Pirate Nation. David Childs
with their slaves and other valuable cargo, all of which was recorded by their aggrieved owners, who petitioned the Privy Council, more in hope than expectation of restitution. Further slaves, to a total of about four hundred, were captured after some severe skirmishing ashore.
This time the Atlantic crossing proved not so deadly for the slaves, possibly because the larger Jesus of Lubeck allowed for less cramped conditions below decks and the freer circulation of air. Even then, about thirty died before landfall. There just remained the problem of disposing of the remainder at a good price. To achieve that profit from communities who were well aware that they were forbidden to trade with the English required the repetitive use of a tactic, the purpose of which was well understood by both sides. First, Hawkins would state his innocence in that he had been forced westward by strong winds and now very much needed a licence to trade to obtain fresh victuals. This the local magnate would refuse to grant. Hawkins would then threaten violence, even landing an armed party to look sternly at the locals who, subdued by such a threat, would reluctantly trade, simply to spare their town and to rid themselves of the pestilent foreigner. Honour satisfied and excuses provided, an amicable exchange ensued. Once that charade was complete, trade was brisk and very, very profitable.
Guzmán de Silva reported home that Hawkins had returned with gold, pearls, hides and sugar to the value of 50,000 ducados, which, if it were so, represented a profit of 60 per cent. With such a profit available, it was worth the queen regarding the source with a merry myopia and the protestations of the Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors with a selective deafness. Hawkins could gain no more obvious approval than from her continuing to loan him her ships. Yet this time strange auguries might have been seen as prophesying doom.
In September 1567 Hawkins’s fleet of six ships was anchored in the shelter of the Cattewater below Plymouth town, waiting for a fair wind to waft them southwesterly. But even at this stage in the preparation, Hawkins was aware that the queen might be tempted to prevent his departure or to insist on certain caveats which would impinge on his profits. Chief amongst these was her usual desire to placate the Spanish, in the person of de Silva, by assuring him that Hawkins would observe the embargoes of which he was fully aware. Indeed, in a way her loan of both Jesus of Lubeck and the smaller Minion was a guarantee of Hawkins’s good behaviour, a fact about which the fleet admiral sought to reassure her, writing from the anchorage: ‘I do ascertain Your Highness that I have provision sufficient and an able army to defend our charge and to bring home (with God’s help) forty thousand marks gain without the offence of the least of any of Your Highness’ allies or friends’ – which if true would hardly have necessitated the shipping of ‘an able army’.
Hawkins’s letter-writing was interrupted by an urgent summons to come on deck. A lookout had sighted a squadron of seven Spanish warships heading down Plymouth Sound, making towards their own fleet anchorage. Hawkins took one look and ordered his crew to action stations, secure in the knowledge that the guns he had mounted could do grave damage to any vessels closing with hostile intent. At the time England and Spain were at peace but, as with rival football teams, it was not the management, but the fans that could cause trouble to erupt.
Hawkins gazed at the mast tops of the steadily approaching fleet to see if, as custom dictated, they would dip their ensigns as a token of respect and a signal of peaceful intent. The ensigns remained close up, while there was neither a slackening of speed nor an indication of an intention to anchor in the outer harbour so, once Hawkins was sure that the insolent foreigners were within range of his guns, he fired a warning salvo in their direction. When that failed to stem the oncoming fleet or cause them to dip their ensigns, Hawkins ordered his crews to lower their sights and the second salvo hit the hulls. That was warning enough: the foreign fleet went about, dipping its ensigns as it did so, and anchored out of range of the irritated English. From their admiral an envoy was soon dispatched to voice the protests of the Spanish commander, the aristocratic Alphonse de Borgogne, at their rough reception. Hawkins countered by claiming that the insult to the Crown which the brazen entry of the foreign fleet had caused required a stern response.
Shortly after this incident Hawkins received a letter from the queen, fully endorsing his mission. Unfettered by any of the restraining caveats he had anticipated, his third and final slaving voyage got underway.
Great storms soon scattered the fleet and showed up the crankiness of the leaky and aged Jesus, but Hawkins, by dint of his carefully worded sailing orders, managed to reunite his ships in the Canaries before descending to Cabo Blanco, the landfall for all Guinea voyages, and thus the site of a small Portuguese fort. Treating the garrison with disdain, Hawkins surveyed four abandoned Portuguese ships and selected the most seaworthy to sail with him, cheekily accepting a promissory note for the sale of two of the others back to the legal owner.
After one botched slaving raid secured far fewer captives than they wished for, the English sailed on to Cabo Rojo for supplies, much of which were seized from seven Portuguese ships. A few more slave raids were then carried out, with the alerted villages yielding few recruits for Hawkins’s hold. One of these raids resulted in a rare cause of a boat capsizing: it was attacked and smashed by a herd of hippopotamus, their herbivore credentials coming into question by the claim that two of the men were eaten by the beasts.
Eventually an alliance, rather than a raid, brought Hawkins his slaves, but only after his men had witnessed a cannibalistic feast from the bodies of the slain. For the loss of some sixty men he had gained a cargo of five hundred wretches, whom he would endeavour to keep alive for the seven-week Atlantic crossing on a diet of dried beans, the very stores that had alerted de Silva to his true intentions so many months earlier in London. Given the number of slaves that he managed to sell in the Indies and the group that were left unsold, it has been estimated that around one hundred of them died on passage, a death rate that scarcely dented his profit.6
Having gone through the usual charade of threatening and cajoling the governors, by late August Hawkins had made sufficient profit to satisfy the queen, himself and the other investors so, reducing his fleet to the most seaworthy of his vessels, he led the remaining eight northeast towards the Florida Channel from where they would turn homeward. They never made it. A hurricane, the full violence of which is well-described by Rayner Unwin, fell upon the fleet, leaving in its wake a flagship that was no longer seaworthy and in desperate need of a sheltered anchorage before she foundered.7 Basing his decision on local knowledge obtained from the pilots of two captured Spanish ships, Hawkins went about and led his fleet limping back south to the island harbour of San Juan de Ulua, the port for Vera Cruz.
Unlike the welcome that had been given to the similar-sized Spanish fleet when it had entered Plymouth Sound at the start of Hawkins’s voyage, the inhabitants of San Juan fired a five-gun salute and waved and cheered as the English entered harbour: they had been mistaken for their own flota expected at any time soon. By the time the error had been realised it was too late to prevent Hawkins from berthing his ships’ bows to the jetty with kedge anchors run out to secure his stern. While this was being done he sent parties ashore to seize the nearby gun emplacements, the crews of which had conveniently fled on realising the ‘the Lutherans’ were upon them. There followed a stand-off which neither side risked upsetting and if such an armed hostility had continued it is likely that Hawkins would have managed to complete his repairs and continue his voyage unimpeded.
Then a day later, on 17 September, the balance was upset when the anticipated fleet arrived, and the authorities ashore had to inform the admiral, Fransisco de Luxan, and his very important passenger, the new viceroy of New Spain, Martín Enríquez, that their berths were occupied by English ships. No viceroy would have wished to begin his reign by accepting such a snub and when the Spanish finally entered harbour, Hawkins must have known that he faced a swift and unpleasant eviction.
It was delivered by stealth, with the Spanish sneaking soldiers and gunners as close to the alert English as they dared approach under cover. The English opened fire first, but were unable to prevent their shore parties from being overwhelmed and slaughtered. To avoid the soldiers from boarding from the jetty, the English ships cut their mooring lines and drifted into the harbour, all the time firing at close-range on the enemy ships, several of which caught fire. But Jesus was too unwieldy to manoeuvre herself out of trouble, and Hawkins ordered