The Boy's Hakluyt: English Voyages of Adventure and Discovery

by Edwin M. Bacon; Richard Hakluyt

Desperately brief as was the time for preparation, the English ships had been made ready for the awful assault. But the men on the island were taken quite unawares, and abandoning their guns fell a quick prey to their onrushing assailants. The story of the unequal battle Hawkins graphically relates with soldierlike brevity.

"Our men which warded a shore being stricken with sudden feare, gave place, fled, and sought to recover succour of our ships; the Spaniardes being before provided for the purpose landed in all places in multitudes from their ships which they might easily doe without boates, and slewe all our men a shore without mercie, a fewe of them escaped aboord the Jesus. The great ship which had by the estimation three hundred men placed in her secretly, immediately fel aboord the Minion, but by Gods appointment, in the time of the suspicion we had, which was onely one halfe houre, the Minion was made readie to avoide, and so leesing her hedfasts, and hayling away by the sternefastes she was gotten out: thus with Gods helpe she defended the violence of the first brunt of these three hundred men. The Minion being past out, they came aboord the Jesus, which also with very much a doe and the losse of manie of our men were defended and kept out. Then there were also two other ships that assaulted the Jesus at the same instant, so that she had hard getting loose, but yet with some time we had cut our headfastes and gotten out by the sternefastes.

“Nowe when the Jesus and the Minion were gotten about two shippes length from the Spanish fleete the fight beganne so hotte on all sides that within one houre the Admirall of the Spaniards was supposed to be sunke, their Viceadmirall burned, and one other of their principall ships supposed to be sunke, so that the shippes were little able to annoy us.” But the guns on the island which had fallen into the Spaniards’ hands, were worked with direful results. All the masts and yards of the “Jesus” were so cut by their shot that “there was no hope to carrie her away”; and one of the small ships was sunk. Thereupon it was decided to bring the battered “Jesus” to the land side of the “Minion” and use her as a defence for the “Minion” against the batteries, till night, and then to shift as much of her provisions and other necessities to the “Minion” as time would permit, and abandon her. But just as the “Jesus” had been so placed alongside the “Minion,” suddenly the Spaniards had “fired two great shippes which were comming directly with” them. Having no means to avoid the fire this “bredde among our men a marvellous feare, so that some sayd let us depart with the Minion, other said, let us see whither [whether] the winde will carrie the fire from us.” Then “the Minions men which had alwayes their sayles in a readinesse, thought to make sure worke, and so without either consent of the Captaine or Master cut their saile, so that very hardly I was received into the Minion. The most part of the men that were left alive in the Jesus made shift and followed the Minion in a small boat, the rest which the little boate was not able to receive, were inforced to abide the mercie of the Spaniards (which I doubt was very little) so that with the Minion only and the Judith [Drake’s little bark] we escaped.”

Throughout the engagement Hawkins was at the fore, and his coolness was superb, as this dramatic incident at the height of the action, quaintly related by one of the survivors, Job Hartop, shows: "Our Generall couragiously cheered up his souldiers and gunners, and called to Samuel his page for a cup of Beere, who brought it to him in a silver cup; and hee, drinking it to all men, willed the gunners to stand by their ordnance lustily like men. He had no sooner set the cup out of his hand but a demy Culverin shot stroke away the cup and a Coopers plane that stoode by the maine mast, and ranne out on the other side of the ship; which nothing dismaied our Generall, for he ceased not to incourage us, saying ‘feare nothing, for God who hath preserved me from this shot, will also deliver us from these traitours and villaines.’"

That night the “Minion” rode only two “bow-shootes” off from the Spanish ships with her crowded company. During the night the “Judith” "forsake" them in their “great miserie,” as Hawkins wrote; but it was afterward stated that she had lost sight of the “Minion” in the confusion of the disaster. The following morning the “Minion” attained an island about a mile from the scene of the furious action, and the fugitives hoped for a little relief. But here the dreaded north wind took them; “and being left onely with two ankers and two cables (for in this conflict we lost three cables and two ankers),” they “thought alwayes upon death which ever was present.” On the next day, however, the “weather waxed reasonable” and they again set sail. For fourteen days “with many sorowful hearts” they wandered about the gulf till hunger enforced them to seek the land. At this time such were their straits that “hides were thought very good meat, rats, cats, mice, and dogs, none escaped that might be gotten, parrats and monkeyes that were had in great price, were thought there very profitable if they served the turne [of] one dinner.” They at length came to land in the bottom of the gulf, but it afforded them no haven of relief or place where they could repair the “sore beaten” ship. But they were able to take on a supply of fresh water. Here a number desired to remain and take their chances in the unknown country. Accordingly Hawkins divided the crowded company. “Such as were willing to land I put them apart, and such as were desirous to go homewardes I put apart, so that they were indifferently parted a hundred of one side and a hundred of the other side: these hundred men we set a land with all diligence in this little place beforesaid, which being landed, we determined there to take in fresh water, and so with our little remaine of victuals to take the sea.”

