In England, the years after Drake's return were alive with predatory projects: ‘Gentlemen of fortune, and gentlemen of no fortune, were about this time equally encouraged to distress the enemy.’^[35] Already before he was back, but after it was known from John Winter that he had passed into the South Sea, the younger and greater Richard Hakluyt had envisaged, with considerable panache, the seizure of the Straits and São Vicente: a reclaimed pirate could be sent out ‘as of himselfe, and not with the countenance of thenglish state’, and a colony peopled with Cimarrons and convicts, men and women—

Officially, however, so long as relations with Spain were still fluid, though fragile, attention was directed rather to following up Drake's success with the Sultan of Ternate; this seems indicated by ‘A project off a corporatyon of sooche as shall ventere unto sooche domyniones & contries scytuat beyonde the equynoctyall lyne’, apparently of November 1580.^[37] Drake was specifically proposed as life-governor of the company, and there is added an interesting request for the establishing of ‘an howse of Contratacon w^t sooche orderes as weare grawnted by the K. of Spayne.’ There seems to have been objection by the Muscovy Company, since the Moluccas, being north of the Line, were in its sphere, and the project was lost in the more exciting possibilities raised by the presence of the refugee Dom Antonio in England. These included occupation of Terceira in the strategically immensely important Azores, and as an alternative to go to Portuguese India, expected to rally to the Pretender, and to establish the spice trade from Calicut.^[38] Ours was not the first ‘Global Century’.

Despite the many alarmist despatches of the Spanish ambassador Mendoza (soon to be expelled for his plotting), these schemes got bogged down in personal and political disputes, and when Drake took to the seas again it was for the great West Indies raid of 1585–6, in which he took Cartagena but was not strong enough to go on to Panama itself. The Dragon's mantle fell in the first place on to the inadequate shoulders of Edward Fenton, a soldier not a seaman,- 279 -who replaced the original choice of Martin Frobisher as leader of the follow-up expedition; Frobisher's known toughness would at least have ensured that any piratical diversions would have been efficiently conducted. As it was, Fenton's voyage was as thoroughly mismanaged as any of which we have record, except Diego Flores's. Though Drake and the Muscovy Company had large shares in it, the enterprise was essentially Leicester's—the flagship of 400 tons and 40 guns was renamed the Galleon Leicester—and was well-found; it was wrecked by personal incompatibilities and the lust for the plunder of Peru. It never got anywhere near its objectives, official or other, and in fact its main interest is in the lurid diary, for very obvious reasons kept largely in cipher, of the chaplain Richard Madox.^[39]

Fenton's instructions were for a voyage to the East Indies and Cathay by the Cape of Good Hope, the Straits being specifically barred either going or returning, ‘except upon great occasion incident’. This loophole was enough for the more ardent spirits, who included Sir John Hawkins's nephew William and Drake's cousin John, together with Drake's pilots on the circumnavigation, Blacoller and Hood; also the shady Protestant Portingall Simão Fernandez, who was all for plunder though not for the Straits, hedging neatly when the decision had to be made. The details of the fiasco need not detain us long. The four ships sailed in May 1582, far too late, and after some misadventures in Sierra Leone reached Brazil, where as we have seen they crossed the tracks of Diego Flores and Sarmiento. Dissension had begun in the English Channel, and now came to a head. Fenton himself, in his post-mortem apologia to Burghley and Leicester, stresses his honest intent; but according to Madox (who was an upright man) and William Hawkins, he had ideas of making himself a Pirate King at St Helena, counterfeiting the Portuguese flag and taking the carracks of the Carreira; ‘He saith the queen was his love. He would go through the South Sea to be like Francis Drake.’^[40] When it came to the point, he drew back, fearful of Spanish forces in the Straits. Off southern Brazil a council of December 1582 decided to turn back to trade and revictual at São Vicente; John Drake deserted and took his bark into La Plata, naturally to fall into Spanish hands. The Cape of Good Hope option was theoretically kept open, though Fenton probably meant to sell off his merchandise and make for home. At São Vicente prospects were ruined by the fight with the Begoña, and despite the murmuring of the crews, still eager for loot, Fenton gave over the voyage.

