Pirate Nation. David Childs
to pay. At that time a sailor on a merchant ship might receive £10 a year, a sum which a crew member of a reasonably successful pirate ship might occasionally be paid after the taking of a moderately rich cargo. When Frobisher appeared to turn traitor in 1572, he was rewarded with £20 for offering to bring three hundred English seamen over to the Spanish side. Now, incarcerated, with neither accumulated wealth nor rich relations, Frobisher faced a life sentence: many of his fellow practitioners would have been sentenced to death for lesser crimes. That he was not might be due to the fact that most of his illegally-seized vessels were foreign and not English-owned.
Yet rot inside he did not. Along his erratic and unsuccessful way he had made just the sort of contacts a pirate in distress needed. The Huguenot exiles sprang to his aid, with the Cardinal of Châtillon writing to William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, that the wife of Captain Frobisher had begged him to write and require Cecil’s aid in delivering her husband from the misery and captivity in which he found himself.3
More important was the involvement of Lord Admiral Clinton whose wife, Elizabeth Fiennes, made an offer to buy Robert, the sale of which would have made a major contribution to the fine. In the end it did not require payment, for on another February note ordering the transfer of Frobisher from the Marshalsea to the Fleet prison, above the words stating that the pirate be kept in jail until ‘he shall satisfy and pay the same’, Cecil scrawled ‘or otherwise be released by us.’ That release took place in March.
As a sign of his undeserved fortune, in October 1571 Frobisher was appointed to command Carrack Lane and a squadron of three other Portsmouth-based ships entrusted to enforce the more stringent anti-piracy laws that Elizabeth had approved as part of her attempt to clear the Channel of foreign freebooters. Now, rather than pay her professionals to do the job, she contracted out to reformed pirates, believing them to be more knowledgeable of the ways of their late colleagues, besides being the cheaper option. Cheap, but not necessarily efficacious: Frobisher cruised and failed to make contact. His obvious partiality for his past companions failed to become an embarrassment for his new employers when his task was switched to that of transporting the army and its accoutrements to Ireland. Here indeed was gainful employment, but the temptations remained, for Frobisher was now required to sail past eminently seizable, laden merchant ships, giving them a friendly salute rather than a salvo. In the end, he cracked and reverted to his old ways, escorting several French ships into Plymouth – claiming them as legitimate prizes. The arrest warrants were not long awaiting issue.
However, Frobisher had become associated with legitimate maritime tasks and had also shown himself to be most biddable in areas that required a certain derring-do. Over the next few years he entered into the murky world of treachery and double-dealing, claiming clean hands however muddied the waters through which he passed. By 1574 his unsuccessful independent piratical career was over: in future Frobisher was to serve the state, which valued the skills which they thought he must have acquired through his illegal activities. In 1576, ’77 and ’78 he made three voyages to the far north of America: the first to search for the northwest passage to Cathay; the second two to mine for gold. They were two tasks which he completed with his usual lack of success. However, others sailing astern of him on similar voyages were able to open up new opportunities for those with a lust for wealth and limited scruples. Among these were John Hawkins and the ‘master-thief’, Francis Drake.
Drake might have been a Devon man, but he spent his apprenticeship on the opposite shore, off Kent, whence his father had fled from Tavistock to avoid either prosecution or persecution or both.4 Here, on a hulk moored in the Medway, the elder Drake made a sort of living running an early mission to seamen, while apprenticing his son Francis to the master of a small bark, who taught him all the pilotage skills necessary to handle a ship safely in the featureless and mud-bank strewn waters of the Thames. When the ship owner died, he bequeathed his craft to the young man, but Drake dreamed of further horizons and together with a few of his crew sailed for Plymouth to offer his services to his distant relative, John Hawkins.
