Tropics Bound E-Book

James Seay Dean

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

In the popular imagination, English colonisation in the Americas began with the founding of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 (which recently celebrated its 400th anniversary). But the focus of English voyages to the far side of the Atlantic for 100 years before that had been much further south, in defiance of Pope Alexander VI's decree that South America would be divided between Spain and Portugal. Tropics Bound examines not only the oft-forgotten history of this period of English exploration between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, but also looks at the voyages themselves, through the eyes of the sailors who faced that daunting journey. It is a story of adventure, hardship and courage. Written by an historian with a practical knowledge of seamanship, this is an important contribution to our understanding of the early period of (failed) English attempts at colonisation.

Leseprobe

Tropics Bound

Tropics Bound

ELIZABETH’S SEADOGS ON THE SPANISH MAIN

JAMES SEAY DEAN

To my sons, Christopher and Alexander

For a man to have lived he has to have planted a tree, raised a son, and built a boatPortuguese proverb

First published 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© James Seay Dean, 2010, 2013

The right of James Seay Dean to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9668 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Timeline

Introduction

one

Brave New World, 1516–68

two

Storm Swell, 1569–76

three

Near Gale, 1577–81

four

Severe Gale, 1582–88

five

Profit in Piracy, 1589–91

six

Indigo, Sugar, Penguins, 1591–93

seven

A Daintie at Dear Cost, 1593–95

eight

Committed to the Deep, 1595–96

nine

Taken at the Flood, 1596–1603

ten

No Scallop Shell of Quiet, 1604–10

eleven

Maidenheads Lost, 1611–181

twelve

Epilogue: After 1619

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone

John Donne, ‘The Good Morrow’, published 1633

O my America! My new-found land

John Donne, ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’, published 1633

He that will sail without danger must never come upon the main sea

Seventeenth-century proverb

PREFACE

Tropics Bound recounts the largely forgotten English trade voyages to Latin America in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the reign of Henry VIII to that of Charles I. Those voyages, nearly 100 of them – at least, those that were recorded – were made from about 1520 to 1620. The words of the Elizabethan seamen who sailed on those voyages provide vivid accounts of storms, leaky ships, broken masts, foul water and rotten meat, malaria and dysentery, Spanish gunfire, exotic fruits, Edenic forests and meadows, cargoes of hides, sugar and ginger, and sometimes pearls, silver and gold. They are tales told from the deck, from both the height of the quarterdeck and forward before the mast.

This is a seaman’s book that chronicles 100 years of English voyages to the American tropics lying between Capricorn and Cancer. It pieces together what historians from Hakluyt to the present usually leave out: the sea passages themselves. It tells how critical the seizing of a Portuguese or Spanish pilot and his charts could be, and how essential it was to learn the currents, magnetic variation and the ways of hurricanes in the Caribbean. Beyond the ocean passages, this book limits time ashore to how far a ship’s boat could navigate upriver with fresh water and enough powder and shot, or how far men could march for a few days through mangrove swamps on ship’s biscuit, salt pork and tropical fruits. It documents how trading was often done at gunpoint or on a lonely beach at midnight. The book draws on sources from English and Spanish archives and includes mariners’ journals, Admiralty depositions, letters and official reports. It includes details from the sailors themselves as they challenged Portuguese and Spanish rule in the name of God, England and Profit.

This account deals with what is important at sea. Sailors then, as now, wanted a sound, sea-kindly ship, well-provisioned with supplies, food and water, an experienced crew and captain, an able navigator, a profitable cargo, a healthy ship and a swift passage out and back. Tropics Bound is principally nautical history, not political history. It is a book that Captain John Smith or Henry Mainwaring would recognise; the sort of book in which the experience of Hawkyns, Ralegh and Drake is to be found. It deals with the practicalities of sixteenth-century voyaging to the tropics, of sailing there and back safely and profitably. At sea and on foreign shores, the politics of Whitehall and Seville were distant matters that had to give way to hurricanes, mosquitoes, enemy broadsides and dragging anchors.

These pages chart the Elizabethans’ efforts to establish an England in the tropics, as told in the words of her seadogs. Research for this book benefited from a year as Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford (2005–06) and earlier research fellowships at Exeter University and the University of East Anglia (2000–01). Behind the words are the volumes and manuscripts of English and American libraries: the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library, London; The National Archives, Kew; the Wellcome Institute Library, London; the Library of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; the Chester Nimitz Library at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis; the John Carter Brown Library, Providence; the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Library of Congress, Washington.

