On August 12, 1553, not quite a month after Mary’s accession, the little squadron consisting of two ships and a pinnace set sail from Portsmouth. The ships were the Lion, which had made the two Barbary voyages, and of which Wyndham was part owner, and the Primrose, the pinnace being named the Moon. The two last-mentioned belonged to the navy and were lent for the expedition.[[265]] The three vessels were manned by 140 men, including several of the merchants who had ‘adventured’ the voyage. Most of them were destined never to return. They touched first at Madeira, where wines were bought and duly paid for. Here they encountered a great Portuguese galleon, full of men and guns, expressly sent to prohibit their voyage; but, on a closer view, she refrained from interfering with them, and they proceeded unmolested. At this point the disagreements between Wyndham and Pinteado began. Eden implies that hitherto they had had equal authority, the fleet ‘having two captains’, an improbable arrangement. However that may have been, Wyndham was henceforth supreme, and was evidently backed by the officers and crews, while the merchants, if we are to believe Eden, sided with Pinteado. Voyaging in leisurely fashion so as not to arrive on the coast before the end of the hot season, and touching at various islands on the way, they at length reached the River of Sestos in the westernmost part of Guinea, known as the Grain Coast (the modern Liberia). They did not tarry to load the ‘grains’ of the district, although cargoes of them were frequently brought to Europe by the Portuguese;[[266]] but, ‘by the persuasion or rather inforcement of this tragical captain’, they pushed on to the Gold Coast, and there traded on either side of the Castle of Mina, the head-quarters of the Portuguese.
The position of the latter on the Guinea coast at this time somewhat resembled that of the English and French on the coast of Coromandel at the opening of Clive’s career, with the exception, of course, that the Portuguese officials were the servants of the Government and not of a trading company. There was no effective occupation of the hinterland or even of the entire coast, but at various places along the latter were Portuguese forts and trading stations, of which Mina, not far from the modern Cape Coast Castle, was the chief. Other places on the coast were ruled over by native chiefs in a state of vassallage to the Portuguese, whose hold over them was not sufficiently rigorous to prevent them from trading with the English and French. Thus there was no colony in the sense in which the word was applied to the Spanish settlements in America, but merely a chain of commercial ‘factories’. Liberty of trade among the Portuguese themselves was restricted to those who had the royal licence for that purpose, a fact which redoubled their annoyance at the invasion of their preserves by others.
Wyndham did not touch at Mina itself, but exchanged his wares with the native chiefs, obtaining in all about 150 lb. weight of gold, a sum which in itself would have cleared all the expenses of the expedition and have paid a handsome profit besides. Eden asserts that it was Wyndham’s unbalanced brain which then caused him to leave this lucrative trade and push on to Benin to seek pepper. But, judging from the accounts of later voyages, it is probable that no more gold was then forthcoming, or that the demand for English goods had slackened. Only one other expedition of which we have particulars secured more than 150 lb. of gold, the supply being limited; and the natives were always very grasping and prone to take offence. The record of Wyndham’s career certainly gives no ground for the supposition that he would forsake the certainty of gold for the possibility of pepper.
The decision to make for Benin was the prelude to a series of disasters. Pinteado opposed it owing to the lateness of the season, and a violent scene was the result. ‘Wyndham ... fell into a sudden rage, reviling the said Pinteado, calling him Jew, with other opprobrious words, saying: This whoreson Jew hath promised to bring us to such places as are not, or as he cannot bring us unto: but if he do not, I will cut off his ears and nail them to the mast.’ Pinteado submitted, and piloted the fleet to the river of Benin,[[267]] up which he himself with Nicholas Lambert and other merchants proceeded for some sixty leagues in the pinnace. Having completed this distance, they left the pinnace and travelled thirty miles inland to the town of a native king, by whom they were civilly received. The king could speak Portuguese, and promised to buy all their merchandise in exchange for pepper. In the course of a month eighty tons of pepper were collected, and the merchants were assured that more would be obtained until the fleet should be fully laden.
In the meantime the inaction and the climate were producing dire effects on the crews left at the mouth of the river. The men ate without moderation of the tropical fruits, and drank the liquor exuding from the trunks of palm trees, ‘and in such extreme heat running continually into the water, ... than which nothing is more dangerous, were thereby brought into swellings and agues’, so that they sickened and died at a terrible rate, sometimes four or five in a day. This could not go on for long without entailing utter extermination to an expedition which numbered only 140 men to begin with. Therefore, a month having elapsed, Wyndham sent word to Pinteado and the others to return immediately, contenting themselves with such cargo as the pinnace could bring down. But they failed to comply, and wrote instead, telling of the quantity of pepper which they hoped to secure. Wyndham replied with a peremptory order to come back at once, under threat of being left behind; then, in desperation at their callous disregard of the sufferings of the crews, he lost control of himself and ‘all raging, brake up Pinteado’s cabin, brake open his chests, spoiled such provision of cold stilled waters and suckets as he had provided for his health, and left him nothing, neither of his instruments to sail by, nor yet of his apparel; and in the meantime falling sick, himself died also.’
