The Pirate Queen (30 page)

After their retreat, there was little else to do than plan their next raid for the spring of 1573, and capture a prize that would hopefully keep them well provided in victuals and water. Then, nearly a month after they had rejoined their ships following the Venta Cruces raids, a large French ship bore down on them just off Cativas Headland near Nombre de Díos. Her captain, who had been looking for Drake for some five weeks, was none other than the Huguenot corsair Guillaume le Testu. Le Testu was no ordinary pirate. He had been the personal protégé of Admiral de Coligny, and was captaining a ship for the merchant adventurer Philippe Strozzi.
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Le Testu was well known to Drake. After all, Le Testu had taken part in the French colonial adventure to Brazil, and Drake admired the French challenge in South America to the Spaniards.
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So when the Frenchman asked for water, and explained some of his men were ill, Drake ordered provisions to be sent aboard; then he asked Le Testu to follow him to one of his storehouses so that they could be fully replenished. When they finally anchored, the Huguenot captain gave Drake a gilt scimitar that had been a gift of his dear, now butchered, leader, Admiral de Coligny. This devastating news, and the carnage that had ensued in France, shocked and angered Drake, making the gift all the more dear.
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The two men had already respected each other before they ever met, but once in the same cabin together, that respect grew into mutual admiration. Le Testu showed Drake his invaluable folio atlas of fifty-six maps that he had drawn based on his own experiences, and which had been dedicated to Coligny some years earlier. This treasure of experience would have driven home the fact to Drake of
how poor English knowledge of the seas had truly been. Le Testu had been a royal pilot at Le Havre, and had been born and bred with the sea coursing through his soul like Drake. The main difference between the two was that Le Testu had high-level contacts in Coligny and, lately, André Thévet, Catherine de’ Medici’s chaplain. Drake had to make his own way through hard graft. What is striking from this encounter of great “pirates” is that Le Testu would have not been a corsair or outlaw if he had adhered to the Catholic faith.
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Naturally, Drake and Le Testu fell in together, and agreed on how to mount another raid on the
trajín
. Le Testu believed that if they attacked closer to Nombre de Díos, after the gold and silver shipments had been separated at the Chagres River, the soldiers would be more relaxed as their journey was nearing its end. It would be easier to box them in or, preferably, disperse the mule train’s defenders more easily, he ventured. Drake agreed.

On March 31, 1573, the combined
Cimarrone
, English, and Huguenot forces stole into the jungle. Cimaroon scouts edged forward in the night, returning to their positions before daybreak. The
trajín
had nearly two hundred mules in all and an escort of around forty-five poorly armed, barefoot soldiers.

The assault was rapid and deadly. The Cimaroons led the charge. Within the first few seconds, a Negro harquebusier fired at Le Testu, wounding him in the stomach, and killing a Cimaroon. The attackers surged forward regardless, shouting fierce battle cries and shooting off their weapons. The Spaniards quickly recognized that if they stayed and defended the
trajín
, it would be a turkey shoot, and they would be the turkeys. While they turned tail and ran, the raiders leapt onto the baggage and prized open the chests. The mules were carrying more than 200,000
pesos de oro
($23.24 million or £12.56 million today). What made the prize sweeter was that 18,363
pesos de oro
($2.13 million or £1.15 million today) personally belonged to the King of Spain.
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The fifteen tons of silver looted was hastily hidden in burrows made by land crabs, or under fallen trees. They had to be quick about it, though, since again, they were only two leagues from Nombre de Díos. Half of the gold was loaded back onto the mules and carried to the mouth of the Francisca River, where their pinnaces were waiting. But Le Testu was mortally wounded, and he knew it. He told Drake
to go ahead and leave him, that he would guard the silver until they could return. The last thing Le Testu wanted was for Spanish soldiers to cut off their retreat to the sea, and Drake reluctantly agreed. Two of his men volunteered to keep him company, while the others marched laboriously away.

