one fluke, and was secured by a piece of old cable spliced in two places. When the next wind arose they towed themselves out to sea by means of their repaired boat. The anchor came home held by just a solitary strand.
Back at sea they found the weather unimproved, while the precarious state of their rigging limited their options. Their pinnace, under tow, suddenly reared up and drove herself into the ship’s side; by morning she had disappeared. Onboard Desire, the night’s gale split both the foremast and its sail so that the mizzen had to be shifted to serve in its place. Now, every time the ship encountered rough weather a body blow was dealt her; like a boxer weakened by too many rounds, she was inexorably being driven onto her watery canvas. Except, and this speaks volumes for English shipbuilding, she appears to have remained both watertight and upright, so that it would seem to be the precarious state of her masts, rigging and anchors that would decide her fate.
That ‘ruinous end’ almost came in mid October when, forced once more under bare poles back towards the Straits, they feared that they would be driven ashore before rounding the entrance for ‘our sails had not been half an hour aboard but the footrope of our foresail broke, so that nothing held but the eyelet holes’. The seas continually broke over the ship’s poop, and flew into the sails with such violence that ‘we still expected the tearing of the sails, or oversetting of the ship.’ A wrecking seemed inevitable until ‘our master veered some of the main sheet; and whether it was by that occasion, or by some current, or by the wonderful power of God, as we verily think it was, the ship quickened her way, and shot past that rock where we think we would have shored.’
If there is a reverse analogy to a cork shooting out of a bottle, this is how Desire then entered the Straits for ‘we were shot in between the high lands without any inch of sail, we spooned before the sea, three men not able to guide the helm.’ Six hours later they anchored and pumped the ship dry then, probably, slept, as best might exhausted men being eaten alive by clusters of lice as big as peas.bb
Similar suffering was endured by the crew of the Bristol pirate ship Delight whose crew wrote a petition outlining why they had behaved mutinously in the Straits in February 1589.
By now, all hope of making the voyage was gone and they returned to the Atlantic and their anchorage at Port Desire, where they ran the ship up on the ooze and secured her firmly with a number of lines. There they had foraged for copious amounts of the aptly-named scurvy grass, which they fried together with penguin eggs and fish oil. Without their knowing why, this diet cured them all of the typical swellings and bleedings associated with scurvy. They also took onboard 14,000 dried penguins to supplement their victuals for the estimated six-month voyage home. For this journey, the ration per man was reduced to two ounces and a half of meal twice a week, three spoons of oil three times a week, a pint of peas between four men twice a week, and every day five penguins for four men and six quarts of water per day to be shared by the same four men, thus indicating the importance of the system whereby a small number of men formed their own mess.
Of all the provisions, water was both the most important and the most problematical. They called in at Plancentia in Brazil, their first stop on the outward voyage, not only to take fresh water onboard but, more importantly, to repair their split and leaking casks. The town had been abandoned and, while the overgrown gardens provided some fresh food, the repair of the casks was disrupted by an Indian attack in which thirteen of their number were killed and their weapons seized. They sailed with just 8 tons of water poorly stowed, only for a series of heavy showers to salve their thirst.
Relief was short-lived: in an ‘Ancient Mariner’-like incident the equatorial sun caused massive ‘worms’ to erupt from the bodies of the dried penguins and crawl upon the weak sailors where ‘they would eat our flesh, and bite like mosquitoes.’ Scurvy also seemed to return with a violence, so that ‘they could not draw their breath’, while their joints, limbs, breasts and ‘cods’ all swelled hugely and ‘divers grew raging mad, and some died in most loathsome and furious pain.’ By the time the ship was able to turn towards the British Isles, just sixteen of her original complement of seventy-six remained alive, of whom just five were capable of working the ship.
They flopped homeward, unable to set a sail, hardly able to handle the sheets, tackle or capstan, and with the captain and master taking watch about on the helm. ‘Thus as lost wanderers upon the sea’, they drifted into Bearhaven in Ireland on 11 June 1593, where the locals insisted on being paid £10 up front, before agreeing to help secure the vessel whose sorry condition belied the fact that she had withstood an assault on her timbers that would have sunk many larger ships.
Galleon Leicester, Cavendish’s flagship, also arrived safe home, but without her commander. Somewhere in mid Atlantic the disillusioned and half-mad leader of the failed expedition lost his will to live and was buried at sea.
Dainty
Information about the tragic happenings on Cavendish’s final voyage did not reach England until after Richard Hawkins sailed from the Thames in April 1593 on his own gloriously mismanaged voyage to the South Seas in Dainty. The ship had been built at the end of 1588, to voyage, so Hawkins claimed, to Japan, the Philippines and Moluccas by way of the Straits of Magellan, and to make a ‘perfect discovery’ of those parts and to establish ‘the commodities which the countries yielded, and of which they have want’, which is as disingenuous a description of piracy as wielded by any pen. Dainty was originally named Repentance by Hawkins’s puritanical stepmother, until Elizabeth sighted her and ordered a name change. She was larger than Golden Hind, being of some 350 tons, but she had those same essential attributes, being ‘profitable for stowage, good of sail, and well conditioned.’
All of these attributes she seemed to have demonstrated in her brief pirateering career before she sailed for the Pacific in 1593. She was part of the pack that captured the great and richly cargoed Portuguese carrack, Madre de Dios, in 1592 and was one of Frobisher’s squadron that seized a 600-ton Biscayan laden with iron that same year. Nevertheless, the elder Hawkins considered that she ‘never brought but cost, trouble and care’, and he had little hesitation in selling her to his son for he was, above all else, a businessman. The younger Hawkins wasted little time in readying her for the voyage for which she was built.
The account of Dainty’s Pacific voyage was written wonderfully well in The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, who proved to be a better raconteur than rover, ultimately losing his ship in a fight with the Spanish. Yet the whole voyage lurched towards this final ignominy with Hawkins always learning lessons after the event, while refreshingly admitting his own culpability in most of the incidents that occurred.
It began on day one, 8 April 1593, when Hawkins saw Dainty off from Blackwall, determined to join her himself that night at Gravesend. However, seeing the ship anchored at Barking he rowed out and clambered onboard to be greeted with a tale of near woe. Dainty had sailed with her gunports open and they, because the vessel was deeply laden, lay perilously close to the waterline. A sudden fresh wind had caused the ship to heel and water to rush in at the open ports pulling the vessel over. Luckily, once this was noted and the ‘sheet flowne, she could hardly be brought upright.’ Danger described, Hawkins recommended that ports be shut and caulked, although the example he quotes in evidence is the loss of Great Harry at Portsmouth in 1545 not, as it in fact and famously was, Mary Rose. It had been a close thing and Hawkins’s crew insisted that the ship be lightened before she proceeded into the Channel, so some 6 or 8 tons were duly offloaded into a hoy hired for the purpose.
The passage down-channel was a drearisome one against contrary winds, with Dainty having to anchor on the flood tide before weighing to gain westings on the ebb. The ship then ran into fog so dense that for three days they had no sight of land and had to feel their way gingerly down the coast, until a bark from Dartmouth informed them they were not far off the Eddystone, while they thought they were off Exmouth. Cue for