On receipt of the second summons Pinteado had started for the coast to expostulate, the other merchants still remaining up the river. Before his arrival Wyndham was dead. The surviving officers and men were thoroughly exasperated, and gave him a very bad time with copious abuse and threats of violence. In vain he asked to be allowed to fetch his companions from the interior. They would stay for nothing, and refused even to let him remain behind with the ship’s boat and an old sail, with which he promised to bring Lambert and the others back to England. Eden’s account is very confused, and there is no mention of the pinnace having come down the river again, the messages having evidently been conveyed by smaller boats, possibly by natives. If the merchants still had the pinnace their case would not be altogether desperate. There is no information as to their ultimate fate.
Before commencing the homeward voyage one of the ships was abandoned and sunk for lack of men.[[268]] A week afterwards Pinteado, who had been degraded to a menial position, fell sick and died ‘from very pensiveness and thought, that struck him to the heart’; and when the remaining vessel at length reached Plymouth scarcely forty men were left of all those who had set forth.
The lessons enforced by the disasters of this voyage were taken well to heart by subsequent adventurers. The succeeding expeditions confined themselves to the Guinea coasts, and left Benin severely alone. They were also careful not to remain on the coast after the beginning of the season of extreme heat, and, as they probably took greater personal precautions against disease, we hear of very little mortality thenceforward. The importance of the information supplied by Pinteado cannot be overestimated. The arrival without a hitch on the Grain Coast, the successful trading in the neighbourhood of Mina, the finding of the native town 150 miles up the Benin river which none of the English had ever seen before, all point to the fact that the expedition was availing itself of the experience that the Portuguese had taken a century to gather. It is no wonder that Pinteado, lending himself to such a purpose, went in fear of his life, as his admirer tells us, from his own countrymen. No provocation can justify a man in betraying his country’s interests, and we cannot feel much commiseration for his melancholy end; he was a traitor receiving a traitor’s wages. Eden’s denunciations of Wyndham’s character as a commander are largely discounted by the fact that he was in command at all. He was a tried man, and his record was known; no company of merchants would have entrusted him with their lives and goods if he had been the irresponsible maniac whom Eden depicts. No doubt he was jealous of his authority, and rightly so, for a hazardous adventure cannot be conducted on republican lines. In the days when success at sea depended primarily on the captain’s personal powers of discipline, harshness was often the only justifiable course, as Drake and many another were to prove.
Terrible as had been the personal sufferings in Wyndham’s last voyage, the commercial possibilities of the Guinea coast had been proved to be most encouraging. A strong syndicate was therefore formed to send out another expedition in 1554, including among others the names of Sir George Barnes, Sir John Yorke, Thomas Locke, Anthony Hickman, and Edward Castlyn. Five vessels were prepared—the Trinity, 140 tons, the John Evangelist, 140, the Bartholomew, 90, and two pinnaces, one of which foundered before getting clear of the English coast—the whole being placed under the command of John Locke. Locke was a merchant rather than a sailor, and the arrangement was thus analogous to that which obtained then and long afterwards in the navy, when the captain of a ship was commonly a soldier, the master being responsible for the handling of the vessel. This was the same John Locke who had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the previous year, of which Hakluyt prints a very entertaining account. Eden again supplies the story of this voyage and, having no quarrel with any individual concerned, gives a much more intelligible description of what occurred.[[269]]
The squadron sailed from the Thames on October 11, 1554, was detained for a fortnight at Dover by adverse winds, and again for three or four days at Rye. After touching once more at Dartmouth the English coast was finally lost sight of on the night of November 1. Thence a fair passage was made to Guinea, the first point of which, Cape Mensurado, was sighted on December 21. Next day they entered the River of Sestos, the principal haven on the Grain Coast, and remained there for a week, trading for grains. Five more days were spent at the mouth of another stream, the Rio Dulce, 75 miles to the south-eastward, and altogether 630 butts of grains were obtained. On January 3, 1555, the expedition made sail along the coast to the eastward, passing Cape Palmas which marks the division between the Grain Coast and the Ivory Coast. Apparently no stay was made at the latter on the outward passage, for by the 11th they had reached Cape Tres Puntas, which similarly divides the Ivory Coast from the Gold Coast. Fifteen miles to the west of Cape Tres Puntas there was a Portuguese fort named Arra. Their head-quarters, the Castle of El Mina, lay about 90 miles to the eastward of the same cape, and well in the middle of the Gold Coast.