Sarmiento reported in person to King Philip in September 1580, a few days before Drake reached Plymouth. At the Cape Verdes and the Azores he had picked up wild rumours of English fleets for the Straits, English settlers in Brazil; and in the midst of his Portuguese venture, Philip had to turn his attention to this threat on the other side of the ocean. Morale, however, had been much enhanced by the acquisition of the neighbour kingdom with its naval strength, and for once at least little time was lost in deciding to mount a powerful expedition to settle and fortify the Straits, which would be much facilitated by the Brazilian bases.

As to the fortifications, the most expert opinion was sought: the Duke of Alba and the great admiral Santa Cruz approved, the former at first with reservations—it was a most important thing to be done if it could be done, and perhaps a stout boom across the narrows and some gunboats would be cheaper and as efficient. But Sarmiento's conviction prevailed: solid forts, backed by a colony to provision them, would be the real answer, and the Italian military engineer Juan Bautista Antonelli was called in to design them.^[12] Following Toledo's hint, the fleet was to take out 600 soldiers for Chile, under Don Alonso de Sotomayor. In contrast to this careful military planning, the arrangements for a colony, so distant and in so little-known a region, were- 269 -cursory: simply that Sarmiento was authorised to recruit, ‘without expenses to His Majesty’, a hundred or so settlers.^[13]

Preparations were put in hand at Seville with much vigour; but they were vitiated by a fatal flaw in the command structure. Despite his relative lack of experience in command, Sarmiento had shown himself not only a very skilful navigator but a most resolute leader; he had succeeded in all his public undertakings and fully justified the trust of so notable a ruler of men as Toledo. He might therefore have reasonably expected overall command of the enterprise; but by the norms of Court life, so great an armada—twenty-three ships—should be headed by a man of high social standing. It is difficult to see Sarmiento working happily under any leader but one of the stature of Toledo or Alba or Santa Cruz; and even a milder man than he, one less utterly convinced of his own rightness and powers, might have resented being passed over. Almost any available choice of a commander over Sarmiento would probably have led to great difficulties; the actual choice of Diego Flores de Valdes was a disaster.

As prickly and quarrelsome as Sarmiento himself, he had the appropriate social rank and considerable experience in the more or less routine task of convoying the Seville fleets across the Atlantic, but these seem the sum total of his qualifications. He had no initiative and was no leader, his very inept showing as the reluctant chief of staff to the reluctant commander Medina Sidonia in 1588 finally demonstrating his unfitness.^[14] From the start he was averse to the Straits project, perhaps resenting being taken from his comfortable and profitable convoy command to face unknown hazards and hardships. We need not believe more than a fraction of Sarmiento's anguished allegations of malevolence, deliberate sabotage, corruption (though this was likely enough in a convoy commander), and even personal cowardice; discounting a great deal, it remains clear that his appointment to overall command of the fleet—but of the fleet only, Sarmiento being designated Governor and Captain-General of the projected colony—was a recipe for fiasco; not to mention the insertion of a third element in the command, Sotomayor and his Chilean force.

Sarmiento accepted the situation, after a protest of a stiffness to which His Majesty was probably unaccustomed, and set to work. At Seville, conditions were chaotic. To begin with, Diego Flores practically washed his hands of the detail work. Everything, except bureaucracy and peculation, was in short supply. Somehow or other Sarmiento and a few other devoted officials managed to collect ships and stores, men and munitions, including some 300 colonists (nearly a third of them children) caught up, by God knows what inducements, from the grinding life of the Andalusian peasantry: the nominal roll still exists, the names of the nameless, ‘Juan perez su mujer maria y tres hijos….’^[15] By the time that all was more or less ready, the season was so far advanced that it would have been better to wait till the next year; they should have left in August at latest, and when that month was past they risked losing all, ‘as one who goes to slaughter’,^[16] and Flores and Sarmiento were for once agreed in protesting when- 270 -Medina Sidonia forced them to put to sea, being towed out over the San Lucar bar, on 25 September 1581.^[17] The expected equinoctial storm did not fail them: within a week six ships and 800 men were lost, and the battered remainder made Cadiz with great difficulty.

They sailed again on 9 December, with orders to winter at Rio de Janeiro, to ward off expected French corsairs; this to the dismay of Sarmiento, who feared the ravages of the broma (ship-worm) and ‘other inconveniences’. His fears were well founded: they reached Rio on 24 March 1582, and from then on Sarmiento's narrative, not lacking in complaints hitherto, becomes an unending round of recrimination. As he had no authority over the fleet, he was able only occasionally, and then by violent action, to check the ships’ companies (from the highest officers down) from selling gear and stores and stocking up with profitable Brazil timber and dye-wood. Much powder was wasted in salutes and fireworks, and Sarmiento trembled for fear of shortages in the Straits: they fired off more arquebus shots than there were hairs on his head, and each shot ‘struck me to the heart … Your Majesty ties my hands … alone and without authority, I can do no more, but my blood scalds me.…’^[18] Clearly by this time Sarmiento is almost paranoid in his anguish; yet he did his best to look after the sick and to keep his people employed in constructing prefabricated houses for the Straits; even so, morale was naturally abysmal. Soon it was being said that not even to seduce a soul would the Devil himself dare to enter the Strait.^[19] Only a madman like Pedro Sarmiento.…

When at last they left Rio, Flores insisted that Sarmiento should not sail with him in the flagship, but in the slow Begoña. The broma had done its work so well that a 500-ton ship foundered with much loss of life and stores. Many officers now wished to return, but it was agreed to refit at Santa Catarina, where there was news of Edward Fenton's English fleet in nearby waters: against his orders, Flores made no attempt to intercept them. There were more bitter disputes at Santa Catarina, where Flores sent three ships back to Rio de Janeiro for repairs. When the rest sailed again, on 13 January 1583, Alonso de Sotomayor, who seems to have tried to mediate, had had enough: he took his three ships (and according to Sarmiento many of the stores for the Straits) into La Plata and thence marched his 600 men across the Andes to Chile. The diminished fleet pressed on, and by February was at the Straits: twice Flores tried to enter, but each time the notorious tidal currents drove him out, and his honour, such as it was, was satisfied by the attempt. Disregarding pleas to wait in the shelter of Cabo Virgenes or the Rio Gallego, he set a course for Brazil, and Sarmiento, in far from speechless fury, had perforce to follow.^[20]

The ships were scattered by a storm, and Sarmiento reached São Vicente (near modern Santos) to find that the three sent back from Santa Catarina had attacked Fenton's ships, which got away after sinking the Begoña. Early in May what was left of the armada reassembled at Rio de Janeiro, and here Diego Flores announced that he would have no more of the enterprise. His- 271 -arguments did not lack substance: the Straits did not lend themselves either to fortification or settlement, and it was more important to make sure of the Brazilian bases, threatened by French and English privateers and Portuguese sedition.^[21] By his own account, Sarmiento humbled himself—we may doubt by how much!—but in vain. Flores took himself off with six ships, and at Parahaiba was lucky enough to surprise five French corsairs loading Brazil wood: as four of them were careening, the victory was easy, and on his return to Spain—getting in first with his story—it served to divert attention from his general conduct.^[22]

Sarmiento remained with five ships under Diego de Ribera; after some reinforcements and further desertions (including his engineer, J. B. Antonelli's brother), he was left with 548 men, women, and children. At least he was now his own master. It is a tribute to his astonishing drive and powers of command that the expedition did not collapse there and then. All but two years to the day from their final sailing from San Lucar, they wearily put to sea again (8 December 1583). On 1 February 1584 they were again off Cabo Virgenes, and the promised land was near.