the beam:keel:draught:tonnage ratios exist, along with details of the relevant mast size, sail fit, anchors and cables required, for the present generation to visualise these state-of-the-art creations.
Her dimensions can be estimated from those of the dry dock that was built to preserve her on public display at Deptford. These suggest that England’s first preserved historic ship had a length of 67ft, a beam of 19ft and a draught of around 9ft, making her about a 120-ton ship.4 She carried three masts and a bowsprit supporting six sails with a sail area of just over 4,000sq ft, meaning that in favourable conditions she could maintain a speed of about 8 knots.
The exact number of men who sailed out of Plymouth in Golden Hind at the start of her voyage is not known, but the fleet of five ships had a combined crew of about 160. Spanish prisoners taken in the Pacific reported that Golden Hind had a crew of around eighty to eighty-six, while according to John Drake’s evidence she sailed from the Moluccas with sixty men onboard, arriving off the Cape of Good Hope with fifty-nine.5
Although da Silva provided no visual image of his floating prison, his comments do give us some insights into the practical aspects of managing such a ship on a long voyage. He notes, for example, that she was well-sheathed, having a sacrificial outer hull as well-fitted as her inner one. The outer one acted as the larder for hungry tropical wood-boring molluscs whose hidden voraciousness could reduce hull timbers to dangerously feeble, riddled weakness. To further protect the hull, a coating of tar and horsehair was used both as a sandwich between the hulls and as a coating for the outer one. Well aware of the risk, Drake stopped several times to careen his ship, scrape off weed, examine her timbers, replace decaying ones and to recoat the hull. This not only protected her against worm, it also kept her robust. Nowhere was his diligence better rewarded than when Golden Hind went firmly aground in the Spice Islands.
As they realised that their ship was firmly stuck on a reef, John Fletcher, the priest, got down on his knees, while Drake the professional took more direct action:
Showing us the way by his own example, first of all the pump was well plied, and the ship freed of water. We found her leaks to be nothing increased. Though it gave us no hope of deliverance, yet it gave us some hope of respite, as it assured us that the hulk was sound [wrote Fletcher, continuing] Which truly we acknowledged to be an immediate providence of God alone, as no strength of wood and iron could possibly have borne so hard and violent a shock as our ship did, dashing herself under full sail against the rocks, except the extraordinary hand of God had supported the same.
In fact, it was the extraordinary day-to-day ship husbandry of Drake that enabled the ship to withstand the shock. Assured of the watertight integrity of the vessel, the captain then set about lightening her by – a hard decision this – throwing overboard 5 tons of spices, which was half of his cargo, and up to eight pieces of ordnance. He would also have lowered his boats and transferred to them any heavy movable items, including some of the crew. After twenty hours aground, a combination of a rising tide and a change in wind direction and speed slid the hull back into deeper water. From then on the voyage continued with little incident, with Golden Hind arriving back in Plymouth still in a most seaworthy condition. Yet her seagoing days were over. Taken round to the Thames, she was visited by the queen who, having knighted Drake on her decks, ordered his ship to be preserved for posterity in a dry-dock created specifically for this purpose.
Golden Hind might not have sailed again but her exploits soon encouraged a repeat performance.
The Failure of Desire
At 120 tons Desire, as well as being much the same size as Golden Hind, was built for much the same reason, being ordered by the young Thomas Cavendish specifically to mount an expedition to capture treasure on the Pacific coast of South America. Cavendish sailed from Plymouth in July 1586 in company with the 60-ton Content and the 40-ton bark Hugh Gallant.6 With just 123 men embarked, he needed to conserve his crew and was lucky not to lose more than he did following attacks on his shore-parties in both the Canaries and Brazil.
He needed to conserve his ships well, so carried out his first careening in mid December, taking advantage of a good tidal range off Brazil that also produced an abundance of fresh meat in the shape of sea lions. Their passage through the Straits of Magellan was plain sailing and they were able to record that ‘in this place we watered and wooded well and quietly.’
Watering continued but not quietly. As they passed up the South American coast, pillaging and burning as they went, they came across larger and better defended settlements. In fighting for the possession of these they were to lose a number of men so that by early June they had to sink Hugh Gallant ‘for want of men’.
Success came to the remaining two ships when the 700-ton carrack Santa Anna was sighted making her Pacific landfall off California. She put up a brave fight, only surrendering when she came in danger of sinking. The wealth unladen from the vessel (and over 500 tons of cargo was not transhipped for lack of space) almost upset the voyage, for the men squabbled over their shares and those onboard the inaptly named Content decided to part company and return home via the Straits of Magellan. They were never heard of again. Cavendish, however, navigated Desire successfully through the Asian island chains and made a swift and safe passage homeward, just having a storm blow out his sails a few miles short of Plymouth, where he arrived in early September 1588, his arrival by good chance timed so as to avoid falling in with the ships of the Armada.
Desire had proved to be stoutly built, but vessels needed to be as robustly commanded if they were to make successful voyages to the Pacific plunder grounds, as can be shown by the fate of Cavendish’s second, and unsuccessful, repeat voyage which began at Plymouth on 26 August 1591. On this occasion Desire was commanded by John Davis, while Cavendish sailed in Galleon Leicester, with Captain Cocke in Roebuck, and two barks keeping company.7
Things fell apart from