Once again, like any Toynbeean hero, Drake withdrew, to wait for a return of greater renown. The negotiations for the Convention of Bristol were now in full swing (if that is the right phrase for any dealings between those incomparable deferrers Elizabeth and Philip), and any prominence for so successful a corsair would have been most inconvenient. Drake betook himself to the Irish wars, leaving to his companion on that peak in Darien the by now traditional free-booting on the Main. Oxenham's penetration right across the Isthmus was probably not the ‘if of history’, the ‘Gallipoli campaign of the sixteenth century’, that J. A. Williamson once called it—the lines of communication were too tenuous for Panama to have been held, had Oxenham taken it—but it has the interest of being the first European but non-Iberian enterprise on the waters of the Mar del Sur.^[31]

Oxenham sailed from Plymouth in April 1576, with two small vessels and only fifty-seven men. After the usual marauding between Veragua and Acla, he came to the Cimarrons at their town of Ronconcholon—a considerable place, 217 houses, four or five times the size of Cruces. Meanwhile the President of the Panama Audiencia, Gabriel de Loarte, had sent out a small force from Nombre de Dios, which found Oxenham's hidden ships and took most of his guns and ammunition, with the goods which he carried to back up his cover story of innocent trading with the Cimarrons; but the English salvaged enough iron-work and cordage to build a new vessel. With the help of the Cimarrons, on whom he was now dependent, Oxenham took these materials across the Isthmus and built a 45-ton pinnace, and in February 1577 raided the Pearl Islands.

Here there was a good deal of wanton sacrilege: John Butler, the pilot and interpreter, opened a child's lesson-book, and ‘when he came to the commandment: Thou shalt not steal, he laughed loudly at it….’^[32] There was loud talk of returning with 2000 men ‘to make himself master of all this realm’, and altogether the party behaved recklessly. Oxenham captured a ship from Guayaquil—the first European prize ever taken in the Pacific—with 38,000 pesos in gold, a figure soon inflated to 100,000;^[33] but by this time all Tierra Firme was aroused. Loarte had mobilised 500 men at Panama and sent 200 in search- 237 -of the raiders; he appealed to Peru for aid, expended money ‘in anticipation of sanction’ (to use a classic phrase of the British Raj), and in general displayed a most unbureaucratic energy. Oxenham retired to Vallano, the Indian country, and might have got away (for the time being) but for carelessness: the pursuing Spaniards were baffled until they noticed a trail of food scraps—in one version, chicken feathers floating down a creek. Some of the English were killed or taken; the Spaniards reached and burnt Ronconcholon, which, as they calculated, led to trouble between the allies.

In Peru, Francisco de Toledo was not the man to ignore Loarte's appeal, and sent succours from Trujillo and Manta. Loarte tried to stop them, thinking he now had the situation well in hand and not wishing to share the credit; but an officer of Toledo's was not likely to desist at the behest of a legal official, however eminent. After tedious and confused ‘campaigns’ by handfuls of men in the jungly hills of Darien, all but a few of the English were rounded up: Oxenham's account of his own capture is one of the most vivid episodes in the whole story of the Spanish Main.^[34] Thirteen were hanged at Panama, but Oxenham, Butler, and one ‘Xerores’ or ‘Xervel’ were taken to Lima for examination by the Inquisition: they were there when Drake came to Callao, and were at last hanged in 1580, a bitter payment for the sacrilege at the Pearl Islands. The handful who had escaped the Spanish net managed to seize a small vessel and sail away; their fate is unknown. As for the Cimarrons, many made terms, and were given letters of freedom and resettled with some degree of autonomy; others remained recalcitrant, and as late as 1580 were still waiting for the return of Oxenham's remnant showing the agreed signal, a black flag.^[35]

Oxenham's raid was merely a disastrous episode, but not without some wider significance, even if its immediate result was only to impel the Spaniards to deal more effectively than before with the Cimarrons. The simplest English approach to the South Sea was indeed his: march across the Isthmus and build a ship. ‘But that method was available only for a grab-and-run pirate raid, and was useless for serious empire-building.’^[36] In their depositions at Lima, Oxenham spoke quite freely of Grenville's discarded project; Butler scouted the idea that a poor man like Drake could mount an expedition through the Straits. Oxenham thought that he could and would do so if he had the royal licence—but that this was impossible so long as Elizabeth was Queen. The net effect of the activities of Drake, Oxenham, and other corsairs of the 1570s may well have been to concentrate Spanish attention on the Caribbean side, so that when Drake did irrupt into the South Sea, with more force than Oxenham's pinnace, its shores were naked of defence. ‘The colonists of [Chile and Peru], when they saw a sail approaching, knew no misgiving, and never dreamt that it could be other than a friend.’^[37]