The real significance of this miserable affair is in its evidence of the over-mastering lure of the South Sea; in William Hawkins's words, ‘ther is no hope for money … but by passynge the Straytes.’^[41] This, coupled with abysmal leadership, was enough to wreck a well-considered venture which might have taken English trade to south and east Asia two decades before the East India Company's eventual success. Yet Drake had shown that the two objectives of the Moluccas and Peru were not entirely incompatible, that a resolute leader might tap at once ‘both the Inidia's of spice and Myne’.^[42]

Anglo-Spanish relations worsened in 1584, and Elizabeth, though still averse to open war, felt less need to maintain even an ostensible regard for Philip's claims and susceptibilities. A powerful fleet was planned for the Moluccas, probably to go by way of the Straits—fifteen ships and barks, twenty pinnaces, 1600 men, a third of them soldiers—under Drake's command; scarcely a peaceful trading venture. But the deepening crisis in the Netherlands after William of Orange's murder by a Spanish agent (July 1584), the seizure of English shipping in Iberian ports in May 1585, followed by the commitment of English troops under Leicester to the Dutch ‘People's War’—all these compelled the retention of so great an armament in waters nearer home, and hence Drake was diverted to the West Indies.^[43] The more distant field of the South Sea was left to private enterprise, and the first entrants were the dazzling courtier George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland,^[44] and Thomas Cavendish, a young gentleman of good family and fortune from East Anglia, not one of the West Country brood of corsairs. Cumberland, apparently in collaboration with Cavendish, sent out two ships for the Straits and Peru in 1586, but they got only as far as 44°S and apart from the wanton robbery and burning of Negro villages in Sierra Leone and some scrappy fighting in Brazil, his captains achieved little. Their most useful prize was the Portuguese Lopez Vaz, captured off the Plate and brought to England to become a prime informant for Hakluyt.

Cavendish, who had gained experience on Grenville's 1585 Virginia voyage, was his own master: he sailed himself and had better fortune.^[45] With his newly built Desire of 120 or 140 tons and two smaller ships, he left Plymouth on 21 July 1586 and reached Port Desire, north of Port St Julian, in mid-December, sailing again on the 28th. Cavendish had timed himself well, avoiding the need to winter in Patagonia, a sure breeding-ground for dissension and often mutiny and the overthrow of the voyage.^[46] On 6 January 1587 he entered the Straits and, as we have seen, picked up Tomé Hernandez and examined the grim relics of Rey Don Felipe. He named Cape Froward, the southernmost point of the mainland, and beyond it was held up for a month by ‘most vile and filthie weather’, though finding ‘at every myle or two myles ende an Harborough on both sides of the land.’ On 24 February he passed into the South Sea, a passage of fifty days against Magellan's thirty-eight and Drake's sixteen.

At Mocha they had a brush with Araucanians who took them for Spaniards, but at St Mary (Isla Sta Maria) the subjugated Indians were very friendly after they had been ‘made merie with wine’ and convinced that the newcomers were none of their old masters. By 30 March they were at Quintero Bay, where Tomé Hernandez, naturally enough disregarding his ‘deepe and damnable othes’ of loyalty, made his escape, and two days later brought down upon them 200 horse; a dozen Englishmen were killed in the fight, and others captured. On 23–25 April they took a large ship and two barks in Arica roads, but the place was too well defended to risk a landing. The Spaniards had learnt the lesson of 1579, if as yet inadequately; two days later, Cavendish took a bark (with- 281 -a useful Greek pilot), and under torture the prisoners confessed that they had been carrying ‘letters of adviso’ for Lima. A raid near Pisco produced nothing but some provisions, and the taking of a 300-ton ship yielded no better plunder; the best prize had a general cargo worth £20,000 ‘if it had bene in England or in any other place in Christendome where we might have solde it.’ Paita was sacked and wantonly burnt, by no means the last time that this little town ‘of more importance than its wretched appearance would indicate’ was to pay such a penalty for having the only safe anchorage on this part of the coast.^[47]

