Much anger and discontent were excited in connection with the division of the spoils, especially among the crew of the Content, who thought Cavendish took more than a fair share for himself and the company of the Desire—his own ship. The threatened mutiny was, however, suppressed, and a grand gala was held on the queen’s day—17th November, with eating and drinking, firing of guns, and a display of fireworks, with as a grand set-piece the blazing Santa Anna, with all of her precious cargo on board that the captors could not carry away with them. They left the ship burned down to the water’s edge. After they left the burning ship, the fire providentially freed the wreck from the anchors, and the flood-tide carried her still burning into the bay. The abandoned company were happily enabled to extinguish the flames, and to save so much of the hull as with some fitting furnished them with a means of escape from the inhospitable shore upon which they had been cast.
After leaving Cape St. Lucas, the Content fell behind, and was never again seen by Cavendish, who set sail to cross the Pacific by a course not very widely different from that taken by Drake.
In January 1588, Cavendish reached the Ladrone Islands, a few miles from which an incident occurred that does not redound to his credit. A fleet of fifty or more canoes surrounded the Desire with cargoes of fish, potatoes, plantains, etc., to exchange them, as they had been accustomed to do with the Spaniards, for pieces of iron. The islanders were importunate and rather troublesome, and, to get rid of them, “our general” and five of his men fired a volley into them. The savages were so expert as divers and swimmers that the sportsmen could not tell how many they killed. These natives were of tawny colour, tall, stout, and naked. Their canoes, six or seven yards in length, but very narrow, were admirably made, and had carved figureheads. They had square and triangular sails of a cloth made from rushes.
On the voyage, while in the vicinity of the Philippines, an important secret oozed out. The Portuguese taken from the Santa Anna let it be known that the Spanish pilot had prepared a letter to be secretly conveyed to the governor at Manilla, explaining how the Desire might be surprised and overpowered. The Spaniard was summarily hanged for his patriotism. The further course of the homeward voyage was from Manilla to the Moluccas, passed about the middle of February; Java; the Cape of Good Hope; St. Helena, in June; to Plymouth, which was reached on the 9th September 1588; Cavendish’s circumnavigation of the globe—the third that had been accomplished—having been made in two years and fifty days, a considerably shorter time than had been occupied by either Magellan and his successors or Sir Francis Drake,—but mere speed in getting back to a home port had not been an object with either of the three distinguished navigators.
Accounts differ as to the style in which Cavendish made his return entry into Plymouth. According to one account, he encountered, for four days, a violent storm in the Channel, from which the tempest-tossed adventurers happily escaped, and, says N. H., “on 10th September 1588, like wearied men, through the favour of the Almighty, we got into Plymouth, where the townsmen received us with all humanity.” Anyway, his arrival, like that of Drake before him, caused a great sensation at Plymouth.
ROUNDING THE CAPE DE BUENA ESPERANÇA.
Cavendish was received as a hero, and appeared to consider himself worthy of his fame and the honours conferred upon him. He had acquired great wealth, albeit dishonestly, and his exploits had been distinguished in many instances by wanton outrage and gratuitous destruction of life and property. He, however, appeared to be unconscious of having done anything to be ashamed of, and probably held in accord with those avowed by the Rev. Dr. Thos. Fuller, prebendary of Sarum, who, as apologist for Sir Francis Drake’s piratical performances, considered that “his case was clear in sea divinity; and few are such infidels as not to believe doctrines which make for their own profit.” In a letter to his patron, Lord Hunsdon, he writes: “It hath pleased Almighty God to suffer me to circumpass the whole globe of the world, entering in at the Strait of Magellan, and returning by the Cape de Buena Esperança; in which voyage I have either discovered or brought certain intelligence of all the rich places in the world, which were ever discovered by any Christian. I navigated along the coast of Chili, Peru, and New Spain, where I made great spoils. I burned and sank nineteen ships, small and great. All the villages and towns that ever I landed at I burned and spoiled; and had I not been discovered upon the coast, I had taken great quantity of treasure. The matter of most profit unto me was a great ship of the king’s which I took at California, which ship came from the Philippines, being one of the richest of merchandise that ever passed those seas. From the Cape of California, being the uttermost part of all New Spain, I navigated to the islands of the Philippines, hard upon the coast of China, of which country I have brought such intelligence as hath not been heard of in these parts; the stateliness and riches of which country [China] I fear to make report of, lest I should not be credited. I found out by the way homeward the island of Santa Helena; and from that island God hath suffered me to return unto England. All which services, with myself, I humbly prostrate at Her Majesty’s feet, desiring the Almighty long to continue her reign amongst us; for at this day she is the most famous and victorious princess that liveth in the world.” Although Cavendish contributed comparatively little to the sum of geographical knowledge by accurate reports of any original discoveries he had made, apart from the moral aspect of the principal incidents in his career, he was indisputably a remarkable man, and rarely since the world began has a young man of only twenty-eight years achieved such a record as he had done, at the end of his circumnavigation, illustrative of daring bravery, indomitable perseverance, and manly endurance.