Too many of the British and American popular history accounts and often even major museum exhibitions skip over those hundred years and argue the assumption of success forward from Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620 – a Virgilian fallacy of manifest destiny. A few scholars know otherwise, those such as Sir Julian S. Corbett, Louis B. Wright, K.R. Andrews, I.A. Wright, Samuel Eliot Morison, D.B. Quinn, A.N. Ryan, James A. Williamson and J.H. Parry, and more recently, David Loades and N.A.M. Rodger. These historians paint with a broad brush in the context of the greater English colonial and naval expansion. A finer brush is that of the Hakluyt Society, which for many years has been publishing scores of texts of the accounts to the tropics, editions such as those of I.A. Wright, and continued in those of Kenneth R. Andrews and Joyce Lorimer. No one, however, has brought that detail to bear on the larger question of England’s drive for a sun-drenched land of hope and glory.

Like the historians, biographers of the Elizabethan seadogs have painted detailed portraits of the main figures: the three generations of Hawkyns’ through James A. Williamson and Harry Kelsey; Ralegh, by A.L. Rowse, Raleigh Trevelyan and Stephen Coote; Drake, by Harry Kelsey and John Sugden; Frobisher, by James McDermott; and Cumberland, by Richard T. Spence. Essential nautical considerations have been researched by D.W. Waters (navigation), Arthur Nelson and Ian Friel (naval ships, men and organisation), and J.J. Keevil (naval medicine).

Yet despite these excellent efforts, no one has written a maritime history seen through sailors’ eyes that draws together these aspects of a century of early English voyages to the tropical Americas, and it is a story worth telling – a sea story of adventure, hardship and character; of a paradise lost and regained.

The Prudent Mariner

The reader of these Elizabethan voyages needs some local knowledge to pilot the waters safely. Tudor, Stuart and Continental texts have been silently modernised and made consistent for the sake of the reader, though the syntax, vocabulary and punctuation of the originals are largely kept. Scholars will find that the notes and bibliography can take them to original sources. In the interest of clarity and where several versions are treated together, notes are at times flagged at the start of a passage. Facts often differ according to the source. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the English and the French often see things in different ways. Generally, the Spanish account, written ashore and with more time, is more accurate and detailed than the English one, written in haste, at sea. Editor Hakluyt’s telling is pressed by his own time and place, as in being most circumspect about Drake’s circumnavigation, since England and Spain were at war when he was publishing his Navigations, first in 1589, then in 1598–1600. Similarly, Purchas’ Pilgrimes, when published in 1625, appeared at the time England was beginning to expand its colonies into the Caribbean. In writing this book the author has chosen what he judges the most probable version of events. And, like any good navigator, the author finds course corrections welcome and essential, especially as new facts in this period come to light.

Then there is the matter of hours, days and years. A seaman measures time traditionally from noon to noon, not as the landsman, whose civil time begins the day at midnight. In this book the landsman’s time is generally followed. Calendar dates from the English documents are given in Old Style (the Julian Calendar), and Spanish and Portuguese ones generally in New Style (Gregorian), which in this period moves Spanish dates ten days on from the English. The English did not adopt the NS calendar until 1752, the year it also made 1 January the start of the new year. Until then both 1 January and 25 March (Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, a date close to the vernal equinox on 20 or 21 March) were variously observed as the year’s beginning.

Measurements also differ in this period. Latitude (height) was commonly taken, longitude not so. To measure latitude first the astrolabe, then the jack-staff and back-staff were used. Minutes and seconds of latitude were of course then divided by sixty. Tons (as in the size of a ship) derived from the number of barrels (tuns) that could be carried in the hold. Different countries calculated tonnage differently. Distances were measured in leagues both at sea and on land. (One league is 3 nautical miles; 3.18M, nautical miles, are approximately one minute of latitude.) At sea, distance and heading were recorded on a traverse board, hence so many boards sailed. Barometric pressure was not yet measured (Toricelli’s discoveries were in the 1640s). Beaufort’s scheme of wind forces came in the nineteenth century. Depths were measured in fathoms by a sounding lead. (One fathom equals 6ft.) Though tide tables were well known in European waters, in the Caribbean there were none (a critical fact for Drake, Richard Hawkyns and Cumberland, even though the tidal range was not as great as in parts of England).

