During a spell of fine weather on the homeward voyage, when the Caribbean rolled in those long, graceful swells which made it famous, Don Diego told his future son-in-law: ‘Notice what a fine ship we got for ourselves. When she rolls to port or starboard, doesn’t matter which, she always returns to the upright position and holds it for a long moment. Doesn’t wallow continuously from side to side like a drunken Frenchman.’ He pointed out another feature of even greater significance: ‘Look at the structure. Clinker-built with her strakes overlapping for strength. Not like so many Spanish ships, carvel-built with the boards abutting against each other and liable to split apart in a storm.’ But the feature he seemed to like best was one rarely seen in Spanish ships: ‘Her hull is double-planked.’ Clicking his tongue, he said with great warmth: ‘When you and I captured this one, we got ourselves a real ship.’
Suffused with this euphoria, Ledesma completed his long run westward, then headed south for home, and as he coasted down the western edge of Cartagena’s island and saw on the cliffs above him the safe, solid town which he commanded, he was inspired to discharge seven salvos to inform the citizens of his victory.
But as he was luxuriating in his defeat of the Dutch and the capture of their fine ship, his future son-in-law, the vice-regent, showed what a perceptive young man he was by asking permission to address the admiral, and when Don Diego gave assent, the young man said: ‘You know, Excellency, that my great-uncle was once governor of Peru?’
‘Of course! That’s one reason why Doña Leonora and I have been so proud to think of you as a possible member of our family. Don Pedro, one of the finest.’
‘Then you also know what happened to him?’
Don Diego’s easy smile turned into a frown: ‘Terribly unfair. Enemies brought all sorts of base charges against him. Reports to the king were biased …’
‘And he was hanged.’ There was silence in the cabin, after which Don Diego asked: ‘Why do you remind me of that sad affair?’ and the young man said: ‘Because you must not boast about your victory at Cumaná. Neither in your report to Spain nor in your comments here in Cartagena.’
‘What would be the peril … if I did … which I certainly won’t?’
‘Envy. The envy that your enemies here and in Spain will feel.’ In the silence that followed, the young man mustered his courage, then continued: ‘You have promoted me to high office. Same with your two nephews. And before we sailed you did likewise with two of your brothers. Tongues will wag. Spies, even aboard this ship, will begin framing their secret reports to the king.’
How well Don Diego knew and appreciated the truth of this warning. Any Spanish governor in charge of a territory far from home ran the constant risk of being summoned back to Spain to refute charges of the basest sort, and the nature of his commission made this inevitable, for he was assigned a position of enormous authority, in charge of riches beyond the imagination even of rapacious men, but given almost no remuneration. The kings of Spain were a penurious lot, grasping for every gold or silver piece their colonies produced but unwilling to pay a decent wage to their overseers. The Spanish viceroys and governors were expected to steal, allowed ten or fifteen years to enrich themselves, and it was supposed that they would return to Spain with wealth great enough to last them and their voluminous families the rest of their lives.
But at the same time the suspicious kings encouraged a constant chain of spies to report on the misbehaviors of their viceroys and governors, with the result that after a man—like, say, Columbus—had been in one of those offices for a dozen years, he was almost certain to be visited by an official audiencia whose members might spend two years looking into his behavior and inviting his enemies to testify in secret against him, with the result that repeatedly an official who had enjoyed extraordinary powers in some far place like Mexico, Panamá or Peru finished his illustrious career by sailing home in chains, to languish in jail after he got there. The unlucky ones were hanged.
Don Diego felt driven to recall the mournful list of Spain’s great conquistadores who had met bitter ends, and as he recited their fates, his son-in-law nodded grimly: ‘Cristóbal Colón? Home in chains. Cortés in Mexico? Chains. Nuñez de Balboa? One of our finest. Beheaded. The great Pizarro of Peru? Slain by jealous underlings.’
These two good men, one a governor who kept his stealing within reason, the other the scion of a splendid family and himself destined to become a colonial governor, had identified the fundamental reasons why Spanish lands in the New World would fail, during the next four hundred years, to achieve any simple, responsible system of governance, democratic or not, in which good men could rule without stealing and alienating the riches of their countries.