Like Sir John Yorke, John Hawkins, the son of the Plymouth merchant and convicted pirate, William Hawkins, saw trading opportunities in the steaming and unhealthy shores of Guinea. His interest, however, lay not in gold and ivory, but in a human cargo. He aimed to turn the trading voyage from simple outward and homeward legs into a triangular trade with the West Indies, as he tried to brush aside the Portuguese and Spanish monopolies on the capture and sale of slaves. With him on those voyages sailed the young Francis Drake, keen to learn the science of navigation beyond the sight of land.
In 1562 John Hawkins, after a few exploratory trading voyages as far as the Canaries, sailed on his first slaving voyage. He had planned well, establishing a partnership with a merchant family in the Canaries who would guarantee his fleet a friendly watering and recuperation stop while on passage. Just three small ships, Salomon of 140 tons, and Jonas and Swallow just 40 and 30 tons respectively, departed from Plymouth, but they were precursors of a great armada of infamy – the slave traders. Hawkins, as did those that came after, realised that if a reasonable profit was to be made from the venture, then the slaves would have to be crammed between decks which meant, paradoxically, they would suffer a high death rate. Nevertheless, although the trade might be inglorious it was not piracy. The means employed to assist the voyagers, however, were.
Reaching the coast of Sierra Leone, Hawkins seized his first slaves from several Portuguese vessels which he captured. And along with those four hundred slaves came a by-cargo of cloves and ivory which was sent home in a ship commanded by Hawkins’s cousin, the young Francis Drake. Hawkins himself sailed to Hispaniola where he arrived having lost about half of his slaves, but getting a good price for the survivors. With an eye to the even greater profit the sale could make, Hawkins bought all the sugar, hides, pearls and ginger available in the warehouses of Isabella. His eyes were larger than that which his ships’ holds could stomach, as a result of which he had to load two Spanish ships with the overflow and dispatch them back to Spain, with instructions to offload them through an English factor in Seville. That this arrangement would work was a naive assumption, for the cargo of both ships was impounded as contraband, one at Lisbon and one at Seville. Hawkins did not receive compensation and thus made merely a good profit rather than an extraordinary one from his voyage. The reduced return was, however, sufficient to interest the avaricious queen, who became a major partner in Hawkins’s next voyage through the loan of two of her own ships.
As his flagship Hawkins would now sail in the elderly, but capacious, 700-ton Jesus of Lubeck, purchased from Hamburg by Henry VIII in 1545. Aged she might be, but she represented the queen’s willingness to approve and invest in a voyage, the purpose of which was very apparent: the capture and illegal trading of slaves. Moreover, both the procurement and the disposal of this human cargo would involve her directly in the breaking of internationally recognised trading embargoes held by Portugal in West Africa and Spain in the West Indies. The vessel thus represented a significant shift in the move from royal indulgence of wayward seamen to royal involvement in illegal trading – the first step to the approval of piracy.
Yet outwardly the queen was still active in her pursuit of pirates, if only to calm down the exasperated and protesting ambassadors from her aggrieved European neighbours. In November 1564 she asked the Admiralty Court judge, David Lewes, to carry out an investigation into the complaints by the Spanish ambassador about piratical depredations committed at sea on the subjects of the king of Spain. As the inquiry was to involve the county commissioners against piracy, many of whom were well-known supporters of the trade, a disinterested report was most unlikely.5 She had also allayed the fears raised by the Spanish ambassador, Guzmán de Silva, about Hawkins’s intentions by telling the incredulous gentleman that Hawkins, far from being a pirate, was just an honest and wealthy trader, to which de Silva retorted that if this were so, he failed to see why the ships were carrying so many armed men.
In company with the creaking Jesus of Lubeck were Solomon and Swallow, as well as a 50-ton vessel, Tiger. Francis Drake was included in the crew of just 150 men, but still only as an ordinary seaman. Stopping to call on his friends in the Canaries, the refreshed Hawkins sailed on to the Guinea coast where he committed the first piratical act of the voyage by capturing and de-storing a small Portuguese fishing fleet. His second was the