The actual fighting did not begin in the guise of recognised warfare for a very considerable time. Spain and England were at peace, each trying to humbug the other, but between Protestant and Catholic it was otherwise. Armed cruisers manned by angry Protestants made their appearance in the Narrow Seas, and whenever they got a chance fell upon Catholic ships and avenged the sufferings of their fellow-heretics in a fashion at once prompt and pitiless, and this at length so exasperated Philip that he closed his ports to English trade, and Drake’s occupation was gone. Better, in truth, had it been for Philip if he had left him undisturbed in his business!
He sold his little vessel, went to Plymouth, and entered the service of two kinsmen of his, one of whom was soon to prove somewhat of an empire-maker in his own line and whose name, with certain others soon to be mentioned, was destined to go down to everlasting fame indissolubly linked with that of Francis Drake. This was Captain John Hawkins, and when the young trader reached Plymouth he had just come back with a shipload of gold and other precious things from his first venture in slave-trading, and now at least Drake, who was still a lad in his teens, must have heard something of the wonders of El Dorado. Yet, curiously enough, when Captain Hawkins went back he did not go with him. He sailed instead, as a sort of supercargo, in another of Hawkins’ ships to Biscay, and there a momentous revelation awaited him, as though to guide him on the path of his destiny.
At San Sebastian about a score of English sailors, once strong and stalwart men of Devon, crept out of the dungeons of the Inquisition and took passage with him home. King Philip had taken off his embargo now, and these men were the remnant of the crew of a Plymouth ship which he had seized in port when the embargo was laid on. The others had rotted to death during the six months that he had bestowed his hospitality upon them. We can imagine what talks they had on the way home, and no doubt El Draque bore the stories of these forlorn mariners well in mind on that most memorable day when he “singed the King of Spain’s beard” at Cadiz.
John Hawkins came back from his second voyage richer than ever, and now all the mariners of the South Coast were beginning to dream golden dreams which were soon to become yet more golden deeds, and King Philip, to whom all such ventures were the flattest piracy, began to fear for his monopoly and instructed his ambassador in London to drop the hint that foreign trade with the Indies was forbidden, upon which, foolishly enough, or perhaps not knowing their own true strength, Queen Bess’s councillors backed down and forbade John Hawkins to start again.
He, obediently enough, stayed at home, but a certain George Lovell got together an expedition and slipped out to sea, westward bound. With him went Francis Drake, at length to see for the first time the blue waters and green shores of El Dorado. This time, however, it proved anything but golden for him or his companions, for they came back with shattered ships and still worse broken fortunes. They had drawn a blank in the great lottery which half Europe was wanting to gamble in.
Nothing daunted, he shipped again, this time with George Fenner, bound for Guiana. Again, financially speaking, the voyage ended in disaster, but there was one incident in it destined to bear good fruit. A big Portuguese galleasse, backed up by six gunboats, tried to enforce the prohibition against foreign trade. Fenner had one ship and a pinnace, and with these he fought the “Portugals” and thoroughly convinced them by the logic of shot and steel that he was not the sort of man to be prohibited from doing anything he wanted to do.
This forgotten action is really one of great importance. It was Francis Drake’s first taste of fighting, which in itself means a good deal, but it was also the beginning of that lordly and magnificent contempt which the English mariners of that day were soon to feel for all enemies, no matter how strong they might seem. It was this spirit which a few years later was to take Sir Richard Grenville
“With his hundred men on deck and his ninety sick below,”
into the midst of the fifty-three Spanish ships which he fought for an afternoon and a night before he surrendered so sorely against his will and fell dead of his wounds on the deck of the Spanish flagship. It was this, too, which, when that long seven days’ fight against the Armada was raging and roaring up the Channel, brought the flag of the Spanish Rear-Admiral down with a run just because the Little Pirate stamped his foot on the deck of that same Revenge and said that he was Francis Drake and had no time to parley.
Meanwhile the rumblings of the war-storm in Europe had been growing louder. The Netherlanders were at last turning on their torturers, Darnley had been murdered and Mary Queen of Scots put in prison, so Gloriana, feeling herself somewhat at leisure, took a hand in the next buccaneering expedition. It may be noted here, by the way, that there was no more ardent buccaneer and slave-trader in her dominions than Good Queen Bess herself. She lent ships though she withheld her commission, and her pirates did the rest. If disaster overtook them or if the Spanish Minister raged against their doings she promptly disowned them and felt sorry for her ships. But if they came back happily filled to the hatches with plundered treasure, she took her dividends and lent more ships.