There had been sundry partings and rejoinings, but by 25 May all three ships, plus a prize, were assembled at Puna. The Indian lord of the island and his ‘marvellous faire’ Spanish wife had fled with 100,000 crowns, but his sumptuous house made a convenient headquarters and in a great storehouse there were ample supplies of pitch and fibre for cables; Pretty's description of the island, almost as large as Wight, is idyllic. Here they careened and secured a great deal of ships' tackling and iron gear, as well as the bells of the church, which they burned. There was some sharp fighting, in which nine men were killed and three taken, though they claimed to have slain nearly fifty Spaniards and Indians; after this they burned the town of 300 houses and four ships on the stocks, and ‘made havocke of their fields, orchards and gardens’. An exciting fortnight; it is true that there was now open war with Spain, but it is also clear that Cavendish can hardly be described, like Drake, as ‘un corsario sin crueldad’.^[48]

Soon after reaching Puna on 5 June, they burned their smallest vessel, for want of men to man her, and set course for New Spain, making a landfall in Costa Rica on 1 July; news of the raid reached Panama and two ships were sent out, two weeks late, while the Viceroy of New Spain did not receive warning in time. Two ships from Sonsonate were taken and burnt; they were of most value for the information received from a French pilot, Michael Sancius (Miguel Sanchez) of the course and expected time of arrival of the Manila Galleons. Guatulco was thoroughly sacked, the customary church-burning being marked, according to local tradition, by the miraculous preservation of a much-venerated Holy Cross; which then fell a prey to souvenir hunters and, after a 2000-folio enquiry into the incident, was removed to the cathedral of Oaxaca.^[49] Cavendish bypassed Acapulco and touched at a number of small ports and bays to the northward, careening at Mazatlan before reaching Cape St Lucas, where he meant to lie in wait for the Galleon, on 14 October.

Up till now the voyage had not been very profitable: at least a score of ships and small craft had been taken and destroyed, but none of them had any treasure or small-bulk goods of great value. Real success, however, was now at hand, for on 4 November the 600-ton Santa Ana was sighted. The English were greatly outnumbered, but the Galleon had no guns mounted: ‘As no other ships but ours have ever been sighted on this voyage…[the Galleons] have always sailed with little or no artillery, and with as little fear of corsairs as if they were in the river of Seville.’^[50] The Santa Ana beat off the first English attack with small- 282 -arms, but could not cope with two handy ships carrying twenty-eight guns in all, and after a stiff fight of five or six hours she surrendered.

The voyage was now indubitably ‘made’: 122,000 pesos of gold, or about £70,000; pearls, rich silks, musk, altogether an investment of 1,000,000 pesos in Manila, worth twice that in New Spain.^[51] There was more than could be carried off, and most had to be burnt with the ship, but ample remained. Prisoners also were interesting: most of them, including Sebastian Vizcaino, were set ashore in Baja California, but Cavendish carried off two Japanese and three Filipino lads, a Portuguese ‘Old China Hand’, and a pilot who knew the Ladrones and the Philippines. For these he now set sail, reaching Guam on 3 January 1588 and passing through the San Bernardino Straits on the 14th.

The smaller of the two remaining ships had disappeared when they left California, and Manila was too tough a nut to crack with one galleon. Cavendish spent a fortnight cruising at will among the southern Philippines; he attempted to seize a new Galleon being built on Panay, but the local Spaniards were on the alert and beat him off. He departed with a flourish: ‘our Generall sent commendations to the Spanish captaine…and willed him to provide great store of gold: for he meant for to see him with his company at Manilla within fewe yeeres….’ Bishop Salazar of Manila had to admit the ‘more than human courage’ of ‘this barbarian infidel’; his bitterest grief was not for the loss of the Santa Ana and the ruin so caused, but that a mere youth in a wretched little ship should sail gaily and boastfully through ‘an army of [your Majesty's] captains…he went from our midst laughing, without anyone molesting or troubling him; neither has he felt that the Spaniards are in this land to any purpose.’^[52]

