yielding few recruits for Hawkins’s hold. One of these raids resulted in a rare cause of a boat capsizing: it was attacked and smashed by a herd of hippopotamus, their herbivore credentials coming into question by the claim that two of the men were eaten by the beasts.
Eventually an alliance, rather than a raid, brought Hawkins his slaves, but only after his men had witnessed a cannibalistic feast from the bodies of the slain. For the loss of some sixty men he had gained a cargo of five hundred wretches, whom he would endeavour to keep alive for the seven-week Atlantic crossing on a diet of dried beans, the very stores that had alerted de Silva to his true intentions so many months earlier in London. Given the number of slaves that he managed to sell in the Indies and the group that were left unsold, it has been estimated that around one hundred of them died on passage, a death rate that scarcely dented his profit.6
Having gone through the usual charade of threatening and cajoling the governors, by late August Hawkins had made sufficient profit to satisfy the queen, himself and the other investors so, reducing his fleet to the most seaworthy of his vessels, he led the remaining eight northeast towards the Florida Channel from where they would turn homeward. They never made it. A hurricane, the full violence of which is well-described by Rayner Unwin, fell upon the fleet, leaving in its wake a flagship that was no longer seaworthy and in desperate need of a sheltered anchorage before she foundered.7 Basing his decision on local knowledge obtained from the pilots of two captured Spanish ships, Hawkins went about and led his fleet limping back south to the island harbour of San Juan de Ulua, the port for Vera Cruz.
Unlike the welcome that had been given to the similar-sized Spanish fleet when it had entered Plymouth Sound at the start of Hawkins’s voyage, the inhabitants of San Juan fired a five-gun salute and waved and cheered as the English entered harbour: they had been mistaken for their own flota expected at any time soon. By the time the error had been realised it was too late to prevent Hawkins from berthing his ships’ bows to the jetty with kedge anchors run out to secure his stern. While this was being done he sent parties ashore to seize the nearby gun emplacements, the crews of which had conveniently fled on realising the ‘the Lutherans’ were upon them. There followed a stand-off which neither side risked upsetting and if such an armed hostility had continued it is likely that Hawkins would have managed to complete his repairs and continue his voyage unimpeded.
Then a day later, on 17 September, the balance was upset when the anticipated fleet arrived, and the authorities ashore had to inform the admiral, Fransisco de Luxan, and his very important passenger, the new viceroy of New Spain, Martín Enríquez, that their berths were occupied by English ships. No viceroy would have wished to begin his reign by accepting such a snub and when the Spanish finally entered harbour, Hawkins must have known that he faced a swift and unpleasant eviction.
It was delivered by stealth, with the Spanish sneaking soldiers and gunners as close to the alert English as they dared approach under cover. The English opened fire first, but were unable to prevent their shore parties from being overwhelmed and slaughtered. To avoid the soldiers from boarding from the jetty, the English ships cut their mooring lines and drifted into the harbour, all the time firing at close-range on the enemy ships, several of which caught fire. But Jesus was too unwieldy to manoeuvre herself out of trouble, and Hawkins ordered his men to transfer both themselves and the readily reached goods to Minion, which was lying alongside. Drake in Judith was also ordered to close to assist in the evacuation, but how long she stayed to give succour is put into doubt by Hawkins’s pithy comment that she ‘forsoke us in our great misery.’
But Hawkins was also forced to ‘forsoke’. Five ships, and the unlucky remnants of their crews, were abandoned at San Juan de Ulua, the ships to be ransacked for their riches and the men racked for their religion. Out at sea the survivors had exchanged one hell for another. Judith made haste homeward, arriving in Plymouth on 22 January 1569. A sympathetic veil has been drawn over her return passage, for it must have been a low point in the career of her captain that he was unlikely to forget.
We know more about the sad voyage of John Hawkins. With scarce enough provisions to feed her normal crew, Minion was far too overcrowded for many to survive the journey home. Hawkins was forced therefore to close the coast of Mexico and land ninety men at Campeche near the town of Tampico. Even then, with every scrap of food consumed, including the trapped rodent population, men starved. In an ironic imitation of the westward voyage, the ship left a trail of bodies in her wake, but this time they were the corpses of Englishmen not slaves.
Near Galicia Hawkins captured and emptied three Portuguese vessels of their provisions, although there is no evidence to support the claim that he cut off the limbs of their crews and flung their living torsos overboard. A few days later he anchored off Ponteverda where, deploying the only weapons he had left, charm and bluff, he managed to purchase sufficient supplies to set sail homeward. The weather, however, had more tricks to play and Minion was forced back to shelter near Vigo, from where she finally got underway on 20 January to anchor in Mounts Bay four days later.
The casualty list was lengthy. The battle at San Juan de Ulua had claimed 130 English dead with fifty-two more taken prisoner, while to the ninety landed at Tampico had to be added a further forty-five who died during Minion’s voyage home. Few survived to totter ashore at Plymouth, ridge-ribbed and ragged. The two leaders applied both for restitution of goods and the repatriation of prisoners. Eventually some of the latter came home with great tales to tell, but of the former there was to be no redress, principally because the queen refused the issue of a letter of reprisal. She had her reasons. For once Elizabeth must have realised that she had allowed her ruffians to sail in her ships far too close to the wind which was by now chilling rapidly in wintry and warlike blasts from Spain
Hawkins’s and Drake’s reactions to the defeat and humiliation at San Juan de Ulua were very different. The elder man withdrew from an active career at sea to turn his fertile mind to management, including that of his own pirate vessels. In 1575 he proposed that, for an investment of £3,750, he be allowed to take three royal ships, Dreadnought, Foresight and Bull, and five merchant ships to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet, which if successful would produce, he claimed, a profit of £2 million. The plan was not approved but neither, more significantly, did Hawkins endeavour to lead an expedition for this purpose himself. Instead, he chose to employ his busy mind with internal quarrels, deliberately picking a fight with the Wynter brothers on the Navy Board by claiming malfeasance and his own ability to provide a more cost-effective, honest system of management. By 1578, with the support of Cecil, now Lord Burghley, Hawkins was Treasurer of the Navy.
Drake, his eager apprentice, sought a more confrontational role to gain his revenge. He would never more sail on a trading voyage, exchanging culverin for coin as his means of barter. Appropriately for one whose exploits would earn for him the nickname from the Spanish of El Draque, the dragon, Drake sailed again for the Indies in 1570 onboard Dragon with Swan in company. Little is known of this voyage, but when he returned to those waters the following year in Swan it was to ‘rob divers barks’ of goods to the value of at least £66,000, almost £40,000 more than the inflated claim made by John Hawkins for his losses at San Juan de Ulua. Drake had simply committed several acts of piracy, as the Panamanian authorities recognised when they wrote to King Philip informing him that they had:
Sent out three expeditions on which were expended more than 4,000 pesos; and he has always had the luck to escape. Once the fleet is gone, when the town and the port are deserted, it is plain we are going to suffer from this corsair and others, unless Your Majesty apply the remedy hoped for, by sending a couple of galleys to protect and defend this coast and the town, which is in the greatest danger.8
However, in the early 1570s the expatriate population on the Isthmus feared the violent deprivations of the permanently present cimaroons, escaped slaves, more than they did the occasional visit by a rover. Drake’s genius was to befriend the black rebels and work with them to attack their common foe for mutual
