And then, five days later, on 25 January, an outlook on a headland near Plymouth sighted an English ship, battered and barely moving, striving to approach land, with no success. Hastening to Plymouth, the watchman alerted the town, and rescue ships were sent out to intercept the Minion, whose crew was in such pitiful condition that they could no longer man the yards. When the rugged ship, veteran of a score of battles, finally limped into harbor, John Hawkins, without ever naming his kinsman, gave his report on the defeat at Ulúa, concluding with the bitter condemnation which still rankles in the English navy when men speak of Drake: ‘So with the Minion only and the Judith (a small barke of fifty tunne) we escaped, which barke that same night forsooke us in our great miserie.’
Of the hundred who had left Ulúa that flaming night in the Minion, only fifteen survived the terrible, starving passage back to Plymouth, but in Drake’s Judith, with its adequate supplies, all made it. Of the fifty slaves that Hawkins took with him to Ulúa, half drowned, for they were in chains in the hold of the Jesus and went down with her as the sailors were leaping to safety. The remaining twenty-five reached England in the surviving ships and were sold at considerable profit to householders in Devon.
When Admiral Ledesma brought his seven ships home to Cartagena he announced erroneously that both Hawkins and Drake had perished in the tremendous Spanish victory at Vera Cruz, and that the Caribbean was once again a Spanish lake. He even sent a boastful dispatch to the king:
Imperial Majesty, with the death of the two principal English pirates, Hawkins and Drake, your Caribbean is now visited only by Spanish ships, and your treasure armadas from Nombre de Dios now sail to Havana and across to Sevilla without fear of attack.
He was crestfallen when the king replied acidly that ‘apparently the ghosts of men as daring as Hawkins and Drake must be feared, for they have been spotted by our spies in Plymouth, Medway and London,’ and later information reached Cartagena that Drake had been seen prowling the Caribbean, but since he landed nowhere, attacked no land settlements, and bothered no Spanish shipping, the rumors were discounted.
In 1571 these rumors were repeated, but if Drake actually did visit his favorite sea, he did not behave characteristically, for again he attacked nothing Spanish. This shadowy behavior did have one curious effect upon the Ledesma household, whose three daughters had provided the family with several grandchildren, and when their play became rowdy their nurses disciplined them by warning: ‘If you don’t behave, El Draque will snatch you and take you away on his big black ship.’ And Ledesma noted that even adults mentioned El Draque in their ordinary conversation: ‘That is, if El Draque doesn’t come’ or ‘I think the season’s past for El Draque.’
This nebulous period of ‘He’s still alive, he’s definitely dead’ confused even Don Diego, who found himself telling the vice-regent: ‘I almost hope he is alive! To grapple with him once more. To drive him from our sea forever.’ And then, in June 1572, the king sent Ledesma intelligence which provoked a surge of excitement:
On 24 May inst. Captain Francis Drake, who is very much alive, supported by his brother John sailed from Plymouth with the warship Pasha, 80 tons, as his admiral and the Swan, 30 tons, as his vice-admiral. An ugly whisper current in London says that he may be planning to march across the isthmus and burn Panamá, hoping thereby to capture our silver coming up from Peru and our gold coming down from Mexico. To accomplish this, Drake is taking with him a crew of seventy-three, only one of them past the age of thirty.
Do you therefore hasten to La Ciudad de Panamá and ensure safe passage of our gold and silver to our collection port at Nombre de Dios.
If Drake’s ships were not large, they were extraordinarily sturdy and they must have provided more cargo space than was apparent, for the king added a postscript about a detail which obviously fascinated him:
One English sailor, when put to the torture, confided that Captain Drake had built, on shore at Plymouth, three complete pinnaces of some size, numbered each board, then taken them apart and stowed them in the bowels of the admiral, to be reassembled upon reaching the target area. Be warned.
Each item of the king’s intelligence was correct, for after a swift passage of only five weeks, the two little ships reached Dominica again and entered quickly into the Caribbean, where they sped swiftly to the far western shore at a spot not far from their target town of Nombre de Dios. Here they intended capturing King Philip’s gold and silver awaiting shipment to Sevilla.