Two days later, after yet another torrential downpour in the jungle, the raiders arrived at their rendezvous. But instead of their own pinnaces, they found Spanish shallops. Had the pinnaces been captured? How would they escape back to their pirate’s haven? the men asked. Had the Spaniards wrecked the
Pasco
and dashed their hopes of returning home? Drake knew from experience that action would keep these worries from overpowering his men. As ever ingenious, he instructed them to make a raft from fallen trees, binding the trunks together and using a slashed biscuit sack for its puny sail. It wasn’t pretty, but it just about floated. After the Spaniards rounded the headland, Drake and three men waded out in their ludicrous tree raft, at times sailing waist high in seawater, before they spotted the
Bear
and the
Minion
, nestled in a safe harbor nearby. As Drake boarded the ship, he broke into a sudden smile and brought out a quoit (disc) of gold from his shirt. Their voyage had been made.

After his men had been brought safely on board, the
Cimarrones
came forward with the sad news that captain Le Testu had been killed. Drake said a prayer for the Frenchman’s soul and gave the order to weigh anchor. It was unsafe to return for the silver. Their voyage had been made, thanks in large part to the Cimaroons and the Huguenots, with whom he gladly shared their prize. They had been away for more than a year, and more than half of them were dead, including Drake’s two brothers.

In an incredibly swift and uneventful crossing of only twenty-three days, Drake and his remaining crew pulled into Plymouth harbor on Sunday, August 9, 1574. All the good men and women of the town were at prayer in St. Andrew’s Church, listening to their vicar’s sermon, when a murmuring among the parishoners grew into a roar. Drake had returned, they whispered to one another. One by one they left, until finally the entire flock deserted its preacher and raced to the waterfront to welcome home their heroes.

20. Dr. Dee’s Nursery and the Northwest Passage

I did conjecture the…star in Cassiopeia appearing anno 1572 to signify the finding of some great treasure of the philosopher’s stone…

—DR. JOHN DEE,
1582

F
rom the moment Drake returned in August 1574, the floodgates burst open. Adventurers had been champing at the bit for years to explore the western reaches of the globe in search of treasure and a shorter way to the East Indies. Now Drake had returned—not once but twice—with his holds filled with treasure. It mattered little that it was plunder. That he hadn’t looked for the fabled Northwest Passage to Cathay meant that there was still vast scope for others to join in the adventures. Soon, it was rumored at court that Drake had seen both great oceans from one vantage point in the high treetop above Darien. Surely, they speculated, this sighting by Drake proved the existence of the passage, and that North America was no more than a trifling obstacle to attain its Holy Grail of Cathay.

They were right certainly about Drake if not the passage. He was interested purely in “singeing the King of Spain’s beard” through plunder. He was a man who understood results only. And the result that preoccupied his every waking hour was to execute his private war against Philip of Spain, righting the wrongs perpetrated against all Protestants everywhere. Before Drake had reached his anchorage in Plymouth harbor, the kernel of his most daring exploit had already been hatched.

For the greater West Country public, to say that Drake had become even more famous is absolutely true. But to say that his name was on the lips of very Londoner would still be an exaggeration. This had
little to do with Drake’s adventure or the boldness of his actions, and everything to do with his timing on returning to England. While he had been plundering the Spanish Main, the Duke of Alba had at last persuaded Philip to come to terms with Elizabeth, and shortly before Drake anchored at Plymouth, the Convention of Bristol of 1574 provided for a settlement over the Spanish pay ships confiscated by the queen in 1568. By mutual agreement neither England nor Spain would harbor aliens who were hostile to the other; and significantly, from the queen’s viewpoint, Philip promised to restore the “ancient liberties” previously enjoyed by the Netherlanders. Spain also agreed that the Inquisition would be prevented from harming English sailors on Spanish territory.
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Nonetheless, since the terms of the Bristol Accord had only been agreed weeks before Drake’s return, it is tantalizing to think that the Queen of England could have repaid Philip with her share of the phenomenal booty only recently captured by Drake in the West Indies.

