Pirate Nation. David Childs
that ‘in three days the town that was able to furnish such another fleet with all kinds of necessaries, was left unto us nakedly bare, without people and provisions’, so that they sailed ‘worse furnished from the town than when we went in.’
A great storm then ensued, scattering the fleet and drawing the laconic remark from the diarist, John Jane, ‘that our captain could never get any direction what course to take in such extremities, though many times he had entreated for it.’
Worse was to follow when, snowstorm-bound and ill-victualled in the Magellan Straits, ‘all the sick men in Galleon were most uncharitably put ashore in the snow, rain and cold, when men of good health could scarcely endure it, where they ended their lives in the highest degree of misery.’ The rest survived on mussels, water and seaweed. It could not last. The captains conferred and the men were consulted. Although there were many who wished to continue, Captain Davis was not among them, reporting that Desire had ‘no more sails than masts, no victual, no ground-tackling, no cordage more than is over head, and among seventy and five persons, there is but the master alone that can order the ship and but fourteen sailors.’ They turned back into a ferocious gale, the mariners dying from want while their once gallant ship was also failing as fast. The account records that on 16 May:
We had a violent storm [in which] perished our main trestle-trees, so that we could no more use our main top-sail, lying most dangerously in the sea. The pinnace likewise received a great leak . . . the 26th our fore-shrouds broke, so that if we had not been near the shore, it had been impossible for us to get out of the sea.
Desire found shelter at Port Desire, named after her on the first voyage, where her crew found that ‘our shrouds are all rotten, not having a running rope whereto we may trust, sails all worn, our top-sails not able to abide any stress of weather, neither have we pitch, tar, or nails, nor any store for the supplying of these wants; and we live only on seals and mussels, having but five hogsheads of pork within board, and meal three ounces for a man a day.’ There were also large shoals of smelt that could be hooked with a bent pin. Their troubles were far from over, for the suggestion by Captain Davis that he should leave the majority onboard, while he took a trusted few in the pinnace to search for help, almost caused a mutiny with murder in mind. Luckily, the plan was revealed and the ringleaders handled with clemency by the captain. Nevertheless, the crew drafted an account of their circumstances which remains one of the most harrowing tales of the tribulations of ill-victualled mariners.8
They were, to all intense and purposes, shipwrecked, but having sunk in despair they resurfaced to repair. A forge was created to make nails, bolts and spikes. A cable was converted into rope for the rigging and, having carried out essential maintenance, they weighed anchor to sail forth towards the Straits and through them into the South Sea. Here they met with storms which kept driving them back to the Straits because they did not dare subject their sails to any stress. Even in comparative shelter their trials were not over, for one of their cables parted causing them to fear being driven aground. The wind died just in time.
Now, ‘we unreeved our sheets, tacks, halyards, and other ropes, and moored our ship to the trees close by the rocks.’ Unable to recover their lost anchor they found the remaining one had just one fluke, and was secured by a piece of old cable spliced in two places. When the next wind arose they towed themselves out to sea by means of their repaired boat. The anchor came home held by just a solitary strand.
Back at sea they found the weather unimproved, while the precarious state of their rigging limited their options. Their pinnace, under tow, suddenly reared up and drove herself into the ship’s side; by morning she had disappeared. Onboard Desire, the night’s gale split both the foremast and its sail so that the mizzen had to be shifted to serve in its place. Now, every time the ship encountered rough weather a body blow was dealt her; like a boxer weakened by too many rounds, she was inexorably being driven onto her watery canvas. Except, and this speaks volumes for English shipbuilding, she appears to have remained both watertight and upright, so that it would seem to be the precarious state of her masts, rigging and anchors that would decide her fate.
That ‘ruinous end’ almost came in mid October when, forced once more under bare poles back towards the Straits, they feared that they would be driven ashore before rounding the entrance for ‘our sails had not been half an hour aboard but the footrope of our foresail broke, so that nothing held but the eyelet holes’. The seas continually broke over the ship’s poop, and flew into the sails with such violence that ‘we still expected the tearing of the sails, or oversetting of the ship.’ A wrecking seemed inevitable until ‘our master veered some of the main sheet; and whether it was by that occasion, or by some current, or by the wonderful power of God, as we verily think it was, the ship quickened her way, and shot past that rock where we think we would have shored.’
If there is a reverse analogy to a cork shooting out of a bottle, this is how Desire then entered the Straits for ‘we were shot in between the high lands without any inch of sail, we spooned before the sea, three men not able to guide the helm.’ Six hours later they anchored and pumped the ship dry then, probably, slept, as best might exhausted men being eaten alive by clusters of lice as big as peas.bb
Similar suffering was endured by the crew of the Bristol pirate ship Delight whose crew wrote a petition outlining why they had behaved mutinously in the Straits in February 1589.
By now, all hope of making the voyage was gone and they returned to the Atlantic and their anchorage at Port Desire, where they ran the ship up on the ooze and secured her firmly with a number of lines. There they had foraged for copious amounts of the aptly-named scurvy grass, which they fried together with penguin eggs and fish oil. Without their knowing why, this diet cured them all of the typical swellings and bleedings associated with scurvy. They also took onboard 14,000 dried penguins to supplement their victuals for the estimated six-month voyage home. For this journey, the ration per man was reduced to two ounces and a half of meal twice a week, three spoons of oil three times a week, a pint of peas between four men twice a week, and every day five penguins for four men and six quarts of water per day to be shared by the same four men, thus indicating the importance of the system whereby a small number of men formed their own mess.
Of all the provisions, water was both the most important and the most problematical. They called in at Plancentia in Brazil, their first stop on the outward voyage, not only to take fresh water onboard but, more importantly, to repair their split and leaking casks. The town had been abandoned and, while the overgrown gardens provided some fresh food, the repair of the casks was disrupted by an Indian attack in which thirteen of their number were killed and their weapons seized. They sailed with just 8 tons of water poorly stowed, only for a series of heavy showers to salve their thirst.
Relief was short-lived: in an ‘Ancient Mariner’-like incident the equatorial sun caused massive ‘worms’ to erupt from the bodies of the dried penguins and crawl upon the weak sailors where ‘they would eat our flesh, and bite like mosquitoes.’ Scurvy also seemed to return with a violence, so that ‘they could not draw their breath’, while their joints, limbs, breasts and ‘cods’ all swelled hugely and ‘divers grew raging mad, and some died in most loathsome and furious pain.’ By the time the ship was able to turn towards the British Isles, just sixteen of her original complement of seventy-six remained alive, of whom just five were capable of working the ship.
They flopped homeward, unable to set a sail, hardly able to handle the sheets, tackle or capstan, and with the captain and master taking watch about on the helm. ‘Thus as lost wanderers upon the sea’, they drifted into Bearhaven in Ireland on 11 June 1593, where the locals insisted on being paid £10 up front, before agreeing to help secure the vessel whose sorry condition belied the fact that she had withstood an assault on her timbers that would have sunk many larger ships.
Galleon Leicester, Cavendish’s flagship, also arrived safe home, but without her commander. Somewhere in mid Atlantic the disillusioned and half-mad leader of the failed expedition lost his will to live and was buried at sea.
Dainty
Information about the tragic happenings on Cavendish’s final voyage did not reach England until after Richard Hawkins sailed