Sir William Monson, England's leading naval publicist of the early seventeenth century, was of opinion that the incursions of Drake and Cavendish, spectacular as they were, merely ‘warned [the Spaniards], without annoying [i.e. injuring] them, to strengthen themselves in those parts…as appeared by the taking of Mr Hawkyns in the South Sea, 1594.’^[62] Stung by the Callao affair, the Viceroy Toledo had grandiose plans for fortifying Guayaquil, Paita, Callao, and Arica; these were lost in the obstructed ‘official channels’ of the Council of the Indies, but after Drake the engineer Bernardino de Tejeda came to Peru and by mid-1587 had cast forty-four pieces for the new Viceregal navy; after Cavendish, he took in hand four forts at Callao, and gun-turrets were added to the Casas Reales on its waterfront.^[63] Although the defences were still inadequate by 1590, Cavendish's successor Sir Richard Hawkins met with a much more efficient Spanish response.

Hawkins, son of the great Sir John, was twenty-five when he commanded a small galliot on Drake's West Indian expedition of 1584–5, and had a Queen's ship of 250 tons in the Armada fighting. His incomparable Observations show him as a thoughtful seaman and a delightful writer, though too easy-going as a commander.^[64] Years later, after the peace with Spain, he stated his design as a trade reconnaissance in Cavendish's tracks; but it did not exclude plundering the Queen's enemies in Peru, and J. A. Williamson thinks that it may also have included a search for Terra Australis. It is rather doubtful that he had a proper commission, though he did have some official sanction. He sailed from Plymouth on 12 June 1593 with two ships, the Dainty of 300–400 tons and the Fancy, and a storeship.^[65]

The trans-Atlantic voyage was uneventful: English seamen had not yet learnt to appreciate the Portuguese course, which made its westing well north of the Doldrums, and although Hawkins made no stops in the Canaries or Sierra Leone, it was the end of October before he made a landfall at Santos.^[66] By this time he had only a couple of dozen sound men out of his original 164, owing to scurvy; but treatment with oranges and lemons, ‘a certaine remedie for this infirmitie’, produced a rapid recovery. This was all he could get at Santos, however; the Portuguese politely warned him off, and in his weakened condition he could only obey; in any case, he had neither the calculated daring of a Drake nor the bandit instincts of a Cavendish to lead him to defy the warning. He was able to complete recuperation at some islands north of Rio de Janeiro, where he burnt the storeship. Sailing again for the Straits on 10 December, he ran into a storm off the Plate, and the Fancy deserted: almost a standard combination. On 2 February he sighted an unknown land, and ‘in perpetuall memory’ of his Virgin Queen's chastity he named it ‘HAVVKINS-maiden-land.’ This, though his description is rather too favourable, must have been the Falklands.^[67] He sighted Cape Virgins on 10 February 1594 and had a difficult passage of forty-six days; his account is chiefly notable for an entertaining essay on penguins—the word seemed Welsh, and brought to mind Prince Madoc and ‘Motezanna King (or rather Emperour) of Mexico.’

On 29 March he entered the South Sea and three weeks later was off Mocha Island, making very wary contacts with the Indians. Hawkins intended to keep well out to sea to escape observation and to make his first strike well north of Callao; but his company was avid for loot and forced him to raid Valparaiso. Here they took four ships with general cargoes, ‘good Merchandize in Lyma, but to vs of small accompt’; but a fifth ship came in from Valdivia with ‘some good quantitie of Gold’. Hawkins ransomed the ships, exchanging courtesies with the local notables; but Alonso de Sotomayor (‘a noble Souldier, and liberall Gentleman’) was waiting on the shore: in Lima he told Hawkins that he had set an ambush with 300 horse and foot. Hawkins was naturally on edge, regretting the impetuous greed of his crew, and especially nervous of the local wine, which despite all precautions by ‘day and night, overthrew many of my people.’ It was- 287 -clearly not going to be, as heretofore, an easy walkover; and, as he had feared, messages were already on their way north. The Dainty put in at Coquimbo and looked into Arica, and now Hawkins had more trouble with the crew, who were fearful of being defrauded of their share of the prize and insisted that all treasure should be locked up, one of the three keys to be held by their delegate. Too many captains did so defraud their men, and it is typical of Hawkins's fair-mindedness that he recognised this and condoned (he could hardly help it) this first appearance of the shop-steward in English history.

Surprise was now lost: the Viceroy at Lima, the Marquis de Cañete, had already received news from Valparaiso and sent out six ships under his brother-in-law Don Beltran de Castro, while the whole coast northwards was alerted.^[68] Three of the ships were well-gunned, but the crews, though enormously outnumbering Hawkins's seventy-five men, were a scratch lot, apart from 300 trained soldiers. Off Pisco, south of Callao, a sharp little engagement took place: the Spanish ships, though useless in bad weather, were much better adapted to the normally light winds of the coast than was the Dainty, and showed a disconcerting ability to get to windward. Luckily for Hawkins, lack of fighting experience caused the Spaniards to miss their opportunity, and when unusually heavy weather came on, their light spars and large expanses of light cotton sail could not take it: the capitana lost her mainmast and both the other large ships were also damaged in spars and sails. The Dainty was able to slip away between them, but it was a narrow escape.

