The fourth arm was the pirate fleet, which ranged from a single small vessel manned by a few men and their dog to squadrons of well-armed ships capable of taking several hundred men to sea. Their appearance marked the return of the privately-owned warship, which had all but disappeared between 1485 and 1543, and meant that the policy of state piracy could be practised with success.
These fleets were not mutually exclusive and although the fishing boats of all nations offered easy pickings to predators as diverse as Barbary pirates and England’s own Peter Easton and Henry Mainwaring, their skippers were not themselves averse to robbing from weaker foreign hulls. Neither, of course, were the merchants who became better armed the further they ventured, for as they traded to more distant ports they became open to attack, not only from the Dunkirkers on their doorstep, but also from the Barbary galleys that lay in wait off the Straits of Gibraltar, and their Turkish cousins who infested the eastern Mediterranean. To counter this they required to be well-armed and once so equipped could yield easily to the temptation to plunder a passing weaker seafarer. The result was a private arms race leading to many a merchant ship becoming as well-armed as most state warships.
The added armament of a letter of reprisal could provide justification for a most lucrative sideline, especially when the arrangements and understanding with the nation’s legal authorities almost guaranteed no awkward questions being asked and no restitutions being awarded. As far as her own fleet was concerned, Elizabeth was always looking for ways for reducing the costs of its manning and upkeep, unlike her father, Henry VIII, for whom the waging of war was so glorious an enterprise that it justified any expenditure so long as it bought honour. For Elizabeth, conflict, if it had to be undertaken, needed to be prosecuted at least cost to the Crown. This parsimony created a permeable membrane between the Navy Royal and the merchant and pirate fleet, so that in times of national crisis, most notably the Armada campaign, the sovereign could call on the latter to supplement her own ships, while in times of quiet the queen was content to loan her ships for pirateering operations, such as Drake’s West Indies raid, or explorative/settlement ventures such as Frobisher’s search for the northwest passage and Grenville’s voyage to Roanoke – provided, of course, that she had the promise of a profit from these ventures.
Many ships were thus given over to piracy at some time in their career, but a fair few were built specifically for this purpose. Of these, Drake’s Golden Hind was the most notorious, illustrious and successful; Richard Hawkins’s Dainty the least successful and most mismanaged; while Cumberland’s Scourge of Malice was the one that made the successful transit from the age of piracy to the age of trade. Hakluyt’s account of the tribulations endured by a fourth vessel, Desire, which having been Cavendish’s flagship during his successful circumnavigation also accompanied him on his disastrous second attempt, provided a very clear account of the far horizons of endurance to which both ships and their seamen could be driven when things went wrong.2
The Golden Hind
In 1573 Drake climbed up a tree at the invitation of a cimaroon, or escaped slave, named Pedro, and gazed upon the Pacific. Well-informed navigator that he was, he knew that nothing lay between the blue horizon to his west and the distant, fabulously wealthy Spice Islands or, to the northwest, the equally rich and distant shores of Cathay. Well-practised pirate that he was, he knew that close inshore a third fabulously rich treasure trove beckoned in the form of deep-draughted, poorly armed and unescorted merchant ships trekking towards Panama with cargoes of silver. All he needed to do was to sail a suitable ship on those seas to take prizes that would more than compensate for the losses, in ships, men, cargo and self-esteem, that he and his cousin John Hawkins had suffered in 1568 at San Juan de Ulua.
Drake and his partner John Oxenham returned to Plymouth in August 1573, rich beyond their expectations, but with the knowledge that further wealth lay ready for the taking. Oxenham, too impetuous to seek a suitable vessel for the proposed voyage, sailed to the Caribbean, crossed over the isthmus and seized a small ship on the further shore. He was soon caught, imprisoned and eventually killed. Drake, a better brain, took his time, drawing up plans for the sort of vessel he would need to sail the long route from England to the Pacific hunting ground via the seldom visited, but notorious, dangerous waters of the Straits of Magellan. He also spent time learning about the great ocean on which he planned to rove and built up a library of navigational works to improve his ability to sail out of sight of land on seas upon which no Englishman had ever floated.
For the voyage which would make his name, Drake needed a ship which, requiring few to man her, could nonetheless sail fast enough to overhaul her potential prey. Yet she needed to be deep-draughted and beamy so that she could hold both sufficient stores and a great deal of booty. Weaponry sufficient to awe she needed, but not of such power that they might sink a potential prize. Drake named his ship Pelican, which might have been an appropriate name for a ship designed to swallow up a large haul of plunder, yet she proved so capable of managing her incredible task that she fully deserved her name-change to the sleeker Golden Hind (Golden Fleece might have been even more appropriate!).
No plans of the ship survive, if any ever existed, for this was an age where the shipwright’s practised eye was the equal of the draughtsman’s sharpened pen. The few drawings that purport to show her are neither detailed nor accurate, but luckily we have a short description of her which was written by a Portuguese pilot, Nuña da Silva, whom Drake captured off the Cape Verde Islands in January 1578 and found so professionally useful that he did not release him until he was departing from Guatulco on the Pacific coast of New Spain in April 1579. Golden Hind, da Silva wrote, was:
in a great measure stout and strong. She has two sheathings, one as perfectly finished as the other. She is fit for warfare and is a ship of the French pattern, well fitted out and finished with a good mast, tackle and double sails. She is a good sailer and the rudder governs her well. She is not new, nor is she coppered nor ballasted. She has seven armed port-holes on each side, and inside she carries eighteen pieces of artillery, thirteen being of bronze and the rest of cast ironaa . . . This vessel is waterfast when she is navigated with the wind astern and this is not violent, but when the sea is high, as she has to labour, she leaks not a little whether sailing before the wind or with the bowlines hauled out. Taking it all in all, she is a ship which is in a fit condition to make a couple of voyages from Portugal to Brazil.3
Another Spanish prisoner records fifteen pieces of artillery onboard.
It might be a brief description – certainly with that information alone it would not be possible to make a drawing, let alone a reconstruction of the vessel, but fortunately sufficient contemporary sketches of sailing ships and shipwrights’ instructions as how to build one complete with the beam:keel:draught:tonnage ratios exist, along with details of the relevant mast size, sail fit, anchors and cables required, for the present generation to visualise these state-of-the-art creations.
Her dimensions can be estimated from those of the dry dock that was built to preserve her on public display at Deptford. These suggest that England’s first preserved historic ship had a length of 67ft, a beam of 19ft and a draught of around 9ft, making her about a 120-ton ship.4 She carried three masts and a bowsprit supporting six sails with a sail area of just over 4,000sq ft, meaning that in favourable conditions she could maintain a speed of about 8 knots.
The exact number of men who sailed out of Plymouth in Golden Hind at the start of her voyage is not known, but the fleet of five ships had a combined crew of about 160. Spanish prisoners taken in the Pacific reported that Golden Hind had a crew of around eighty to eighty-six, while according to John Drake’s evidence she sailed from the Moluccas with sixty men onboard, arriving off the Cape of Good Hope with fifty-nine.5
Although da Silva provided no visual image of his floating prison, his comments do give us some insights into the practical aspects of managing such a ship on a long voyage. He notes, for example, that she was well-sheathed, having a sacrificial outer hull as well-fitted
