A Brief History of Circumnavigators Read online

  With the aid of a Spanish pilot, Alonso of Valladolid, removed from the Santa Ana, and favoured by wind and weather, Cavendish made the crossing to Guam in forty-five days. This was about three weeks shorter than Drake’s time for an almost identical voyage. The sailing went well but Cavendish had other anxieties. Soon after leaving the American coast the Content was lost to view. Nothing more was ever heard of her. The most likely explanation is that her captain turned the vessel round and tried to return home the way he had come and that the Content was either lost at sea or fell foul of the Spaniards. After the capture of the Santa Ana there had been argument among the men over the spoil. Cavendish had given in to their demands for an immediate share-out. This was his first real sign of weakness as a leader and it was certainly a tactical blunder. With their purses already well lined, the sailors had no incentive to face the largely-unknown dangers of the wide, empty Pacific. Small wonder, then, if the Content’s captain, either willingly or under pressure from his crew, took what he believed to be the easier route home.

  Cavendish, holding to his purpose, now came to what he regarded as the most important part of the voyage: gathering information about the Orient trade. The Desire reached the Philippines on 14 January 1588 and anchored off Samór whose people proved friendly and informative about the Spaniards. Cavendish was scarcely circumspect in his dealings with the enemy. He toured the islands, carefully noting details of strategic interest. His men had occasional brushes with the Spaniards. And he even sent messages of defiance to the authorities. Yet, when the pilot, Alonso, was detected smuggling a message to the Spanish governor, Cavendish promptly had him hanged from a yardarm. The English swaggered around with such braggadocio that the outraged Bishop of the Philippines complained to his royal master:

  The grief that afflicts me is not because the barbarian infidel has robbed us of the ship Santa Ana . . . but because an English youth of about twenty-two years, with a wretched little vessel of about a hundred tons and forty or fifty companions, should dare to come to my own place of residence, defy us, and boast of the damage he had wrought . . . He went from our midst laughing, without anyone molesting or troubling him.8

  Among Cavendish’s boasts was the promise that he would return to wrest control of the Orient trade from the Portuguese and Spanish. This he was clearly resolved to do. Having mastered the southerly route himself, he believed that other English mariners could and would employ their superior ships and seamanship to establish regular contact with these profitable markets. There was no need to wait for the discovery of a north-west passage; Cathay and the Spice Islands lay open via two clearly-established routes.

  Having almost no cargo space available, Cavendish could not take commercial advantage of his position. He, therefore, bypassed the Moluccas, sailing between those islands and the Celebes, entered the Indian Ocean via the Straits of Lombok and coasted along the southern shore of Java. All the time he was adding information to his charts and rutters and compiling a dossier on enemy depots and fortifications. The bland description of the route in surviving documents should not blind us to Cavendish’s real achievements as a navigator. Malaysia and Indonesia present any sailor with a formidable maze of islands and shoals, in which countless ships have come to grief. The Golden Hind’s voyage very nearly ended in these waters. Yet, the Desire made a leisurely and safe three month cruise through the region. Cavendish’s success was certainly partly due to good weather. But more important was his use of local knowledge. He made a point of establishing good relations with the rulers and people of the islands. He gave impressive gifts of cannon and other items of booty to the Muslim princes. In return he received fresh produce, information on reefs and channels, and native pilots to guide his ship to safety.

  He left Java on 16 March, having careened the Desire and seen her well-fitted and provisioned for the homeward voyage. He took the southerly route across the Indian Ocean and a month and a day brought his men in sight of the Cape of Good Hope. The Desire reached St Helena on 8 June and rested there for twelve days before embarking on the final leg of the voyage. She entered the English Channel on 3 September and immediately ran into a storm which shredded her sun-bleached canvas. On the ninth of the month the little ship limped into Plymouth with her weary crew, who only now discovered that their success was the gilt on the gingerbread of a providential English escape from Philip II’s invincible Armada.

  Thomas Cavendish savoured his triumph to the full. He immediately set to work smartening up the Desire and, while ballads and broadsheets proclaimed his exploits throughout the length and breadth of England, he sailed his refurbished flagship round to Greenwich to show her off to the queen. When Elizabeth and her court came down to the quayside they were confronted by a dazzling spectacle: the Desire was dressed overall, her flags and pennants gleaming with rich colour and cloth of gold; her sails of blue damask; her crew resplendent in silks and gold ornaments. Cavendish dined her majesty in a great cabin hung with silks and served her from rich plate captured from the Spaniards. The young captain showered his sovereign with fine gifts in addition to the share of the profits which she legitimately claimed. It was all very impressive and the queen was impressed.

  She was right to be and Cavendish was right to enjoy his moment of glory. But all this costly, swaggering splendour was not just self-indulgent glorification. Cavendish was already planning his next voyage, to be virtually a repeat of his first circumnavigation. He wanted backing from the court and the City. He wanted to demonstrate that sailing freely round the world was not a rare exploit but could become a habit for English mariners. To achieve all this he needed publicity.