Hawkins now set course for the Bay of Atacames in northern Ecuador, purposing to refit and then ‘depart vpon our Voyage, with all possible speede’: he reckoned without his crew. Don Beltran returned to Callao, where he was received with popular insult; but he was soon to put out again with two ships and a pinnace; his flagship, according to Hawkins, had thirty bronze guns, most of them heavy pieces. The crews were weeded out, but still outnumbered the English by at least ten or twelve to one; it seems that they now had some more efficient officers, the almirante, on Hawkins's own showing, being a really first-class fighting seaman.^[69]

On Hawkins's way to Atacames two ships were chased but got away; he had thought that no ship afloat could have gained so much on the Dainty, but to his grieved astonishment the Spanish ships were able to outsail him with foresail and mizzen only. He was now anxious only to get away, but once more the insubordination of his crew ruined his chances. They insisted on taking a pinnace to chase a sail sighted from Atacames and failed to return, as ordered, on the next day, when Hawkins meant to sail for New Spain; he was detained in the bay four days longer than he had reckoned. He was actually weighing anchor, on 18 or 19 June, when Don Beltran's ships stood in. Despite their apparently overwhelming superiority, however, it took three days' hard fighting to overcome Hawkins's little company. At one point the Spaniards offered good terms, but Hawkins in a magnificent speech—doubtless embellished in- 288 -tranquillity, but still magnificent—rallied his men: ‘Came we into the South-sea to put out flagges of truce? And left we our pleasant England, with all her contentments, with intention or purpose to avayle our selues of white ragges?’ They were also fired with wine. But at last the Dainty, riddled with great shot and with nineteen dead, was brought to surrender; Hawkins had received six wounds, two of them serious, and was ‘out of hope to liue or recover’; considering that ‘the honour or dishonour, the wel-fare or misery, was for them, which should be partakers of life’, he consented that they should accept the twice-offered terms not only of quarter but of repatriation to England.^[70] The English were treated with every kindness and courtesy, but it took a long time,

An academic view: remnants of Marco Polo's geography (Beach, Maletur, Locach) are linked by Terra Australis to Tierra del Fuego; Japan has more or less fallen into its right place, Anian and Quivira are prominent; but although Noua Guinea is separated from Terra Australis (mere guesswork) the Spanish discoveries in the Pacific are ignored, and the Indonesian region is less realistic than on Ribeiro's maps of 1527–9 (cf. Fig. Figure 4). But fundamentally Ptolemy has been not so much augmented as demolished: his enclosed Indian Ocean and his Sinus Magnus, the great gulf beyond Farther India (Plate I), have vanished for all time. From C. Wytfliet, Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum (Louvain 1597), facsimile published by Theatrum Orbis Terrarum BV (Amsterdam 1964). By courtesy of Mr N. Israel, Amsterdam. ANU.

 Plate XX. PTOLEMY TRANSFORMED: WYTFLIET 1597.

- 289 -and much effort by Don Beltran, who considered his personal honour at stake, before the Spanish authorities were brought to fulfil the terms. Hawkins himself did not reach England until 1602, though most of his men had preceded him. Meanwhile the Dainty was exhibited at Panama as a trophy of war: the first prize taken by the Spaniards in the South Sea.

This was not quite the last fling: in 1596 Sir Robert Dudley, Leicester's son, sent out three ships under Benjamin Wood ‘for the straights of Magellan and China’, but Wood took them by the Cape route and the expedition dissipated itself in aimless incursions in the Indian Ocean.^[71] But indeed the war itself had become an aimless stalemate: Drake and Sir John Hawkins had died on their mismanaged West Indian voyage of 1595–6, and although Cadiz was sacked in 1596, in the next year both Essex's ‘Islands Voyage’ and the last great Spanish invasion effort were fiascos; Burleigh and King Philip died in 1598, an era was ending. But in 1600 the East India Company was chartered, and in the next two years James Lancaster opened the path of the future for English enterprise by his successful trading voyage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope.^[72]

The final English attack on Spanish America returned to the Isthmus where Drake and Oxenham had begun: in 1601 William Parker, in a brilliant surprise, took the newly fortified Porto Bello; but the treasure fleet had sailed only a week before, and ‘the treasure-house of the world’ was empty.^[73] The old Queen died, and in 1604, under James I and VI, came peace; there was to be no further English attempt on the South Sea until Sir John Narborough's in 1669. The little ports between Valdivia and Acapulco were indeed often to be in terror of corsarios luteranos, Callao itself blockaded; but the flags arrayed against them were not English but Netherlandish. The Hollanders had taken over.