Sir George Rooke, commanding the British fleet at the battle of Vigo Bay.
After this, the hoards of the most notorious and hard-working pirates seem picayune, trifling, shabby, the small change of the age of buried treasure. Why Signor Iberti is so cock-sure of his figures, and how that wondrous treasure fleet was lost in Vigo Bay is a story worth telling if there be any merit in high adventures, hard fighting, and the tang of salty seas in the days when the world was young. No more than nine years after the first voyage of Columbus, galleons laden with treasure were winging it from the West Indies to Spain, and this golden stream was flowing year by year until the time of the American Revolution. The total was to be counted not in millions but in billions, and this prodigious looting of the New World gave to Spain such wealth and power that her centuries of greatness were literally builded upon foundations of ingots and silver bars.
Before Sir Francis Drake sailed into the Caribbean, the Dutch and English had been playing at the great game of galleon hunting, but their exploits had been no more than vexations, and the security of the plate fleets was not seriously menaced until "El Draque" spread terror and destruction down one coast of the Americas and up the other, from Nombre de Dios to Panama. Heaven alone knows how many great galleons he shattered and plundered, but from the San Felipe and the Cacafuego he took two million dollars in treasure, and he numbered his other prizes by the score. Martin Frobisher carried the huge East India galleon Madre de Dios by boarding in the face of tremendous odds, the blood running from her scuppers, and was rewarded with $1,250,000 worth of precious stones, ebony, ivory, and Turkish carpets.
During the period of the English Commonwealth, Admiral Stayner pounded to pieces a West Indian treasure fleet of eight sail, and from one of them took two millions in silver, while Blake fought his way into the harbor of Teneriffe and destroyed another splendid argosy under the guns of the forts. It is recorded that thirty-eight wagons were required to carry the gold and jewels thus obtained from Portsmouth to London. The records of the British Admiralty have preserved a memorandum of the prize money distributed to the officers and men of the Active and Favorite from the treasures taken in the Hermione galleon off Cadiz in 1762, and it is a document to make a modern mariner sigh for the days of his forefathers. Here is treasure finding as it used to flourish:
The Admiral and the Commander of the Fleet.... $324,815
The Captain of the _Active_................... 332,265
Each of three Commissioned Officers........... 65,000
" " Eight Warrant Officers................ 21,600
" " Twenty Officers....................... 9,030
" " 150 Seamen and Marines................ 2,425
The Captain of the _Favorite_................. 324,360
Each of 2 Commissioned Officers............... 64,870
" " 77 Warrant Officers................... 30,268
" " 15 Petty Officers..................... 9,000
" " 100 Seamen and Marines................ 2,420
In 1702 it happened that no treasure fleet had returned to Spain for three years, and the gold and silver and costly merchandise were piling up at Cartagena and Porto Bello and Vera Cruz waiting for shipment. Spain was torn with strife over the royal succession, and inasmuch as the king claimed as his own one-fifth of all the treasure coming from the New World, the West India Company and the officials of the treasury kept the galleons away until it should be known who had the better right to the cargoes. Moreover, the high seas were perilous for the passage of treasure ships, what with the havoc wrought by the cursed English men-of-war and privateers, not to mention the buccaneers of San Domingo and the Windward Islands who had a trick of storming aboard a galleon from any crazy little craft that would float a handful of them.
Timidly the galleons delayed until a fleet of French men-of-war was sent out to convey them home, and at length this richest argosy that ever furrowed blue water, freighted with three years' treasure from the mines, made its leisurely way into mid-ocean by way of the Azores, bound to the home port of Cadiz. There were forty sail in all, seventeen of the plate fleet, under Don Manuel de Velasco, and twenty-three French ships-of-the-line and frigates obeying the Admiral's pennant of the Count of Chateaurenaud.