  PR and advertising techniques may have been honed to menacing perfection in our century but they are not new.

  Shortly after this Richard Morris-Adams arrived from London with Monica Dixon and Simon Weaver from Barwell Sports Management, a public relations firm representing Debenhams, the department store giant. The four of us met on the yacht at the mooring under the wood.

  I took them on a quick tour of the boat; then while examining the Blake’s marine toilet installation adjoining my cabin, Simon made a suggestion.

  ‘What would you think about naming the yacht Debenhams, John?’

  I looked down at the toilet, and tried to imagine how twenty-five thousand used one-pound notes would look piled up in it.

  ‘It has a certain romantic ring to it,’ I grinned, and the deal was struck. The bank manager thought it was a good idea too.9

  Even in the sixteenth century adventurers had to draw themselves to the attention of people who mattered. Such behaviour is often unpopular with lesser spirits who frown upon immodest display. Cavendish was certainly misunderstood by some of his contemporaries who accused him of running through the profits of his voyage and being compelled to organise another to recoup his wasted fortune: ‘although his great wealth was thought to have sufficed him for his whole life, yet he saw the end thereof within very short time’.10 But Cavendish was not a wastrel. If he had been, his end would have been little more than poetic justice – the fall that comes after folly and pride. He was a passionate visionary, a restless adventurer who could never again be content to return to his Suffolk acres or even to the court of Gloriana.

  He was, moreover, goaded onwards by the rivalry of other captains. During the years immediately after 1588 several voyages to the East Indies (as India and the lands and islands beyond now came to be called) via the Straits of Magellan or the Cape of Good Hope were planned. Many never got beyond the drawing board and those expeditions that did put to sea were frustrated by bad weather or poor leadership. Nor was England the only nation interested in wresting long-distance trade from the hands of Spanish and Portuguese captains. Dutch mariners, enthusiastically backed by their government, were catching up fast in the study and practice of navigation. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before someone began to reap rich rewards from the Orient trade. Cavendish, now in the prime of life, was not prepared to yield t
o others the primacy in a commerce he had pioneered.

  In the years 1589–91 he spent money freely but not on self-indulgent luxury. Most of his funds went on ships. He completely refitted the Desire and he bought other vessels for his projected voyage. Some of these were sent on privateering ventures, to earn their keep while preparations were completed for the next expedition. Those preparations dragged on month after month, eating up capital and repaying it only with frustration. One ship was lost in the Thames Estuary. Another proved unsuitable and had to be replaced. There were the usual wrangles with chandlers. Ships’ suppliers were notorious for trying to palm off their customers with inferior gear and stale food. They knew all the tricks of the trade, such as rotten cordage refurbished to look new, barrels half-filled with mouldy flour, then topped up with fresh and the substitution of inferior merchandise for items bought and paid for. Amidst the bustle of crowded quaysides and warehouses it was easy to swindle ships’ captains who had a hundred and one other problems on their minds. By the time deceptions were discovered the victims were hundreds of ocean leagues away, perhaps never to return. Over the centuries dishonest chandlers were probably responsible for as many maritime disasters as storms, shoals and poor navigation. So Cavendish and his agents needed extreme vigilance if the expedition was to be properly supplied. In the event they were not careful enough.

  Another problem was finding reliable crews. Only a very rare breed of mariner was prepared to brave the dangers of a long voyage with a less than fifty per cent chance of returning. It was well-known on the waterfronts that although the sailors who had come home on the Desire had profited handsomely from the voyage they had numbered but forty out of an original complement of a hundred and twenty-three. Seasoned mariners preferred short, privateering voyages offering less risk and more profit. Even to man such ventures as those captains often had to resort to royal warrants of impressment or take aboard a proportion of unskilled volunteers drawn from the ranks of the criminal and the desperate. Too many of Cavendish’s crewmen were unreliable, faint-hearted and potentially mutinous. Some deserted at Plymouth. Others made trouble later.

  But the major weakness of the new venture was divided leadership. Cavendish found himself running rapidly through his own resources and it was probably for this reason and against his better judgement that he now involved others in the enterprise. After the success of his first venture there were many young gallants eager to join his next. These gentleman adventurers could provide money, men and influential contacts. Cavendish, irrevocably committed to the voyage, had little choice but to admit some of these applicants to his company and his counsels.

  Worst of all, as things turned out, he had to take John Davis into partnership. Davis, one of the truly great navigators of the age, was some ten years older than Cavendish, had accomplished three remarkable Arctic voyages in search of a northwest passage and had essayed expeditions to the East Indies by both easterly and westerly routes. He was highly respected in maritime circles and had excellent connections at court. In theory he and Cavendish had much to gain from each other and much to give to a joint venture. But they were both individualists, accustomed to sole command and their coming together was to have fatal results. In retrospect, Davis claimed that he had teamed up with Cavendish out of regard for the younger man and against the advice of his friends. We do not know Cavendish’s version of how the partnership came into being. The arrangement was that the two men should keep company until the coast of California was reached; thereafter Cavendish should complete the circumnavigation, while Davis sailed north in search of the Straits of Anian, the supposed entrance to the North-West Passage.