The wealth with which Cavendish returned was considered sufficient to have bought “a fair earldom”; but it was not to his taste to settle, or found a family. His expedition had been undertaken to repair his shattered fortunes, and had done so satisfactorily, but it was probably “light come, light go” with him. The treasure of the Santa Anna had been put into “a bag with holes,” and what did not run through was providently applied by Cavendish to fitting out another expedition on an extended scale, which it was expected would do a much larger business, and prove even a more pronounced success than the last. The new squadron consisted of “three tall ships” and two pinnaces,—the galleon Leicester, in which Cavendish sailed; the Desire, his old ship, commanded by Captain John Davis; the Roebucke, the Black Pinnace, and the Daintie. The expedition sailed from Plymouth on 26th August 1591, which was from the beginning a series of dreary, unrelieved misery and disaster. The Straits of Magellan were reached in April 1592, and passed through about half-way. Disagreements arose among the crews, and Cavendish seemed to have lost his power of command. He determined to return to Santos. The ships parted company, and the last notice of Cavendish in the homeward voyage of the Leicester is his own notice of the death of his cousin John Locke in 8° N. latitude. Cavendish is supposed to have died on board a few days later, the victim of grief and disappointment. While tossed about in the Desire after the ships had parted company, Captain Davis was, on the 14th August 1592, “driven in among certain islands never before discovered by any known relation, lying fifty leagues or better off the shore, east and northerly from the Straits.” These were the Falkland Islands, of which Captain Davis has certainly the honour of being the original discoverer, although the discovery has been claimed by Sir Richard Hawkins, and certain foreign navigators.[1] Several more or less complete accounts of this last disastrous voyage of Cavendish have been preserved; one of them, drawn up at sea by himself, is a most affecting and depressing narrative. In this account he writes: “We had been almost four months between the coast of Brazil and the Straits, being in distance not above six hundred leagues, which is commonly run in twenty or thirty days; but such was the adverseness of our fortune, that in coming thither we spent the summer, and found the Straits in the beginning of a most extreme winter, not endurable for Christians. After the month of May was come in, nothing but such flights of snow, and extremity of frosts, as in all my life I never saw any to be compared with them. This extremity caused the weak men to decay; for, in seven or eight days in this extremity, there died forty men and sickened seventy, so that there were not fifteen men able to stand upon the hatches.” Mr. John Lane, a friend of Captain Davis, writing of their experiences in the middle of “charming May,” says: “In this time we endured extreme storms, with perpetual snow, where many of our men died of cursed famine and miserable cold, not having wherewith to cover their bodies nor to fill their stomachs, but living by mussels, water, and weeds of the sea, with a small relief from the ship’s stores of meal sometimes.” He makes the shocking disclosure that “all the sick men in the galleon” (Cavendish’s ship) “were most uncharitably put on shore into the woods, in the snow, wind, and cold, when men of good health could scarcely endure it, where they ended their lives in the highest degree of misery.”
[1] Captain John Davis achieved in this early age deserved celebrity as a navigator and discoverer. He made three voyages, under the sanction and authority of the English Government, in search of a North-West passage to the Pacific. In the first, in 1585, he pushed his way round the southern end of Greenland, across the strait that from then until now has borne his name—Davis Strait—and along the coast of what is now known as Baffin’s Land, to the Cape of God’s Mercy, which he thus named in the belief that his task was virtually accomplished. In the second voyage, 1586, he made little further progress; in the third, 1587, he reached the entrance to the strait afterwards explored by, and named after, Hudson. Davis, after other important nautical services, was, when on his return from the East Indies, killed by pirates off the coast of Malacca. Davis was an author as well as a navigator.