upon a pretext, Poland has already braved us and will either arrest or banish our merchants . . . the Emperor has exiled our nation from all trade within the Empire . . . while the Hanse towns were our professed enemies.18
Drawing such evident conclusions as to the nation’s pariah status creates the problem that it reflects badly on national idols: Drake is the second most revered sailor in English history, while Elizabeth is the country’s most admired, and loved, monarch. This status has meant that many have written hagiographies rather than biographies, only for others to endeavour to demolish the pedestals on which these gods have been placed. Thus Julian Corbett, still the greatest biographer of Drake, considered him to have been a naval strategist of genius, a forefather of the Royal Navy and a jolly good sort to boot. Much of that is evidently not so, and a very readable and well-reasoned study far closer to the truth was produced by Andrews, based on the historic, rather than surmised, evidence.19 However, not content with the hero’s return to earth, Kelsey tried to bury him with slander that was as wide of its mark as was Corbett’s panegyric. Without any supporting evidence, he claimed that: ‘Drake’s personal bravery was accompanied by a complete lack of moral scruples. It did not bother him in the least to deprive someone, friend or foe, of life or property’, before dismissing him as ‘an interesting fellow’ without a ‘well-developed moral sense.’20 Yet in the many accounts of Drake’s activities, it is his humanity that stands out as rather special in a savage age. Kelsey does not compare Drake’s treatment of captives with that meted out by the Spanish, who enslaved, tortured, strangled, burnt and held captive most of those whom they seized at sea, the fortunate survivors of Revenge and Dainty being very much the exception.
Michael Turner, the most knowledgeable of all Drake scholars, prefers the use of the term corsair or privateer to describe the status of Drake, and by implication that of his fellow rovers who had been issued with letters of reprisal or commissions. However, as the term ‘privateer’ did not come into common use until the mid seventeenth century, the word ‘pirateering’ has been coined in this book to describe the major state-sponsored piracy that became widespread after 1585. As for ‘corsair’, it is really only an alternative term for pirate most applicable to those based in the Barbary States.21 Although Alexander McKee’s excellent study of Drake’s circumnavigation is entitled The Queen’s Corsair, it could equally have been called The Queen’s Pirate, for it was without her disapproval he sailed and seized ships belonging to both Portugal and Spain, neither of which nations was at war with England.
There were those, like Burghley, Elizabeth’s longest serving and most loyal adviser, who held indominantly to his abhorrence of piracy. Sadly for his sensitivities, Elizabeth did not. But before the queen could reap her unjust rewards, those who would form her piratocracy, her pirateers, had a trade to learn, and a very tough one at that.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1599
At the age of fourteen, the fatherless Martin Frobisher was packed off to the London home of his mother’s relative, the merchant Sir John Yorke. The poor boy’s backwardness won him no preferment as a relative of that aggressive businessman, and Yorke soon decided that he could best fulfil his obligations by sending the young man off to sea. Neither did young Martin’s age or relationship earn him an easy passage. By his later testament ‘he was on the first and second voyages in the parties of Guinea’1 which took place in 1553 and 1554 to a stretch of coastal water that was to claim many an English life through illness, famishment and fighting.
These were voyages that flouted internationally understood arrangements which recognised Portugal as holding a monopoly on trade in this region; the Portuguese agents in London objected strongly to the proposal, and even tried to kidnap the two Portuguese pilots whom the merchants had hired for their first voyage. At this obstruction the Admiralty Court weighed in, imprisoning the potential saboteurs until they repented of their acts.
After many delays the adventurers departed on 12 August 1553. Their fleet was commanded by Thomas Wyndham who, having led two trading expeditions to the Barbary Coast, was one of the few Englishmen who had sailed south of Gibraltar. The ships, comprising Lion of London, Primrose and the pinnace Moon, were crewed by 140 seamen and a number of merchants, including the apprentice Martin Frobisher.
Rather than taking the Portuguese objections seriously and acting with circumspection, Wyndham chose to accept them as a challenge, behaving with a cavalier contempt towards all from that nation whom he encountered. Having called at Madeira for victuals, he sailed and seized two Portuguese vessels just outside the harbour. He then crossed to launch a foiled raid on Deserta Island, retreating with several other ships as prizes. Unsatisfied with the completion of his trade on the Mina Coast, Wyndham subsequently ignored the advice of his Portuguese pilots, carried especially for this role, and sailed into the Bight of Benin, thus becoming one of the first Englishmen to justify the saw: ‘Beware and take care of the Bay of Benin/Where few come out although many go in.’
Wyndham, along with many of his crew, was soon fatally stricken with Benin’s portfolio of diseases, meaning that Lion had to be abandoned, as too few fit men remained to sail her. Then, possibly because the pilots had lost interest, instead of hauling out into the Atlantic to catch the favourable trade-winds, the ignorant navigators made slow passage homeward, close to the coast and feeding the trailing sharks with the bodies of their dead companions.
Forty survivors, some of them dying, worked the two frail vessels up the Thames in May 1554. As those unhappy few represented a major saving in wages, the investors were more than content with the goods that were disembarked. The voyage had been an epic of incompetence, during which the crew had endured most of the perils known to English mariners, along with some new ones. Few teenagers would have survived such a deep baptism into life afloat; few would not have been scarred by what they witnessed – Frobisher throve.2 When in November 1554 the next Guinea-bound fleet sailed from Dartmouth under the command of John Lok (whose relative, Michael, would sponsor Frobisher’s voyages to find a northwest passage), Frobisher was embarked.
This was another three-ship group with Trinity of London the admiral, being accompanied by John Evangelist and Bartholomew. Lok had learned from the earlier errors of Wyndham and his ships sailed directly to what is now the coast of Liberia to purchase pepper and gold. The local traders only insisted on one caveat: that a hostage be landed for the duration of the trading. Whether it was a short straw, a shortage of years, a desire for adventure or, given his emerging character, a wish to be rid of an awkward hand, Frobisher was the one selected to be landed. And thus it was that when a Portuguese warship hove in sight, the English weighed anchor and fled, leaving their young colleague behind them to be locked up in the infamous fort at São Jorge da Minas, where much of the high-value trading goods were stowed for safe-keeping.
For Frobisher the fort was an open prison and he charmed his jailers sufficiently to be allowed out hunting during his nine-month stay. It was probably over a year before he saw England again. For his foster-father, Sir John Yorke, he was no great loss, being expendable while at sea and an extra mouth to feed when ashore. He certainly does not