  On 26 August 1591 Cavendish led out of Plymouth a more impressive fleet than the one he had commanded five years before. His flagship, the Galleon Leicester was a prime ship of 400 tons. The gallant Desire sailed again, under the command of John Davis. The Roebuck was a 240-ton privateer. Davis provided a ship of comparable size called the Daintie. The storeship was a vessel known as the Black Pinnace. Aboard were 350 sailors and soldiers. It was an impressive panoply.

  But it failed. And the failure literally broke Thomas Cavendish’s heart.

  The main events can be quickly outlined. Because of the aggravating problems over equipping and manning the fleet, Cavendish had set out too late. Twenty-seven days becalmed in the Doldrums caused more disastrous delay. It was then that the men discovered that much of the casked food was inedible. They suffered the pangs of hunger and they blamed the leader for their plight. When, at last, the Englishmen reached Brazil they had to spend valuable weeks recuperating, foraging and raiding settlements for fresh food. Not until 24 January did they set out on the long southward haul towards the Straits. Now they ran into savage storms. Several hands were lost. The Daintie turned for home. The flagship was parted from the three remaining vessels. Her boats were lost so that it was impossible to send men ashore for food or water. Only on 18 March was the fleet reunited at Port Desire. From this point we can witness the rapid deterioration of Cavendish’s character as conditions worsened and the expedition fell apart.

  He transferred his flag to his old ship, the Desire, because he regarded the men of the Galleon Leicester as ‘the most abject minded and mutinous company that ever was carried out of England’.11 The sensible course would now have been to winter at Port Desire but Cavendish insisted on sailing for the Straits immediately. If Davis and the other experienced mariners protested, as surely they must have done, the commander overrode them. His independence of judgement was rapidly turning to a paranoiac suspicion of anyone who opposed him. His firm leadership was deteriorating into a combination of fanatical raving, bullying and threats. The success of the expedition had now become an obsession. Anything that challenged that success was deliberate, personal persecution from the hand of either man or God.

  We know all this because of a remarkable document in Cavendish’s own hand written towards the end of the voyage. It is a tragic attempt at self-vindication and blame-shifting. Nothing illustrates as clearly as the following extracts the strains that a long sailing voyage could put upon a man’s mind.

  The ships battled through the Straits of Magellan against contrary winds for four weeks:

  At length being forced by the extremity of storms and the narrowness of the strait, being not able to turn to windward any longer, we got into a harbour where we rode from the 18th day of April till the 10th of May, in all which time we never had other than most furious contrary winds, and after that the month of May was come in nothing but such flights of snow and extremity of frosts, as in all the time of my life I never saw none to be compared with them. This extremity caused the weak men in my ship only to decay, for, in 7 or 8 days in this extremity there died 40 men and sickened 70; so that there was not 50 men that were able to stand upon the hatches.’12

  Everyone now looked to the commander for an initiative. Cavendish called the company together and declared his intention of abandoning his present course and crossing the southern Atlantic to make for China by way of the Cape of Good Hope:

  These persuasions, with many others which I used, seemed to content them for the present but they were no sooner gone from me but forthwith all manner of discontents were aired amongst themselves and to go that way they plainly and resolutely determined never to give their willing consents.13

  Instead, the men suggested a return to Brazil for revictualling and refitting, so that they could make another attempt on the westerly route when the weather improved. Cavendish gave way with great reluctance and, apparently, despite the advice of Davis, who, with his sights fixed on his own personal quest, wanted to winter at Port Desire or Port St Julian.

  Cavendish returned to the Galleon Leicester and, presumably to impress the troublesome crew with his ruthless determination to let nothing hamper his plans, he immediately had eight of the sickest men rowed ashore, where they were left to die. The result of this on the morale of their comrades can easily be imagined.

 
; Out of the Straits, the ships battled northwards through storms and high seas. They kept well together, despite the conditions, until 21 May. At first light on that day the lookout on the flagship reported that the Desire and the Black Pinnace had been lost to sight. Cavendish was convinced that this was deliberate treachery by Davis, whom he castigated as:

  . . . that villain that hath been the death of me and the decay of the whole action whose only treachery in running from me hath been an utter ruin of all . . . his intention was ever to run away. This is God’s will that I should put him in trust that should be the end of my life, and the decay of the whole action: For had not these two small ships parted from us we could not have miscarried on the coast of Brazil, for the only decay of us was that we could not get into their barred harbours. What became of these small ships I am not able to judge, but sure it is most like they went back again for Port Desire, a place of relief for two so small ships, for they might lie on ground there without danger and being so few men they might relieve themselves with seals and birds and so take a good time of year and pass the straits. The men in these small ships were all lusty and in health, wherefore the likelier to hold out. The short of all is this: Davis his only intent was utterly to overthrow me, which he hath well performed . . .14