On 8 February Cavendish was off Gilolo; for some reason he did not repeat Drake's call at the Moluccas; perhaps the sickness which broke out a few days later was already showing itself. Instead he refreshed himself in southeastern Java, where he cultivated very friendly relations with the local raja and also with two Portuguese, who enquired after their King Dom Antonio, reported by the Spaniards to be dead. Cavendish assured them that he was alive and honourably maintained in England, ‘and that we were come under the King of Portugall into the South sea, and had warred upon the Spaniards there.’ He also left three large guns, whether for the Portuguese or Javanese was not clear, and received enthusiastic offers that should Dom Antonio arrive, he would have at command the Moluccas, China (i.e. Macao), and the Philippines. This apparently successful piece of propaganda warfare did not prevent the two Portuguese informing the Malacca authorities about the visit.^[53] Having thus laid foundations of a sort for future projects, Cavendish sailed for home on 14 May, by the Cape and St Helena: a week before entering Plymouth on 9 September they learnt from a Flemish ship of the defeat in August of the Armada, ‘to the singular rejoycing and comfort of us all.’ Truly a happy return.

The booty of the Santa Ana, much exaggerated by rumour, was substantial enough: probably about £125,000, perhaps two-fifths of the ordinary yearly- 283 -revenue of the Crown. Cavendish banqueted the Queen at Greenwich, but his reprise of Drake's achievement did not extend to a knighthood. Apart from its financial success, the voyage was very profitable from an intelligence point of view: it is apparent that in the East Indies Cavendish had been at least as much concerned with political warfare and the gathering of information as with plunder or spices, for which he had little room. The master of the Desire, Thomas Fuller, brought back detailed sailing directions for the whole voyage, and Cavendish had secured a great map of China, from which were deduced Chinese armed forces of 7,923,785 horse and foot! The English name had been brought to the Philippines, where Cavendish had been at pains to ingratiate himself with the Indians of Capul, who promised ‘to ayde him, whensoever hee shoulde come againe to overcome the Spaniards’; in Java also his contacts were very genial. He might therefore congratulate himself on a well conducted and very promising reconnaissance, and he undoubtedly looked forward to a more solid exploitation of it on a second voyage.^[54] That voyage was to be a disaster, and in fact no Englishman coming by the South Sea was to repeat his success until the days of the buccaneers, a century later.

The first attempt to do so was made within a year of Cavendish's return, by John Chidley and Andrew Meyrick, who sailed from Plymouth in August 1589 ‘for The South Sea, and chiefly for the famous province of Arauco on the coast of Chili’, reported by Cavendish to be full of gold mines. Of Chidley's three tall ships, only one—the Delight—is heard of again, wrecked in Normandy with, as we have seen, the last Spaniard from Rey Don Felipe.^[55]

Already in 1589 Spanish reports were speaking of another linked venture by Cumberland and Cavendish, both for the South Sea and the latter for China as well. In the event, Cumberland went only to the Azores and Cavendish seems to have rapidly expended his gains from the Santa Ana, redeeming lands mortgaged for the first voyage, investing in some not very profitable semi-piratical ventures, and fitting out his second fleet.^[56] This was on a large scale: he had the big Galleon Leicester, his own old Desire refitted, the Roebuck of 240 tons and 20 guns, The Black Pinnace which had brought Sir Philip Sydney's body home to a mourning England, and a small bark: at least 80 guns and some 350 men. His captains included John Davis, regarded by many then and since as England's greatest navigator of the day, under promise that ‘when wee came back to the Callifornia, I should haue his Pinnace with my own Barck (which for that purpose went with me to my great charges) to search that Northwest discouery vpon the backe partes of America….’^[57] In Quinn's view, Cavendish's objective was not only the routine plunder of Peru, but also ‘an English galleon trade with China [and perhaps Japan] that might emulate the fabulously rich Manila galleon itself.’ To this end his two young Japanese and his Portuguese China expert would doubtless be most useful intermediaries.^[58] With these high prospects he sailed from Plymouth on 26 August 1591.