A fatal tradition had already been codified during the rule of Diego Ledesma in Cartagena: provide reasonably good government for the time being, steal as much as decency and the envy of others will allow, and then, because your own position is tenuous, place every relative in the richest position possible so that he, too, can accumulate a fortune. This will mean that even if you are dragged home in disgrace, the members of your family will be left in positions of power, and after a few years they can ease their way back into Spain laden with wealth and titles, to become the new viceroys and governors or to marry into the families who do, and thus find new opportunities to steal new fortunes.
It was a system that provided swings of the pendulum so wide that men became dizzy, and a form of government that wasted the tremendous resources of the New World. With far fewer natural riches, both France and England would establish more lasting forms of good government than Spain with its superior holdings ever did. On that day in 1568 as Don Diego sailed home in triumph, Spain had already been in control of the New World since 1492, more than three-quarters of a century, whereas both France and England would not start their occupancy until the 1620s and 1630s, another half-century later. But the seeds of Spain’s deficiencies had already been sown.
However, neither of these reflective men perceived the lasting damage their philosophy was creating: First, if it was known and condoned that their governor was appropriating public funds, officials on the next tier down were justified in doing the same, although to a more restrained degree. Then those on the third tier were invited to try their luck, and on down to the lowest functionary. All had their hands out and all levels of government proceeded by theft and bribery. Second, and equally destructive, if thousands of men like Don Diego returned each year to Europe with their booty, they left the New World colonies increasingly impoverished.
At about this time a Cartagena poet summarized such rules of conduct in six sardonic lines: ‘My Spain against all other countries. / Her religion against all other religions. / My part of Spain against all other parts. / My colony against their colony. / My big family against all other big families. / And my wife and children against my brother’s wife and children.’ As one of the most congenial practitioners of this art of personal and familial self-protection, the governor of Cartagena applied nine-tenths of his energies to finding jobs for his family and treasure for himself, one-tenth defending his Caribbean against intruders. But his victory against the Dutch proved that when aroused, he could be valiant. For in the Spanish society a man could be a peculator but not a coward.
On the day that John Hawkins and Francis Drake loaded the Jesus of Lübeck with the maximum number of slaves, Don Diego de Guzman, a Spanish spy at Queen Elizabeth’s court, drafted a note in code and hurried it to the Thames waterfront, where a swift ship was waiting to depart for Spain. At the Escorial Palace, a monstrous pile of dark rock near Madrid, King Philip’s scribes made rushed copies of the orders he had drafted in cold fury, so that six hours after Philip received the news, a horseman was galloping down to Sanlúcar de Barrameda near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. From there three small boats set sail on the tide for the island of Española, where the messages were delivered to the governor at Santo Domingo. He promptly dispatched a swarm of small, swift coastal f
rigates to speed the news to seven different Caribbean capitals, so that by 3 February 1568, when Hawkins left Africa, his target islands in the Caribbean were about to receive news that he was coming.
One of the Española frigates put into Cartagena’s well-protected harbor, where the messenger hurried to inform Ledesma: ‘Excellency, I hand you an ominous message. John Hawkins is heading this way, and Guzman in London has heard on the best authority, someone close to the queen, that he is heading for Puerto Rico, Río Hacha and Cartagena, with permission to land and destroy each place if we oppose him.’
Don Diego listened, nodded several times, and waited till he himself had read the instructions, then said in a judicial voice that betrayed no fear: ‘There are ways to handle Englishmen. They’re not like French pirates who slay and burn with no questions asked, nor the Dutch who flourish on sheer pillage.’