Ship types differ in this period from now. Brigantines, frigates, pinnaces, flyboats, galleys, shallops, galleons, caravels, carracks – these and more were something else to the Elizabethan sailor and were different still to the Spanish sailor. Whatever the country, piloting, navigational and sailing terms are now often obsolete (these are usually explained contextually). If not, or if the reader wants more, then he or she could consult the OED or the Oxford Companion to Ships & the Sea, Rogers’ Origins of Sea Terms, Webb and Manton’s Yachtsman’s Ten Language Dictionary, or for often obsolete terms, Admiral Smyth’s Sailor’s Word Book. Ranks within fleets differ too. Some of the same titles are used on land as well as at sea. In this period the English call both the naval commander and his vessel the admiral, next in command (and vessel) the vice-admiral, then the rear admiral. Here, for clarity, Spanish ranks have been rendered the English way.

The matter of names is worth a mention. Ralegh was commonly the spelling for the name, though Raleigh, Raley and Gualterral, as the Spanish heard it, are variants. Similarly, Drake appears in Spanish as el Draque. Place names generally follow their present form, though names, such as ‘Nueva España’, have been preferred over New Spain or México. The ‘Spanish Main’, however, may also be called ‘Tierra Firme’.

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the same vessel may be listed as having different tonnages. In this period measurement of tonnage varied from location, from England to Spain and Portugal (tons differed); the decade noted (as ships grew leaner their cargo capacity in tons decreased); and the purpose of the measurement (e.g. to inflate an investor’s stake in a voyage). Originally a ship’s burden indicated how many tuns (barrels) of wine she could carry. Later in the period, tonnage in England was calculated by multiplying length (in feet) by maximum beam, by the depth of the hold below the main deck, that sum divided by 100. The result was her tonnage, or tons burden (used for both merchant and warships). Such was Matthew Barker’s Builder’s Measurement (BM), the standard used from 1582 until 1652. This calculation allowed tons burden or net tonnage (cargo capacity) to be distinguished from gross tonnage (total internal volume of the vessel). Later still, displacement tonnage was applied to warships – the actual weight of ship, crew, stores, fuel, water that displaced that weight (volume) of the sea by the vessel. Merchant ships measured deadweight tonnage – the weight added to the ship (cargo, etc.) to bring her down to her waterline mark.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Tropics Bound first began years ago with the encouragement of Louis B. Wright, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. Since then, it has benefited from the judgement of the late Malcolm Robinson, Royal Navy, Brixham, Devon; Professor Barry Gough, Victoria, British Columbia; Professor Michael Duffy, Exeter University; and Dr James Casey, University of East Anglia; and the support of Dr Ralph Waller, Principal of Harris Manchester College, Oxford. There were summers with National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island; at Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut, and elsewhere; and many hours over the years at the Chester Nimitz Library, the Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library and the Wellcome libraries, London. Shipwrights from Bristol working on Cabot’s Matthew have had their say. US Naval Academy instructor Aubrey Smith taught me celestial navigation. Many sailing ship captains under whom I have served have shown me the way of a ship, including the late Ulrich Pruesse, Roger Ghys (co-author with me of another book) and captain of the Mercator, the Belgian training vessel, Captain James McDonald, US Coast Guard; and finally the late Captain Sloan Wilson, USCG and Captain Serge Yonov, US Navy. Nearly fifteen years of sailing the Caribbean and some eighteen years of summers and several years in Brazil (in part as a Fulbright Fellow) have brought a tropical perspective.

Especially valuable have been my editors, Camilla Turner in Victoria, British Columbia, and Simon Hamlet and others, most notably Christine McMorris and Abigail Wood, at The History Press, Stroud, measuring this text from trough to crest, to gauge what will make a book both pithy and pleasant for the reader. Sailing’s editor Wm F. Schanen, production manager Jane Farnham, graphic designers Stephanie Foelker and Brook Berth, and features editor Tim Gregoire, as well as John Lawson, former editor of Anglia Afloat, have brought the present beauty of sail to often dry hard tack. At the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Dean of Arts & Sciences Donald Cress and photo/graphics manager Donald Lintner provided help. Librarian Sue Halloran, at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, showed me how to navigate the libraries of academe. Luso-Brazilian scholar, the late Professor Alexandrino Severino Vanderbilt, provided Luso-Brazilian matter. By sea and by land others have in their way seen this book through: in England are Sheila Robinson, Ian Gordon, Robin Wilshaw, Gerald Seymour and Clare Ford-Wille. In America, Maria Angélica Guimarães Lopes years ago heard the first thought. My first mate, Mary Zielke, who knows the feel of the Atlantic swell, has seen it at its end. Credit them and others for any felicities, the author for errors. He welcomes any corrections to the log, for as Plutarch (and the Hanseatic League) believed, navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse (to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary).