But a skilled mariner other than Drake had also been laying careful plans, for when the king’s directive reached Admiral Ledesma, he sprang into action, and now the value of having members of one’s own family in positions of importance proved itself, for when he rasped out orders to his many relatives, he could trust they would be followed. To his son-in-law the vice-regent he said crisply: ‘Fly you to Nombre de Dios and put everything in readiness.’ To his two Amadór nephews he said: ‘Plunge into the jungle and erect barricades to block the route between Panamá and Nombre.’ To a trusted brother he said: ‘Hasten to Río Hacha and man its defenses. He might stop there for sheer revenge.’ To another brother and three cousins he handed over the defenses of Cartagena itself, while he, in obedience to the king’s commands, hastened to the city of Panamá, where he assumed overall management of the defense system. When Drake reached the western Caribbean, his purported target, he would find not less than sixteen members of Ledesma’s immediate family defending the Spanish interest.
On 12 July 1572, Drake was ready to strike. At a safe harbor some distance from Nombre de Dios, a name that would forever be associated with him, he brought the stacks and spars up from the hold of the Pasha and reassembled the three pinnaces he had built back in Plymouth. That night he convened ashore a council of the men who would attempt the great adventure. When one of the young sailors—a boy, really—asked timorously: ‘How will we know what to do when we reach Nombre?’ he turned to the lad and asked softly: ‘What do you think I’ve been doing the last two summers when I scouted the Caribbean? Wasting my time?’
And with a stick he outlined in the white sand on which the three pinnaces rested a diagram of the treasure town he had spied upon during his two secret trips: ‘We row to here, ignore the big ships staring down at us … they’ll be asleep. We come ashore here, speed directly to the governor’s house here. We’ll capture silver bars for all … and take the governor prisoner. Then rush down here to the Treasure House, strongly built and guarded, which holds what we’re really after—great stores of gold and precious stones.’
‘And then?’ a small voice asked, and without pausing to discern who had spoken, Drake said: ‘Then we throw our treasure aboard our pinnaces, and row back here to the protection of our big guns on the Pasha and the Swan.’ He paused, chuckled, then added: ‘We row very fast.’
It was, like any Drake enterprise, perfectly planned and resolutely carried out. In fact, during the first stages of the assault on Nombre de Dios it seemed as if the Spaniards were playing parts in which they had been rehearsed by Drake. The sailors in the big ships guarding the port were asleep. Citizens in the plaza did step aside to let the English raiders pass. And the first part of the strategy worked, for at the governor’s house, Drake’s men did find well over a million pesos’ worth of silver bars awaiting transshipment.
But they also found something they did not expect. In the bedroom above the fortune had been sleeping Admiral Ledesma’s valiant vice-regent. Awakened by the noise below, he leaped from bed, strapped on his sword, grabbed two pistols, and walked calmly down the stairs, asking in easy tones: ‘What goes on here?’ Then he recognized Drake from events at Ulúa: ‘Ah, Captain Drake! You survived the great defeat at Vera Cruz?’
‘I always survive,’ Drake said, pointing his pistol directly at the young intruder. The vice-regent displayed no fear, keeping his two pistols aimed directly at the Englishman’s heart, so the confrontation was a stand-off. With each man comporting himself with extreme courtesy,
Drake said: ‘I’ve come to collect payment for the slaves your people stole from me at Río Hacha,’ and pointed to the stacked silver ingots.
‘The king would be most unhappy if you touched his silver,’ the vice-regent said, and Drake responded by telling his men: ‘Each free to carry as many ingots as you can manage, then we’re off to the Treasure House, where real riches await,’ but all became so engrossed in stealing samples from the great hoard that they allowed the vice-regent to dash off to freedom.
Irritated, Drake shouted: ‘Forget this minor booty! Capture the Treasure House, now!’ But as the Englishmen sought to rejoin their companions in the plaza, the vice-regent, running ahead at great speed, shouted: ‘Fire! Fire!’ and a bullet cut into Drake’s left leg, bringing much blood, which he stanched by keeping his hand in his pocket and pressing its cloth against the wound.