But then the messenger disturbed this tranquillity by revealing privileged information which had come by word of mouth: ‘Hawkins is sailing in a very powerful ship, the queen’s own Jesus of Lübeck,’ and as the name of the famous warship hung in the air, Admiral Ledesma, as a well-informed navy man, could visualize that terror of the seas. To have the Jesus with its many guns bearing down upon smaller and poorly defended Spanish ships was not a happy prospect, but it was what the messenger added as his last bit of information that caused the governor his greatest worry: ‘Hawkins will bring with him a second major warship, the Minion, impossible to sink, and five lesser ships. Swallow, one hundred tons; Judith, fifty tons; Angel, thirty-three tons,’ and as he ended the recitation he added: ‘In command of the Judith will be young Francis Drake, a kinsman of Captain Hawkins, on whom Hawkins will depend if fighting becomes necessary.’
At the mention of this name Ledesma flinched, for he had heard about the threat Drake had uttered when the Spaniards at Río Hacha stole the forty slaves from him the year before: ‘When I return to these waters I will demand full payment for my slaves and burn Cartagena.’
That afternoon Ledesma issued a host of instructions for the further fortification of his capital. In the following days three more ships were sunk across Boca Grande to make it totally impassable and additional guns were emplaced to protect the entrance to Boca Chica. Each headland the Hawkins fleet would have to pass if it were to threaten the small inner harbor was given additional firepower, and troops were trained in tactics for driving English assailants back if they attempted to scale the battlements.
‘Cartagena cannot be taken,’ Ledesma announced when the work was finished, but a few weeks later a small boat scurried in from Río Hacha with the appalling news that not only had Hawkins returned to the Caribbean, but he had indeed brought the tough little fire-eater Drake with him.
‘Excellency, my crew of three and I escaped miraculously from under the English guns, and I report only the truth, as these men will testify. On the fifth day of June, this year, Captain Hawkins, with a fleet of seven English vessels and some French acquired along the way, passed the salt flats of Cumaná without stopping, but he did sell some of his slaves at the pearl island of Margarita and at Curaçao, from where he sent ahead two of his smallest ships, the Angel and the Judith, the last under the command of Captain Francis Drake, to clear the way for his big ship, the Jesus of Lübeck.
‘Drake was a reasonable choice for this mission, since he had visited Río Hacha last year, as you will remember. Immediately upon arriving he started hostilities, capturing the dispatch boat from Española and making the officials thereon his prisoners, something never done before. He then fired two shots at the town, not over the rooftops as the English are supposed to do when trading, but right at the house occupied by his great enemy, Treasurer Miguel de Castellanos, who took the slaves from him last year. And I am ashamed to say that one of Drake’s broadsides ripped right through the treasurer’s house and would have killed him had he been dining.’
‘What did Castellanos do?’ Ledesma asked, and the messenger replied: ‘For five days all he did was glare at those two little ships in his harbor, powerless to do anything against them but also strong enough to prevent Drake from landing with his soldiers.’
‘You mean the assault on Río ended in such a stalemate? Doesn’t sound like Drake.’
‘Oh no! On the sixth day Captain Hawkins arrived, bringing his great Jesus of Lübeck into the harbor. Now all was different. First thing Hawkins did, according to his custom of never making Spain angry, was give back the dispatch boat and its passengers as warrant of his peaceful intention. Then, to prove that he meant business, he marched two hundred armed men ashore, but as you know, the treasurer had long ago decided that if ever the English returned, he would oppose them to the death, and this he did, or rather, tried to do.
‘A serious battle ensued, with two English dead, but their attack was so relentless that Castellanos’ troops fled, and Hawkins found himself possessor of a town containing no women, no gold, silver, pearls or objects of value. Hawkins gave the obdurate treasurer three days to bring back his people and his treasure, and when the man refused, Hawkins threatened to burn the place. Heroically, Castellanos said: “Rather than give in to you, I’ll see every island in the Indies ablaze,” whereupon Drake, who heard the vain boast, started setting houses afire, but Hawkins stopped him, saying: “There must be a better way.”
‘After five days of patient waiting, an escaped slave showed Hawkins where the treasure was hidden. And so Hawkins won everything he wanted.’
‘What do you mean, he won everything?’
‘He sold us two hundred fifty slaves at fair prices. He made us give him extra money for the families of the two English soldiers who were killed. And then he asked us to produce the women belonging to homes that Francis Drake had burned, and when they stood before him, tired and dirty from their time hiding in the jungle with our treasure, he said: “Englishmen do not make war against women. I give you each four slaves to recompense you for your loss,” and he turned over sixty additional slaves at no charge.’