Cavendish intended to begin by taking Santos in Brazil as a base, but they were becalmed in the Doldrums, and here, on a charge by the two Japanese that a Portuguese pilot was plotting desertions at Santos, Cavendish had ‘the poore Portingall’ hanged.^[59] They suffered from scurvy and food shortages before reaching Brazil, but Santos was duly taken on 16 December (the people were all rounded up at Mass), though through negligence most of the local provisions on which Cavendish had relied were spirited away by the inhabitants. They did not sail again until 24 January 1592, sufficiently late in the season. The fleet was scattered by a storm off the Plate; although Cavendish had not fixed a rendezvous, the three large ships and The Black Pinnace were reunited in Port Desire on 16 March—already autumn. By this time morale was exceedingly low amongst what Cavendish called ‘the moste abiect & mutanus Companye that ever was Caried out of Englande by anye man livinge’. It was not improved by the weather in the Straits, ‘not durable for Christians’, where in late April they had to shelter a few miles west of Cape Froward. Like Sarmiento's men, they were reduced to shellfish, cinnamon bark, and seaweed; on the Galleon Leicester forty men died in seven or eight days and seventy were ill, ‘so that there was not 50 men that were able to stand vppon the hatches.’ All the ships had lost or worn out many of their sails and cables; and it was not yet full winter.

In this extremity, Cavendish decided to put about and reach the East Indies by the Cape; after representations by the crews, and since neither Port Desire nor Port St Julian was really suitable as shelter for the larger ships, he agreed to return to Brazil to recuperate. As Richard Hawkins was to warn, ‘all men are to take care, that they goe not one foote backe…for I haue not seene, that any who haue yeelded therevnto, but presently they haue returned home’—and he makes specific reference to Fenton and Cavendish.^[60] Such a decision was all but inevitably fatal to the voyage, though perhaps often enough the only salvation for the voyagers, or some of them.

On the night of 20 May, not very far from Port Desire, Davis in the Desire, with The Black Pinnace, parted company. Once again, Cavendish had inexplicably failed to appoint a rendezvous; inexplicably again, although he thought that the two missing ships would make for Port Desire, he made no attempt to find them: all he did was to denounce ‘that villaigne that hath bynn the death of mee and the decaie of the whole Accon, I meane Davys’, and to sail on for Brazil. Meanwhile his scapegoat Davis, not meeting the General at Port Desire, refitted there and pressed on with the voyage, although it is true that his interest was probably exclusively with the Northwest Passage. He could not leave the port until 7 August, and may have been blown within sight of the Falklands; thrice he pushed through into the South Sea, in the dead of winter, losing The Black Pinnace there, until on 10 October he was finally driven back into the Straits. By the 30th he was back at the Penguin Island off Port Desire: they had made the second full passage from Cabo Deseado to Cape Virgins in seventeen days. They took on 20,000 penguins—dried, as they had not enough salt—and sailed- 285 -for England on 22 December. They lost twenty-one men in Brazil, surprised by the Portuguese while watering, and as a final horror the poorly preserved penguins rotted and produced a most loathly worm: ‘there was nothing that they did not devour, only yron excepted.’^[61] Davis, more of a leader and less of a driver than Cavendish, kept them going, and on 11 June 1593 they reached Berehaven in Ireland—sixteen men, of whom only five were fit enough to work the ship.

Seven months earlier Cavendish had died. He had made his way up the Brazilian coast, fighting the Portuguese with more ill than good fortune. He considered—secretly, for fear of mutiny—stripping the Roebuck to refit and man the Galleon Leicester, pretending that he would make for St Helena to prey on the carracks of the Carreira, but really meaning to slip back to the Straits. But in the second of three fights with the Portuguese he lost twenty-five men out of eighty committed, and at this point the Roebuck deserted. On the flagship Cavendish managed to maintain his authority, partly by physical violence like Sarmiento's in like case, and even to induce his men—nominally at least—to make once more for the Straits. But the slaughter of all but two of thirty sick men ashore was too much for any remaining morale, and Cavendish bore up for St Helena. He missed it, and his men compelled him to go on northwards for Ascension. Cavendish was preparing himself to die; one can hardly say composing himself, for the bitter apologia he wrote, blaming everyone but himself, is the work of a man brought near to madness: ‘amongst such hel houndes my spirit was Cleene spent wishinge my self vppon any desarte place in the worlde there to dye’ and at Ascension he meant ‘to haue there ended my vnfortunate lief.’ But he missed that island also, and died at sea: a ruffianly spoiled child of fortune yielding up his life in an agony of spirit. Davis survived, to defend himself with dignity but point in The Seamans Secrets: after all, the ‘runaway’ was the last to return home.