Pirate Nation. David Childs
the readily reached goods to Minion, which was lying alongside. Drake in Judith was also ordered to close to assist in the evacuation, but how long she stayed to give succour is put into doubt by Hawkins’s pithy comment that she ‘forsoke us in our great misery.’
But Hawkins was also forced to ‘forsoke’. Five ships, and the unlucky remnants of their crews, were abandoned at San Juan de Ulua, the ships to be ransacked for their riches and the men racked for their religion. Out at sea the survivors had exchanged one hell for another. Judith made haste homeward, arriving in Plymouth on 22 January 1569. A sympathetic veil has been drawn over her return passage, for it must have been a low point in the career of her captain that he was unlikely to forget.
We know more about the sad voyage of John Hawkins. With scarce enough provisions to feed her normal crew, Minion was far too overcrowded for many to survive the journey home. Hawkins was forced therefore to close the coast of Mexico and land ninety men at Campeche near the town of Tampico. Even then, with every scrap of food consumed, including the trapped rodent population, men starved. In an ironic imitation of the westward voyage, the ship left a trail of bodies in her wake, but this time they were the corpses of Englishmen not slaves.
Near Galicia Hawkins captured and emptied three Portuguese vessels of their provisions, although there is no evidence to support the claim that he cut off the limbs of their crews and flung their living torsos overboard. A few days later he anchored off Ponteverda where, deploying the only weapons he had left, charm and bluff, he managed to purchase sufficient supplies to set sail homeward. The weather, however, had more tricks to play and Minion was forced back to shelter near Vigo, from where she finally got underway on 20 January to anchor in Mounts Bay four days later.
The casualty list was lengthy. The battle at San Juan de Ulua had claimed 130 English dead with fifty-two more taken prisoner, while to the ninety landed at Tampico had to be added a further forty-five who died during Minion’s voyage home. Few survived to totter ashore at Plymouth, ridge-ribbed and ragged. The two leaders applied both for restitution of goods and the repatriation of prisoners. Eventually some of the latter came home with great tales to tell, but of the former there was to be no redress, principally because the queen refused the issue of a letter of reprisal. She had her reasons. For once Elizabeth must have realised that she had allowed her ruffians to sail in her ships far too close to the wind which was by now chilling rapidly in wintry and warlike blasts from Spain
Hawkins’s and Drake’s reactions to the defeat and humiliation at San Juan de Ulua were very different. The elder man withdrew from an active career at sea to turn his fertile mind to management, including that of his own pirate vessels. In 1575 he proposed that, for an investment of £3,750, he be allowed to take three royal ships, Dreadnought, Foresight and Bull, and five merchant ships to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet, which if successful would produce, he claimed, a profit of £2 million. The plan was not approved but neither, more significantly, did Hawkins endeavour to lead an expedition for this purpose himself. Instead, he chose to employ his busy mind with internal quarrels, deliberately picking a fight with the Wynter brothers on the Navy Board by claiming malfeasance and his own ability to provide a more cost-effective, honest system of management. By 1578, with the support of Cecil, now Lord Burghley, Hawkins was Treasurer of the Navy.
Drake, his eager apprentice, sought a more confrontational role to gain his revenge. He would never more sail on a trading voyage, exchanging culverin for coin as his means of barter. Appropriately for one whose exploits would earn for him the nickname from the Spanish of El Draque, the dragon, Drake sailed again for the Indies in 1570 onboard Dragon with Swan in company. Little is known of this voyage, but when he returned to those waters the following year in Swan it was to ‘rob divers barks’ of goods to the value of at least £66,000, almost £40,000 more than the inflated claim made by John Hawkins for his losses at San Juan de Ulua. Drake had simply committed several acts of piracy, as the Panamanian authorities recognised when they wrote to King Philip informing him that they had:
Sent out three expeditions on which were expended more than 4,000 pesos; and he has always had the luck to escape. Once the fleet is gone, when the town and the port are deserted, it is plain we are going to suffer from this corsair and others, unless Your Majesty apply the remedy hoped for, by sending a couple of galleys to protect and defend this coast and the town, which is in the greatest danger.8
However, in the early 1570s the expatriate population on the Isthmus feared the violent deprivations of the permanently present cimaroons, escaped slaves, more than they did the occasional visit by a rover. Drake’s genius was to befriend the black rebels and work with them to attack their common foe for mutual advantage. Oxenham, endeavouring to repeat Drake’s success in 1576, failed and was captured and executed, largely because he upset these erstwhile allies. He also failed because Drake’s visit a few months earlier had alerted the authorities, who were ready to respond to the next assault on their trading routes. Drake himself was wise enough to avoid returning to the scenes of his earlier successes.
Drake was a great believer in seizing the moment and in the next few years the time was ripe for West-Country adventurers to enrich themselves while the queen, her council and Admiralty Court were focused on events at the other end of the Channel. These were years of moment affecting the whole of Europe as the struggle for control over the Netherlands between the Spanish occupiers and their rebellious subjects became more bloody and more expensive. It was the behaviour of pirates in the waters between Dover and Flanders that was exercising the English councillors, foreign ambassadors and the unfortunate merchants and ship owners who were struggling both to transport their cargoes unmolested and to be compensated for those goods that were being seized on a regular basis. Activities in the West Indies lay far beyond the horizon of these protagonists.
One Sunday in August 1573 the church bells of Plymouth pealed to welcome Drake home from a voyage in which he had ambushed a mule train loaded with silver bars, thrown off his pursuers and re-embarked with another fortune in his hold, but one bought at the cost of the loss of over half his crew, including two of his brothers. They would not be the last of that family to lose their lives or liberty on these ventures until Drake himself was ‘slung between the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay.’ For the moment, to avoid over-much embarrassment through the lionising of her rover, the queen was content to see Drake dispatched as the naval adviser to the earl of Essex who was trying to pacify Ireland; it also gave the council a chance to see whether he could be entrusted with the less rewarding role of loyal service to the Crown. He succeeded but his Iberian infamy remained: in1575 Philip sent Elizabeth a list of those Englishmen whom he considered to be no more than pirates – it included Sir William Wynter, a member of the Navy Board, the Drakes and the Hawkins brothers. There is no evidence to indicate that Philip was mistaken. A few years later and he might have added another name to the list.
In contrast to Francis Drake, whose family background is always shown to be modest, Walter Ralegh’s father was a country gentlemen moving in the sort of society about which Jane Austen would later write. But he was a pirate. A case brought before the Admiralty Court in 1557 is worth some examination for it is an example of the way such gentlemen pirates behaved prior to the targeting of the treasure fleets. The petition was brought by Portuguese merchants whose ship, Conception of Vienna, was seized off the Scillies on 26 August while on passage between Ireland and Portugal. Her attackers arrived in two vessels, Nicholas of Kenton, commanded by John Ralegh, and Katheryne Ralegh, whose captain was his brother George, both sons of Walter Ralegh senior. The Portingale did not surrender easily, struggling to escape all day while receiving ‘divers pieces of ordnance’. In the late afternoon she was boarded by fifteen sword-waving sailors, who forced the crew below decks and kept them battened down for nine days until the ship was driven into Cork by a gale. Here the captives were set ashore while Conception was sailed back to Cornwall, where the crew were challenged as to her identity, once by the master of another merchant ship and once by the captain of the naval vessel Anne Gallant. Unhelpful questions ceased, in the first instance with a bribe of one bale of cloth, in the second instance with a bribe of two bales of cloth. Warned by his men of the interest in the prize, Walter Ralegh told her crew to describe her as French and ordered her to be brought to Exmouth where, it being his home port, questions would