TIMELINE

1516–17

Sebastian Cabot and William Pert sail to Hispaniola. These first English ships in the Caribbean are fired on by Spanish.

1530

William Hawkyns the Elder sails to Guinea and Brazil, trading ivory, pepper and brazilwood for English goods.

1531

William Hawkyns sails again to trade in Brazil, leaves Englishman in exchange for a Brazilian chief, who is presented to the English court at Whitehall and dines with Henry VIII.

1532

William Hawkyns makes third voyage to Brazil. Brazilian chief dies at sea. Profitable cargo in brazilwood. Sends other ships to Brazil in later years. Son John Hawkyns born 1532, and his relative, Francis Drake, born 1540. Southampton merchants expand Brazil trade.

1558

Elizabeth Tudor, on death of half-sister Mary, ascends English throne, returns England to Protestant faith. Their father, Henry VIII, had died in 1547, leaving the throne under a protectorate to Edward VI. On his death in 1553, the Crown had passed briefly to Lady Jane Grey, then to Catholic Mary Tudor, 1553–58. Walter Ralegh born c. 1552.

1562–63

John Hawkyns makes his first transatlantic voyage. Calls at Guinea, takes on slaves, ‘black gold’, then sells them and English goods to Spanish colonists in the Caribbean despite official Spanish prohibitions.

1564–65

John Hawkyns makes a second profitable slaving voyage to the Caribbean, similar to his first but now with royal support. Despite official embargoes, gets orders from Spanish colonists for more slaves and English goods.

1567–68

John Hawkyns and Francis Drake make a third slaving voyage to the Caribbean in six vessels, with royal support. Official Spanish resistance stiffens. Caught in storm, fleet seeks refuge in Nueva España’s port of San Juan de Ulúa, loses four of six ships to the Spanish: first important English-Spanish naval engagement in the Americas. Numerous voyages of reprisal follow.

1570

Francis Drake returns to Caribbean. ‘El Draque’ plunders Spanish settlements in voyages during 1571, 1572–73.

1577–80

Francis Drake transits the Strait of Magellan, raids Spain’s Pacific ports, captures the Cacafuego’s silver and gold, proclaims Nova Albion as English, seeks Northwest Passage, and returns to England by circumnavigating the globe westward, the second in history after Magellan’s ship.Voyage yields great profit. Queen Elizabeth I knights Drake.

1582

Richard Hakluyt publishes Divers Voyages, rebukes the English for allowing the Spanish and Portuguese to colonise the Americas exclusively, and proposes an English settlement in Florida. In 1584, makes appeal to Crown for colonisation in Discourse of Western Planting.

1584

Humphrey Gilbert sails under first colonial letters patent to found a colony in the Americas. On return voyage, Gilbert in the Squirrel is lost at sea. Elizabeth I knights Ralegh and transfers Gilbert’s patent to him.

1585

Drake commands royal fleet of more than two dozen ships and eight pinnaces to West Indies, sacks Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo and other ports. A prosperous voyage. Ralegh establishes English colony at Roanoke, Virginia – the doomed ‘Lost Colony’.

1586

George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, sails on the first of his twelve voyages, the first of three to the West Indies and South America.

1586–88

Thomas Cavendish circumnavigates the globe, third to do so after Magellan’s voyage and Drake’s. Raiding and piracy yield good profit.

1588

Spanish Armada, the ill-fated ‘Enterprise of England’, attempts invasion of England. Repulsed by English fleet led by Howard, Hawkyns, Drake, Grenville and others. Storm hits Spanish in North Sea. Hawkyns knighted.

1589

Richard Hakluyt publishes Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, first edition of England’s maritime prose epic.

1591

Privateers, more than eleven in a year, prey on Spanish shipping in the West Indies. Christopher Newport leads first of nine profitable privateering voyages to the Caribbean.

1593

Sir Richard Hawkyns, son of Sir John Hawkyns, transits Strait of Magellan and sails into the Pacific, the Mar del Sur. His Daintie fights hard but is outgunned by Spanish fleet. After years in captivity, he is ransomed, 1609.

1594

James Lancaster sails to Brazil, fights Portuguese in Bahia, engages in ‘trade at gunpoint’. In 1601 sails on ‘nutmeg voyage’ to the Spice Islands, fights the Dutch, returns with substantial profit. Sir Robert Dudley, courtier and later military engineer, sails for the Spanish Main, faces stiff opposition.