While timing from the queen’s perspective may have been a tad bit embarrassing publicly, privately Drake’s adventure was the talk of those in the know. He had been singled out by Leicester and Walsingham as an ingenious and handy man to have in a pinch, and Drake was packed off to Ireland to help Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex, in his Ulster plantation scheme. It was a brilliant coup on their part to distract Drake in the “bog” of Ireland. Leicester knew, probably as one of Drake’s backers, that the stout and hardy West Countryman had earned his spurs in the Caribbean. Still, his loyalty to the crown had yet to be proven. When Leicester advised England’s most dangerous mariner that the queen had her personal money invested in Essex’s Irish venture—£10,000, no less, or some $34.67 million or £18.74 million today—Drake would have readily spotted the opportunity to curry royal favor, and done all he could to ensure Essex’s success. Not only would Drake be useful in “the great bog” of Ireland, Leicester reasoned, but also it would keep the dazzlingly bold captain from “annoying the King of Spain” at a time when Elizabeth had become shortsighted again, and was particularly desirous of appeasing the Spanish monarch. But that did not mean that Drake’s projects, or indeed others contemplated by a range of adventurers for attacking Spain, had stalled. Though diverted for now, Drake would use his time in Ireland wisely.

And so he planned, and planned. To undertake the greatest voyage of his life, Drake would need powerful and wealthy patrons. John Hawkins and his other West Country backers wouldn’t have sufficient resources to back his scheme on their own. Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, on the other hand, did. Essex was married to the queen’s cousin, Lettice Knollys, daughter of the Privy Councillor Sir Francis Knollys, and would recommend Drake to the court if he served the Earl well. Also serving under Essex was Christopher Hatton, a rising star at court. Drake was aiming his sights directly at the queen’s personal favorites, and he wanted to prove himself to Leicester, Essex, and Hatton as a capable general at sea.
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Ireland had long been the place where an adventurer’s fortunes were made, or swallowed up whole, since the time of Henry VII. It was also a vast proving ground for many of the West Countrymen like Drake—most of whom had had some education in Dr. John Dee’s nursery for budding adventurers. The most staunchly Protestant West Countrymen like Richard Grenville, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh, Sir Peter Carew, and Sir Arthur Champernowne had all served devoted “hard time” in Ireland. The lord deputy of Ireland’s son and Renaissance man, Philip Sidney, had engaged in the intellectually stimulating military chatter around the table in Dr. Dee’s library at Mortlake near London. And Sir Henry Sidney had come to rely increasingly on Philip’s advice during his tenure as Ireland’s lord deputy, not only for the geographic and navigational knowledge that Dr. Dee had imparted to England’s dogged mariners, but also for his insights into abstract mathematics and science, and how it related to military strategies.
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But they were not the only adventurers flocking to Dr. Dee’s doors. As early as February 1563, Dee had written to Lord Burghley from an inn in Antwerp aptly named the Golden Angel. Dee had already become a great friend of the Flemish master cartographer Gerard Mercator.
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Another of his great friends was Abraham Ortelius, a generation younger than Mercator and a brilliant mapmaker in his own right. Dee had known Mercator since his days at Louvain in 1547, when Mercator described him as a “tall, slight youth, looking wise beyond his years, with fair skin, good looks and bright color.”
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Back then, Dee was only nineteen.

By 1563, Dee had come to an “arrangement” with Cecil that in
exchange for important information, Cecil and others in positions of power would help him grow his expensive and rare library relating to mathematics, cosmography, astrology, geography, the scientific mysticism of the Cabala, and the writings of the ancients. A voracious reader and devoted correspondent with his Continental friends and luminaries, Dee had already proved to the Privy Council that he could provide them with the crux of a fledgling yet well-oiled espionage network. For Dee, espionage was only one of the end results of the codes and ciphers—a gift from the magical scientific principles of the Cabala—upon which he worked. It was the bigger code, or the unraveling the universe’s mysteries for man’s understanding, that enthralled him. Espionage was a means to an end, providing him with cash to pursue his travels, to meet more men of thought, to protect the recent Protestant rise, and, above all, to purchase more books.