In this way he reached the Treasure House, where another group of his men attempted to blow off the doors. Meanwhile, the vice-regent had rallied his troops and launched a counterattack, which might have annihilated the small English force had not a sailor seen that Drake was bleeding profusely from the leg, and urged him to abandon the scheme.
When Drake hesitated, infuriated by being so close to untold wealth but unable to touch it, four of his soldiers dragged him bodily away from the attacking Spaniards and took him to the safety of the pinnaces.
To the astonishment of the Spaniards in Nombre de Dios, the arrogant Englishmen retreated slowly to an island in the middle of the bay, where they established headquarters with the implied challenge: ‘Dislodge us if you dare.’
The Spaniards then dispatched one of their small boats to the island under a white flag. It bore the vice-regent, who came ashore and addressed Drake as if they were diplomats meeting in formal session at some court. ‘And when will you be departing, Captain?’ the Spaniard asked, and Drake replied: ‘Not until we capture the gold and precious stones in your Treasure House,’ and the Spaniard said without changing his tone: ‘I’m afraid that will be a long time coming, since our guns will destroy you if you move in that direction.’
‘Only a lucky shot prevented me from ransacking your Treasure House yesterday,’ said Drake. And the Spaniard replied: ‘Our men are given to lucky shots.’
Then, to rub salt into Drake’s wound, the vice-regent said: ‘I am, as you may remember, son-in-law to Don Diego, governor of Cartagena. He sent me here to forestall you, which I have done, and I’m sure he would want you to know that if you had taken with you the silver you had already captured at my house, you would have had ten million pesos at least, and if you’d broken open our Treasure House, you’d have another hundred million.’ When Drake did not flinch, the vice-regent added: ‘Four times now Governor Ledesma and I have frustrated you. Why don’t you sail back to England and leave us alone?’ and Drake replied without rancor: ‘I shall accept your counsel and sail back soon, but you and your father will be astonished at what my men do before we go.’
The visit ended in such apparent amiability that one English sailor who had waited on them whispered: ‘You’d think they were cousins,’ and when the vice-regent reached shore he told the people awaiting him: ‘A splendid meeting. I was never treated with more civility in my life.’
What Drake did as a first step in achieving his revenge was as amazing to his own men as to the Spaniards, for he left Nombre de Dios with its treasure intact, regained his two ships, and with the three little pinnaces trailing behind, crossed back to Cartagena, fired a few insolent shots over the city walls, and came brazenly in through Boca Chica, where he captured several trading ships carrying just the supplies he needed.
Then, in a daring gesture unequaled at the time, he himself sank his little English ship as too small to bother with, assuring his men: ‘We’ll find a better.’ And he did, capturing a big, fine Spanish merchant ship which promptly became his vice-admiral for the incredible feat he was about to try.
Throwing a few final farewell shots into Cartagena, whose citizens sighed with relief to see him go, he escaped just in time to avoid meeting a very strong Spanish fleet coming in from Spain with hundreds of well-armed soldiers. Once free of that danger, he headed west toward the Isthmus of Panamá, where he revealed his hitherto secret plans to his astonished men: ‘We’re going to march across the isthmus to the city of Panamá, intercept the mule train laden with gold and silver, and earn each man his fortune.’ There were sixty-nine young men and boys on whom he would depend to accomplish this bold attack against a city of thousands.
The isthmus was a terrible place to cross, filled with mortal vapors, unknown animals, deadly snakes, polluted water, and some of the most obdurate Indians in the New World, armed with poisoned arrows. They were a breed apart, not Caribs from the east, nor Arawaks from Hispaniola, nor Incas from Peru, nor Aztecs from Mexico; they were formidable and made their isthmus one of the most perilous stretches of land in the known world, but it was the link between the silver mines of Peru and the safe harbor of Nombre de Dios. It was this lifeline that Drake now proposed to sever.
But in the months since he had received the latest intelligence on Panamá, a significant change had taken place: Governor Ledesma of Cartagena had arrived to take personal responsibility for the accumulation of treasure in Panamá and its safe transfer by mule train to Nombre de Dios, where his son-in-law was awaiting it.
He had taken all practical steps, having his nephew install forts along the jungle path and training both the muleteers and their protecting soldiers in procedures for frustrating English attacks. The mule train that Governor Ledesma would be leading might be assaulted but it would not be surprised.
On the dark night of 14 February 1573, Drake, having hacked his way through uncharted jungle to avoid the blockades guarding the normal path, secreted his pitifully small contingent at the western outskirts of a little jungle village only a few miles from Panamá, each man dressed in white to avoid confusion in the night fight ahead. His orders were strict: ‘No man to move until the mule train has passed well beyond us. So that when we attack, it cannot scamper back to Panamá but must stand and fight us. Remember—if we take it, thousands for all!’
His daring plan would have worked except for the wise foresight of Governor Ledesma, who himself was in the lead, tall and silent and resolute.
Just before his mules started into the jungle he had a brilliant idea: ‘Commander! Move six of our reserve mules bearing nothing to the front, with three peons who will look like soldiers.’ A stop was made to accomplish this, but as the decoy mules were about to move out, he had a second good thought: ‘Place bells about their necks,’ and when this was done the six mules sounded like sixty.
The name of the Englishman they fooled, Robert Pike, has come down in infamy through the annals of the English navy. He heard the spurious mules approaching with their bells tinkling and their attendant soldiers marching cautiously ahead. Eager to play the hero, Pike leaped up as the mules reached him and began assaulting the three peons with loud cries of: ‘For St. George and England!’
Ledesma heard the strange cry, heard the mules twist in confusion, and heard a shot fired either by Pike or one of the terrified peons. In less than three seconds he uttered his command: ‘About! Flee!’ And there in the darkness Robert Pike’s intemperate action and Governor Ledesma’s judicious one deprived Captain Francis Drake of more than fifteen million pesos.
There was nothing he could do. By the time he regrouped his men, Ledesma and his mule train were galloping back to Panamá, with swift horsemen spurring ahead to mobilize a force so large and well trained that it would have annihilated the Englishmen had the latter tried to follow. In despair at having been defrauded yet again by Ledesma and his team, Drake could do nothing but retreat through that steaming jungle to find refuge in his waiting ships.
And then, in the depth of a self-inflicted misery over his failure, he proved himself to be one of the most remarkable men of his age. He had not yet performed those feats which
would make him immortal—his circumnavigation of the globe, his raid on Cádiz, and his humbling of the Spanish Armada—and so, what he did now in this remote corner of the world with only a handful of men seems all the more incredible.
First, he returned to Nombre de Dios, not boldly as before but creeping like an animal through the jungle. Then, so close to town that his men could hear its citizens at work, he waylaid the next mule train from Panamá, gaining his men a small fortune. But now he had to get his men many miles back to their ships, through that pathless jungle beset by snakes and swamps and insects and hunger, and when he returned to his ships—the original Pasha and the one captured earlier from the Spaniards—he realized that they were not seaworthy enough to get him back to Plymouth with his treasure. So, with a defiance that was unbelievable, he sailed back to Cartagena, where a great Spanish fleet rested in the tight inner harbor. Trusting that none of the larger ships could maneuver in time, he sailed right into the large southern harbor, negotiating the narrows of Boca Chica in full sail, spotted the kind of huge ship he needed, boarded it, fought off its sailors, and sailed insolently out of Cartagena—in one fine new ship in place of his two leaky old craft. Firing a final salute at the city which had tormented his dreams, he repeated the oath he had taken long ago at Río Hacha: ‘I’ll be back, Cartagena.’ And off he sailed for England and the great adventures that awaited.
But when Diego Ledesma Paredes y Guzman Orvantes returned to Cartagena, he could claim the greater victory, for as he reported to his king:
By following the instructions Your Majesty prudently issued, we have been able to frustrate Captain Francis Drake at every turn. He stole no gold at Nombre de Dios. He did not reach Panamá. He did not capture the richly laden mule train that I organized. And he failed three times to assault Cartagena. Furthermore, we caused him to lose both his Pasha and his Swan, forcing him to flee home in whatever mean ships he could muster.