They departed hence with their lighter load on the sixteenth of October. A month later they were “clear from the coast of the Indies and out of the channel and gulf of Bahama.” Afterward approaching the “cold country” many of the company “oppressed with famine” died, while those that were left “grew into such weaknesses” that they were scarcely able to manage the ship. Shortly new perils came upon them. “The winde alwayes ill for us to recover England, we determined to goe with Galicia in Spaine, with intent there to relieve our companie and other extreame wantes. And being arrived the last day of December in a place neere unto Vigo called Ponte Vedra, our men with excesse of fresh meate grew into miserable diseases, and died a great part of them. This matter was borne out as long as it might be, but in the end although there were none of our men suffered to goe a land, yet by accesse of the Spaniards our feeblenesse was knowen to them. Whereupon they ceased not to seeke by all meanes to betray us.” To escape this danger they made with all speed for Vigo. Here at last fortune favoured them. With the help of some English ships in this port and “twelve fresh men” they “repaired their wants” sufficiently to complete the voyage; and on the twenty-fifth of January, 1568/9 the “Minion” entered Mounts Bay, Cornwall, and the worn and shattered survivors were at home.

“If all the miseries and troublesome affaires of this sorowful voyage should be perfectly and throughly written,” Hawkins opined in closing his narration, “there should neede a painefull man with his pen, and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deathes of the Martyrs.”

The tribulations of the hundred and more men who were landed in the Gulf of Mexico to shift for themselves, and the marvellous adventures of those who lived through awful hardships, were related in large detail by three of them: Miles Philips, David Ingram, and Job Hartop. The tales of Philips and Hartop fill many of Hakluyt’s ample pages. Both supplement Hawkins’s official report of the San Juan d’Ulloa affair in small particulars. Philips told of miseries sustained by himself and companions among savage people; of their ultimate falling into the Spaniards’ hands; of how they were worked as slaves; how they were reviled as “English dogs and Lutheran heretics,” suffered the Inquisition, which was brought into “New Spain” while they were there, and were hardly used in the “religious houses”; and how some of them escaped after years of bondage. Philips also told of meeting in the city of Mexico the English hostages whom Hawkins had given at San Juan d’Ulloa. They were there prisoners in the viceroy’s house. After four months’ imprisonment they were sent to Spain, where, Philips had heard it “credibly reported,” many of them died “with the cruel handling of the Spaniards in the Inquisition house.” In Mexico, too, and at the viceroy’s house, Captain Barret, the captured master of the “Jesus,” was found. He also was afterward sent to Spain, and suffered the Inquisition; and at the last that Philips had heard, he was condemned to be burned, and with him another of Hawkins’s men named John Gilbert. Philips got back to England and told his story in 1582. Hartop was one of the gunners of the “Jesus.” The sum of his experiences covered twenty-three years, and included two years’ imprisonment in Mexico; a year in an Inquisition house in Spain; twelve years in the galleys; four years in the “everlasting prison remidilesse” with the “coat of St. Andrews cross on his back”; and three years a “drudge” to the treasurer of the king’s mint. Ingram’s experiences were the most marvellous of all, according to his narration, and the things that he saw, or imagined he saw, were amazing. He told of travelling with two companions afoot along the coast of North America, from the Gulf of Mexico to near Cape Breton. He averred that he “never continued in any one place above three or four days, saving in the city of Balma,” wherever that may have been, where he tarried about a week. He saw fair dwellings topped with “banquetting houses” built with “pillars of massy silver and crystal”; many strange peoples; wondrous beasts, elephants, a “monster beast twice as big as a horse,” another “bigger than a bear,” with neither head nor neck, the eyes and mouth in the breast; and many strange birds, “thrice as big as an eagle and beautiful to behold.” Hakluyt gave his story in the first edition of the Principal Navigations, but left it out of the later editions, because, as Purchas in his Pilgrimies afterward explained, of some of its “incredibilities”: the “reward of lying,” Purchas observes, “being not to be believed in truths.”

Hawkins made no more voyages for a period of two decades. In 1572 he was returned to Parliament from Plymouth, and the next year was made treasurer of the navy. He was a vice-admiral in the fleet against the Spanish Armada (1588), commanding the “Victory,” and he was created a knight for his effective services in that great engagement. His last voyage was made in 1595, again with Drake, and once more against the Spanish West Indies: and there he died, at Porto Rico, on the twelfth of November that year.

Drake returned from the bitter experience at San Juan d’Ulloa the implacable foe of Spaniards. After fruitless efforts to obtain compensation from Spain for his losses in the San Juan affair, he determined on a campaign of revenge, and in 1570 he was found again at sea on the forerunner of astonishing voyages of reprisal.