1595

Sir Walter Ralegh sails on his first transatlantic voyage to Orinoco River in Guiana, hoping the rumoured El Dorado will return him to Elizabeth’s favour. Ralegh is the first Englishman to penetrate South American mainland and plant a colony, ten years after his failed colony in Virginia (Roanoke) and twelve years before Jamestown, second permanent North American settlement by English, 1607, after St John’s, Newfoundland, in 1583. Sends subsequent expeditions to Guiana. Ralegh’s Guiana is the first of more than a dozen English colonies on the South American main over next twenty years.Years 1595–96 the most important years for England in the tropical Americas.

1595–96

Sir John Hawkyns and Sir Francis Drake, co-commanders under Elizabeth I, sail in armada of twenty-seven ships, six of which are hers. Before attacking San Juan, Hawkyns falls ill, dies and is buried at sea. Drake takes command and is repulsed at San Juan. He sails for Nombre de Dios, fails to seize gold and silver. Fever spreads through fleet. In middle of night, Drake dons battle armour, becomes delirious and dies of the bloody flux (probably dysentery). Buried at sea in lead coffin off Portobelo. Sir Thomas Baskerville takes command. Fleet limps home, her greatest commanders, Hawkyns and Drake, lost to disease. Voyage a disaster.

1597

Cumberland makes the last of his twelve voyages (three to the Caribbean). Sacks San Juan, Puerto Rico. His chaplain on board, Dr Layfield, describes detailed symptoms fitting those that had killed Hawkyns and Drake.

1598–1600

Hakluyt publishes the second edition in three volumes of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation. Affirms English maritime zeal, hardship, success in voyages worldwide. Draws attention to the Caribbean as England’s as-yet-unfulfilled destiny.

1601–06

David Middleton, William Parker and many others sail to Spanish Main, Caribbean and Florida, and take profitable cargoes. Charles Leigh furthers Ralegh’s Guiana. William Turner sails to Guiana, praises fertility of Caribbean islands. John Wilson reports sickness and death spreading in Guiana, while mariner/colonists increase in number on South American mainland and islands of the West Indies.

1603

Queen Elizabeth dies, James I (James VI of Scotland) accedes to English throne. Within four months, Ralegh is convicted of treason on dubious evidence and condemned to the Tower of London, remaining there for next fourteen years.

1604

Treaty of London signed, bringing official end to Anglo-Spanish War that began in 1585.

1607

Jamestown established in Chesapeake. Swampy site on James River breeds disease and dissention. Colony flounders, many die.

1608–11

Robert Harcourt sails to Guiana and Amazon. Prosperous colony, harmony with Indians.

1617–18

Ralegh released on parole from Tower in 1617 to sail for Guiana and bring back gold. Further proviso is not to antagonise Spanish. Contracts bloody flux, stays on board. Sends Lawrence Keymis ashore as commander. Ralegh’s firebrand first-born, Wat, attacks Spanish at the San Thomé settlement on the Orinoco, is killed. Keymis commits suicide. On return to England, Ralegh, last of Elizabeth’s great seadogs, is beheaded at the Tower, autumn 1618.

1620

Plimouth plantation, a religious undertaking by Protestant dissidents, founded in Massachusetts. After tenuous start, this colony becomes third permanent English colony in North America.

1623–38

Tropical English colonies established in West Indies, Gulf of México, Central and South America: at Somers Isles, on Bermuda, back in 1615 (outside tropical Americas); at Saint Christopher’s (St Kitts), 1623; Barbados, 1627; Henrietta (off Colombia), 1627; Antigua, Barbuda and Redonda, 1632; Suriname, 1633; St Lucia, 1638; Eleuthera, 1647 or 1648; and later, Belize, Trinidad, St Vincent, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Dominica and others. James I dies in 1625; his son Charles I accedes throne. Samuel Purchas publishes Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625, a sequel to Hakluyt’s work. In Treaty of Paris, 1763, Louis XV cedes Canada and more to England in exchange for the French islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique and a few others rich in sugar.

INTRODUCTION

Warm waters, palm trees and gold drew Elizabethan sailors to the American tropics. For nearly a century before the nascent English colonies of St John’s, Newfoundland (under Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 patent), Ralegh’s lost Roanoke on the North Carolina coast (1585), Jamestown,Virginia (1607) and Plymouth, Massachusetts (1620), English mariners had been sailing to the Caribbean and to the shores of Central and South America to trade, to make war on the Spanish, and to colonise an England there. This book is a chronicle history (by date) of those sixteenth-century voyages. It is a salt-encrusted tale told by those early seamen.

The earliest voyages date from 1516–17, when the first English ship reached the West Indies and immediately faced Spanish gunfire. This chronicle extends to 1618, when Ralegh’s Destiny returned to Guiana for gold and country, only for him to learn that his impetuous son Wat had been cut down by Spanish musket fire and his own hopes for a royal pardon were also cut off. Ralegh’s beheading in 1618 ended the line of Elizabethan seadogs; one that had included two generations of the Ralegh family, three of the Hawkyns’, three of the Drakes’, Martin Frobisher and George Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland.

When, in autumn 1618, Ralegh laid his head on the block to be executed for treason, England’s hope for a South American tropical empire also died. His paradise was lost. For 100 years the steamy dream of profit and pleasure had driven scores of ships westward to that warm band of the Americas, latitude 30º N to 30º S, long before permanent settlement in North America and English colonies in the Caribbean islands. That century from 1516 to 1618 was critical to later success. More than fourscore voyages made in those years produced a new world of seafaring history: trade, freedom, warfare, Nova Albion, palm trees and white sands, fetid swamps, Arawak remedies, fever, shipwreck, gold, tobacco, greed, Spanish broadsides, starvation, God and profit, England and St George. All these experiences, prosperous or disastrous, prepared the English colonists for their eventual settlement in the early seventeenth century in the West Indies and along the eastern North American mainland.

What was this tropical America? The waters include those of the northern coast of South America, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of México, collectively known then as the Ocean Sea (Mar Oceano), the Atlantic (Mar del Norte), or simply the Northern Sea. Tropical America further includes the coast of South America south to around Rio de la Plata. The Pacific was then known as the Southern Sea or the Mar del Sur, southern because it seemed to lie to the south of Panamá. The lands of the tropical Americas include Florida, the Caribbean islands, Central America, the northern and eastern coastlines of South America, and Baja California. The Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego figure as well. Though hardly tropical at latitude 52º S, that area was strategically important as part of England’s dream for an empire in South America. Similarly, California at latitude 35º N to 40º N, claimed by Drake as Nova Albion for England while he was exploring for the Northwest Passage, was part of that dream.

What of commercial conquest? If Portugal had posted factors in its outposts in India, why could England not do so in the tropical Americas? Commerce sent both countries to sea. For a marginal country without adequate resources in money and manpower, it was a cheap means to profit. Supporting England’s armies against France, then against Spain in Holland, had seriously drained the royal treasury, but with northern Europe’s financial centre shifting to London in the 1550s, joint stock companies formed in the City could begin to undertake costly foreign enterprise. A few English merchants established themselves in Nueva España (the land and coasts of México) and in Brazil, but they typically had married into the Iberian cultures. Such arrangements were rare. Most companies wanted the vertical structure of ownership of land, production and transportation from raw to finished product. The vital links to profit were the ships and the men who sailed them. Despite coming late to tropical America to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese presumption of exclusive rights to the New World, the seafarers show in their words their determination to make at least some portion of the Caribbean English-speaking.

That century of voyages to the tropics of the Americas was England’s first sustained transatlantic effort. The Tudor navies of Henry VII and much of Henry VIII’s had stayed close to England or, at best, had engaged in European coastal trading ranging from Portugal to North Sea ports. But beginning in the second decade of the sixteenth century, merchant ships began to set their main course for tropical latitudes between 30º N and 30º S, and by the start of the seventeenth century, these ships carried back the first profitable cargoes from England’s South American colonies along the banks of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. While Jamestown was struggling to survive and Plymouth was still in the future, these tropical colonies were profitably exporting, if on a small scale, various woods, dyes, linen and tobacco.

English voyages to the American tropics chart the Elizabethans’ illusions and later disillusion with establishing a presence there. Why did the dream of a tropical England along the Spanish Main die? The obvious answer is the dominance of Spain in the sixteenth century. She took over Portugal in 1580 and attempted the same with England in 1588. Relatively weak, England had to pick her conquests carefully. The highest priority was defence. Overseas ventures came a distant second. Why then set out on an uncertain sea? Three reasons: to reap a profit, to attack the Spanish (best done from a naval base) and to colonise.

The sailing route from Europe to the tropics was relatively easy – much easier, for instance, than attempting a north-east passage to Muscovy, as Stephen Borough had painfully learned in the 1550s. The tropical run was a much gentler path to riches. North Atlantic trade winds allowed ships to run south to the Canaries or the Cabo Verdes, then westward to the Caribbean or down to Brazil on a broad reach, which was a point of sail favoured by the vessels of the day. On the return passage, the Gulf Stream and the prevailing westerlies squeezed between the barometric pressure systems known as the Icelandic Low and the Azores High and, squirting through, carried ships homeward on yet another reach or run. The alternative was a direct course to North America via the higher latitudes, which meant beating into currents, wind, fog and occasionally ice. Beating to windward was the wrong way. Furthermore, a tropical passage meant good weather, as long as the captain kept an eye out for the Caribbean hurricane season from July to October.

Throughout the period 1520 to 1620, the Spanish and Portuguese authorities were hostile to any outsiders sailing into their New World ports, especially armed merchant ships, as nearly all were. Ralegh spoke for the merchant seamen when he said the nation that controls the seas controls trade, and that trade controls the world. But the American tropics were not England’s domain in the sixteenth century, for the Spanish and Portuguese had command of those seas and of commerce. This century saw all that begin to change. Pax Britannia, ruling the waves and sailing the world’s trade routes was to come later. Elizabeth’s seadogs came first.

one

BRAVE NEW WORLD, 1516–68

Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

Sir Walter Ralegh, History of the World, 1614

The first English mariners reached the Caribbean in 1516, greeted by fiery Spanish cannon.1 As the English ship bore into the harbour at Santo Domingo, Governor Francis de Tapia writes that he ‘caused a tire of ordnance to be shot from the castle at the ship, for she bare in directly with the haven. When the Englishman saw this, they withdrew themselves out, and those that were in the shipboat, got themselves with all speed on shipboard.’ The English sailed on to St John,

and entering into the port of S. Germaine, the English men parled with those of the town, requiring victuals and things needful to furnish their ship, and complained of the inhabitants of the city of S. Domingo, saying that they came not to do any harm, but to trade and traffic for their money and merchandise. In this place they had certain victuals, and for recompense they gave and paid them with certain vessel of wrought tin and other things. And afterward they departed toward Europe.

The events are first recorded by a Spaniard, Gonsalvo de Oviedo, translated to Italian, then into English. Thus Richard Hakluyt, assiduous translator, editor and cleric, presents this first account of the English in the American tropics in his monumental Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1589, and its retitled sequel, Principal Navigations, 1598–1600. Who were these first Englishmen in the West Indies? Hakluyt reports that an English fleet commanded by Sir Thomas Pert and Sebastian Cabot had been sent by Henry VIII on a voyage of discovery to Brazil, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. ‘Fleet’ or ‘vessel’ may, in translation, be one and the same and may be what Oviedo describes. Hakluyt roundly criticises Pert’s ‘cowardice and want of stomach’ as well as his ‘faint heart’ for failing to bring back the ‘infinite riches’ of Perú to the Tower of London.2 Hakluyt’s successor, cleric Samuel Purchas, wrote in 1625 that Henry VIII had sent Sir Thomas Pert and Sebastian Cabot to sea with a fleet destined for the West Indies, and suggests the English ship that appeared at Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands the same year could have been part of Henry’s fleet.3

For the next 100 years, the thrust and parry of this first English-Spanish encounter was to be repeated over and over again along the Spanish Main and throughout the Caribbean, compounding this story of trade, pillage and plunder, all for profit. As England hotly fought Spain in America’s tropical waters, these battles were, above all, for wealth.

The issue was initially ‘traffique’, the word Hakluyt emblazons on the title page of his second edition. The emphasis, especially in the first two decades of the century, is on trade, not politics or religion. Henry VIII’s break from Rome came only in 1534 and his subsequent excommunication in 1538. Before Columbus’ discovery in 1492, England and Spain had signed the Treaty of Medina del Campo in 1489, recognising unfettered trade between the two countries. The discovery of the Americas changed all that. The Spanish Pope Alexander VI’s Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), signed by João II of Portugal and Ferdinando II of Aragón, defined the newly discovered lands as either Portuguese or Spanish. Other countries were excluded. Thus to the Spanish, foreign voyages to the Americas, including those of England, violated the terms of that document.

That pivotal treaty gave to Portugal all lands east of a meridian 370 leagues west of the centre of the Cape Verde Islands, off the African coast in the Atlantic, and gave to Spain all lands west of that line. To settle João II’s objection that Portuguese discoveries would not be recognised, especially Cabral’s discovery of Brazil in 1500, Pope Julius II issued the papal bull Ea quae (1506), which moved the original meridian further westward. Two decades later, Portugal and Spain were again at odds, this time over the Oriental spice trade, specifically cloves from the Moluccas. The Portuguese paid the Spanish some 350,000 ducats and the two powers signed the Treaty of Saragossa (1529), which set the anti-meridian at 297½ leagues east of the Moluccas, making the spice trade a Portuguese affair.

To the English, even before England’s break with Rome, all these treaties were a matter of popish presumption. Why should England herself not have the right to trade freely? If she could trade with Portugal and Spain in Europe, why not in Africa or the Indies? Furthermore, a paper treaty or a few stone pillars along Africa’s coastline did not confer exclusive trading rights or sovereignty over these non-European areas. Only substantial occupation, exploitation and governance could do that.

Brazilian King Dines at Whitehall

In 1530, fourteen years after that first voyage to the West Indies,William Hawkyns the Elder set sail from Plymouth in his 250-ton Paul on the first of at least three voyages to Brazil. It was this William Hawkyns, senior member of the famous family of West Country merchant-shipowners, who started the profitable triangular trade route of England–Africa–America and round again to England. A contemporary of Henry VIII, Hawkyns (c. 1490/1500–1554), shared his king’s belief that stalwart ships and profitable cargoes made for a strong country. His two sons, William (c. 1519–89) and John (c. 1532/33–95), eventually carried on and expanded the family business of merchant shipping. John, besides engaging in trade, also took on responsibilities as treasurer and later comptroller of the Royal Navy, gaining a knighthood in fighting the Spanish Armada. The second William Hawkyns also had a son, William (the third, c. 1560–1613), and John Hawkyns a son, Richard (1560–1622). Both John and his son Richard were knighted by the Crown. More than any other sixteenth-century family, these three generations of Hawkyns dominated Elizabethan maritime enterprise.4

All of the elder William Hawkyns’ voyages – those of 1530, 1531, 1532 and probably others – were undertaken for trade, not plunder, and not dominion.5 He sailed to Guinea on the west coast of Africa where he trafficked with the people there for elephants’ teeth and other commodities and then sold these in Brazil, where ‘he used there such discretion and behaved himself so wisely with those savage people that he grew into great familiarity and friendship with them’.

On his second voyage he brought back to England a Brazilian ‘king’, leaving behind in exchange one of his crew, a Plymouth man named Martin Cockeram. The Brazilian king, or chief, was presented to Henry VIII:

lying as then at Whitehall: At the sight of whom the King and all the nobility did not a little marvel, and not without cause: For in his cheeks were holes made according to their savage manner, and therein small bones were planted, standing an inch out from the said holes, which in his own country was reputed for a great bravery. He had also another hole in his nether lip, wherein was set a precious stone about the bigness of a pease [a pea or lentil]. All his apparel, behaviour, and gesture, were very strange to the beholders.

This exotic spectacle in 1531 anticipated Martin Frobisher’s return from the Arctic in 1576 with a captive Inuk, who was pleased to demonstrate his skill with his kayak in the River Avon before the amazed mayor and citizens of Bristol.6 Such spectacles fired the English with a sea fever designed to fuel further investment in the Americas.

The Brazilian king stayed in England for nearly a year before Hawkyns set out with him back towards Brazil, but unfortunately, ‘by change of air and alteration of diet, the said Savage king died at sea’. Hawkyns persuaded the Brazilians that his account was honest, and so they returned Martin Cockeram. Resuming his business in Brazil, Hawkyns saw his vessel ‘freighted, and furnished with the commodities of the country’, then weighed anchor and returned to England.

William Hawkyns the Elder apparently made other voyages. In a letter dated 1536 to the Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, in which he asks for aid from the Crown, the style helps flesh out the man.7 Hawkyns writes that at various times he had successfully ventured his ship and goods to bring back commodities from unknown countries. He explains that only because one of his pilots had lately ‘miscarried by the way’ is he now asking Cromwell to commend his request to the king:

to have of His Grace’s love four pieces of brass ordnance and a last of powder, upon such good sureties to restore the same at a day. And furthermore, that it may please His Grace, upon the surety of an hundred pound lands, to lend me £2,000 for the space of seven years towards the setting forth of three or four ships. And I doubt me not but in the meantime to do such feats of merchandise that it shall be to the King’s great advantage in His Grace’s custom. [Signed] Your most bounden orator, William Hawkyns of Plymouth.

Here was West Country enterprise, if verbose.

Records do not show that the Crown paid Hawkyns. The Paul apparently made another Africa–Brazil voyage, since Plymouth Customs Register shows that in October 1540 the ship returned to Plymouth with ‘one hundredweight of elephants’ teeth’ and ‘92 tons of Brasil Wood’.8 We have no knowledge of further voyages to Brazil by William Hawkyns.