‘Very generous!’ the governor said sardonically. ‘But he did have our treasure, didn’t he?’ and the messenger said: ‘Yes. All of it.’
‘And how did Captain Drake behave when Hawkins did these things?’ Ledesma asked, and the man said: ‘He bit his tongue and obeyed, that’s what he did. But I was at the shore when he departed, and he growled at me: “When I come back as captain of my own fleet, I shall burn every house in this godforsaken town.” ’
The governor reviewed the humiliation that had been visited on one of his towns, the great loss of treasure and the peculiar behavior of his Spaniards: ‘Our treasurer, he seems to have played the man.’ The messenger nodded. ‘But our soldiers on the scene. Despicable.’
‘Excellency, when the Jesus of Lübeck is in your harbor, assisted by six other English ships and two French, all guns pointed ashore, it can be terrifying.’ He was about to add: ‘As you will learn in the next few days when Hawkins and Drake come into your harbor down there,’ but he thought better of it and said merely: ‘As the English ships left us Drake shouted from the Judith: “On to Cartagena.” ’
On 1 August 1568 the English fleet swept down upon Cartagena. Hawkins wanted only to sell his remaining fifty slaves at customary profit and trade his ordinary goods for such food and pearls as the Spaniards might have, but Drake hoped to invade the town and hold it for ransom. But though the English had a horde of sailors, they had only three hundred and seventy trained fighting men, while up on his hillside Governor Ledesma had five hundred Spanish infantry, two companies of highly skilled cavalry and not less than six thousand trained and armed Indians. So when Captain Drake dispatched a messenger under a flag of truce to inform Ledesma of the terms under which the English proposed dealing with Cartagena, the governor refused even to open the letter, advising the messenger to tell Drake that no one in Cartagena cared a fig what the English did or did not do, and that the sooner they hied themselves off, the better.
When Drake heard t
his insulting reply, he sailed as close in as he could and ordered his guns to pepper the town, but since he was still not close enough, the cannonballs fell harmlessly and rolled about the streets. Ledesma, chuckling at the impotence of the braggadocio Englishman, signaled his heavy guns to fire back, not in salute but in earnest, but he too missed.
Hawkins, distressed that things were going so badly, landed on the barren islands south of the city, where nothing was found but some large casks of wine, which Hawkins ordered his men to leave untouched, saying: ‘We’re not pirates or thieves.’ Thereupon Ledesma sent word that they should feel free to take the wine, since it was of such poor quality that only Englishmen would drink it.
Actually, the wine was a good vintage from Spain and the English reveled in it—Drake refused to touch it—and when Hawkins realized that he must leave Cartagena with nothing accomplished, he ordered his men to place beside the empty wine casks enough fine English trade goods to match the value, ‘to prove that we follow the custom of gentlemen.’ But as they took the ships back out of the big southern basin, Drake could hear Spaniards in the guard forts laughing at their departure, and his men had to restrain him from firing parting shots at them.
Ledesma and Drake had now had two confrontations without ever seeing each other, and although the rugged little Englishman was bold, the austere Spaniard was resolute and not easily frightened. His fortitude, and that of his agent in Río Hacha, had enabled the Spaniards to rebuff Drake, but the two adversaries knew that the next meeting could be bloody and decisive, though neither could guess where it might occur. Ledesma warned his men: ‘Drake will be back, of that we can be sure,’ and Drake told his sailors: ‘One day I shall humiliate that arrogant Spaniard.’
Now that English ships roamed the Caribbean with impunity, trading where and how they willed, this body of water could no longer be considered a Spanish lake. It had become a public thoroughfare, but Don Diego, who had been commissioned to keep it Spanish, believed that if Drake and Hawkins could be lured into some major sea battle, English power might be broken, and he directed his waking hours to that strategy. He was therefore pleased when a dispatch frigate sped in from Sevilla and Española with these orders: