first voyage, as Purchas refers to it, sailed without the earl being onboard. Instead, he raised the money to dispatch four ships with plans for them to pass the Straits of Magellan and enter the South Seas. The admiral, commanded by Captain Robert Widrington, was Red Dragon, a 260-ton ship with a crew of 130. She left Gravesend on 26 June 1586 in company with the bark Clifford of 130 tons, with Captain Christopher Lister as vice admiral. During a wind-dictated lengthy stay at Plymouth they were joined by Captain Haws in Roe and a ‘fine’ small pinnace, Dorothy, owned, as might have been Roe, by Walter Ralegh. It seemed a fleet ideal to make passage to and cause havoc in the Spanish Pacific. Cumberland had high hopes, telling his admiral not to return home until they had £6,000 of profitable loot to unload.
The fighting, but not the fortune-making, began early. Three days after leaving Plymouth on 17 August, the group engaged sixteen hulks from Hamburg which were sailing home from Lisbon and did not wish to tarry for these pesky Englishmen. Selecting a foe, ‘Our admiral lent him a piece of ordnance which they repaid double so that we grew to some quarrel’, which the English won by boarding, only to have the time just to ‘take out of her some provisions’, before rumour of greater reward led to them endeavouring to intercept another convoy of seven ships. In this they were unsuccessful, as strong winds blew them back to Dartmouth for an enforced week’s break. After this they made passage to the Canaries, before landing in Sierra Leone where they had a St George and the Dragon-like fight with a crocodile and a less noble pillage of a native village. Then across the ocean to Brazil where they irritated a couple of townships and captured several ships loaded with appetising, but not enriching, marmalade. Their best prize ‘took fire and perished, ship, men and goods’. During this sojourn on the coast they held a major conference at which it was decided not to push southwards to the Straits of Magellan. By 29 September they were back alongside in England, giving Cumberland no reasonable return on his investment, a template for most of his subsequent efforts.
Cumberland got to sea himself the following year, when he sailed to support the English forces besieged in Sluys, only to find that he had arrived too late. Moving on to Ostend and finding that it too was soon to be besieged, he returned home in time to offer himself and Red Dragon, renamed Sampson, for service against the Armada, while he sailed in Elizabeth Bonaventure as her volunteer commander.10 In return for his contribution to that campaign, the queen loaned Cumberland Golden Lion for a piratical voyage in which he seized the slow Hare heading from Dunkirk for Spain, but was then himself driven to take shelter in Freshwater Bay off the Isle of Wight. Here, with the winds threatening to drive the ship aground, the master recommended that the mainmast be cast away but, being the queen’s property, ‘no sailor durst attempt this until his Lordship had himself stricken the first stroke.’ Safe but no longer sailable, Golden Lion limped into Portsmouth, bringing another unrewarding voyage to an end. But before that storm Cumberland had been in high spirits, writing to his wife in that spirit of optimism that endeared him not only to his queen and peers, but to subsequent generations.
Sweet Meg,
God, I must humbly thank him, hath so mightily bless me, that already I have taken a Dunkirk ship bound for Saint Lucar in Spain. I have sent Lister to see her unladen in Portsmouth, and to send all that is mine to you, which I would have you use according to your discretion, and let it be opened with secrecy. If there be anything fit to give to my Lord Chamberlain, I would have you do it, it will make him the reedier to do for me, if there be a cause. This man I have taken tells me that there are four ships now ready in Dunkirk, going for Spain. I hope within these three days to meet them, if I do, I shall make a good voyage, for all the ordnance of the galleys and rich lading. Commend me to my Lord of Warwick and my lady. Excuse me for not writing to them but I have scanty leisure to write to you.
Thus with God’s blessing to our little ones, and hearty prayers for their well being, I commit you all to God.
Yours only now and ever,
George Cumberland
That one prize scarcely earned Cumberland the praise granted to him in a letter to Essex in June 1588, in which the writer refers to Cumberland as ‘the English Lord that doth great harm to the Spanish at sea’, but it might have been the source of the ‘jewel of gold like a sacrifice’ and the ‘pair of bracelets’ which he and his wife presented to the queen on the following New Year’s Day. That aside, those voyages, along with his contribution against the Armada, equipped Cumberland, or so he believed, with the necessary experience to expand his horizons and ambitions: in 1589 he was to make his first voyage to the Azores hunting ground.
Nine years earlier, while Gilbert and Ralegh were floundering in the western Atlantic; while John Hawkins was beginning his reforms as the new Treasurer of the Navy; while Frobisher was experiencing failure in the frozen north; while the teenage, newly-married Cumberland was establishing himself in his northern estates, plain Francis Drake was engaged in the voyage that would forever change English aspirations on the rewards for roving. Before he could do this, however, he had to make sure that he had a ship that would suit his purposes, and by this time his career had advanced sufficiently for him to be able to build bespoke.
With the punishment for piracy being to be hanged in chains at Wapping, most practitioners were either foolhardy, desperate or the possessor of influential friends. (Author collection)
Before the English established trading links with the Far East, their preferred method of acquiring oriental exotica was to forcibly remove it from returning merchantmen like the ones depicted here. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Without the need for wharfage or alongside berths, pirates were able to unload while anchored in any friendly, quiet cove or creek. This picture purports to show the return of Sir Edward Michaelbourne, after a piratical, interloping voyage to the Far East in 1606. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
The circumnavigators Drake and Cavendish and the doyen of English transoceanic travel, John Hawkins, all relied on piracy to replenish their ships and return a profit. (Author collection)
The Portuguese trading fort of Sao Jorge da Mina provided an open prison for Frobisher and later a point of contact for Hawkins when he entered the slave trading business. (Author collection)
Contrary to Victorian romantic notions, Ralegh’s boyhood was not spent listening to salty tales of adventure, but in a household that practised piracy. (Author collection)
Until Hawkins, Drake and their fellow pirateers learned the art of navigation, there would have been no Englishman qualified to pose for portraits such as this, showing a professional navigating officer with globe and dividers. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
