Don Diego, as a fellow searfaring man, felt no embarrassment in probing: ‘How many ships did we lose?’ and Ortega said: ‘So many that the Enterprise cannot go forward.’
In the lull that followed, Doña Leonora asked: ‘That was obviously the disaster. What was the hope?’ and Ortega said quietly: ‘When I reached home, far from Cádiz, my mother wept: “Like your father, you lost your ship; you were lucky you didn’t lose your life.” Seeing that there were few prospects for me, she said: “You have an uncle of sorts who’s governor in Cartagena. Try your luck there,” and here I am. You are my hope.’
At this honest disclosure, Doña Leonora looked at her husband and raised her eyebrows in a secret gesture which meant ‘Why not?’ and he nodded slightly to indicate ‘Go ahead,’ so she said brightly: ‘Captain Ortega, you must remain with us till you find quarters,’ and he did not engage in mock humility: ‘That would be most generous. But a captain with no ship has little to offer in return.’
In the days that followed, Doña Leonora saw with approval that her husband and Ortega got along handsomely, for they were both active men who required few words to belabor attitudes on which they agreed. On many evenings they walked together along the battlements, staring down at the landlocked harbor: ‘Was Cádiz much like this?’ and Ortega would place the Spanish ships among the islands, then show Drake sweeping in to create his havoc: ‘My ship? I never got her away from her mooring!’
Don Diego said: ‘The loss of a ship like yours is no worry, really. To you, yes. To the king, no. What really hurts is the rumor that the wily John Hawkins is building a score of ships to bring against us. Men like Drake will devise ways to protect themselves when we strike. More English ships, more English sailors.’
Ortega added: ‘And more ammunition when the fighting begins,’ and Don Diego concluded: ‘As a seaman who has fought Drake many times, winning and losing, I know how tenacious he can be.’
They studied the sea in silence, then Don Diego asked: ‘Will you be going back to fight him?’ and Ortega said: ‘I’d swim back to have the chance.’
But other important matters in Cartagena intruded, and The Enterprise of England was temporarily forgotten, because if Don Diego was constantly striving to enhance his family’s fortunes, his wife was equally determined to improve hers. Her campaign began one evening at supper when she asked bluntly: ‘Captain Ortega, are you married?’ and he replied: ‘Was once. She’s dead,’ and no more was said.
Señora Ledesma had on the island of Española a cousin her age who had a daughter with a lovely name, Beatrix, but no face to match. With Santo Domingo, the capital of Española, having been recently sacked by El Draque, ordinary social life had been disrupted, so that poor Beatrix had slimmer chances than ever of catching a husband, and Doña Leonora decided to do something about it.
As swiftly as the dispatch frigate could get to Santo Domingo and back, it deposited on the docks of Cartagena a young woman twenty-two years old and extremely seasick from a rough crossing. Her whole intention was to climb into bed at her cousin’s house and feel sorry for herself, but Leonora would have none of that, for it was important that Captain Ortega see Beatrix soon and in the best possible light. So Leonora summoned two of her married daughters to the bedroom where Beatrix supposed she would be resting, and with the seasick girl listening, the three Ledesma women surveyed their problem.
‘First thing, fetch her some salts,’ Leonora said, and when these were waved under her nose the two younger women sorted out the newcomer’s clothes and expressed disgust with what they saw: ‘Have you nothing decent, nothing whatever?’ and when Beatrix broke into tears, Leonora slapped her: ‘Your whole future is at stake, girl. You don’t find a man like Captain Ortega very often,’ and together the three women worked a miracle on their distressed cousin.
Borrowing one of Juana’s fine dresses, they called to the kitchen for a seamstress to pinch in the waist, and María, the middle Ledesma daughter, gave her a pair of shoes and a lovely fawn-colored shawl for her shoulders. Then, squeezing her forcefully into the dress until she cried ‘I can’t breathe!’ they told her: ‘You don’t have to. Until after you meet him.’
When the transformation was complete, with her hair exquisitely done and cosmetics applied to her pallid face, she was what she had always been, had she but known it: a lovely young Spanish woman, not dazzling in beauty but adorable in her vulnerability, the beauty of her posture and the quivering about her mouth as she whispered to herself: ‘I will not get sick. I will not get sick.’
Indeed, when Doña Leonora and her daughters propelled her into the main hall where Captain Ortega waited, Beatrix was truly the finest-looking of the lot, her wan face, perfectly powdered, giving her the appearance of a princess in a fairy tale. Small wonder that Ortega was taken with her immediately, but he had to wait for a dance because others reached her first.
The courtship progressed at a reassuring pace, orchestrated by Doña Leonora, and she would surely have had her cousin married had not imperative news reached Cartagena in January of 1588:
Admiral Ledesma, Greetings! The Enterprise of England resumes. Assemble all available heavy ships, crews and repair materials and report immediately to Lisbon. There you will form part of the train carrying supplies for the Duke of Parma’s troops, whom you will transport from the Netherlands across the Channel for their invasion of England.
To seafaring men like Ledesma and Ortega the message brought both joy and irritation—joy for having another chance to fight Hawkins and Drake, irritation that their ships would carry not the invading army but only cargo to Spanish soldiers already waiting in the Netherlands. ‘Of course,’ Ledesma said reassuringly, ‘as soon as we deliver the goods, we’ll ferry them across the Channel and land them in England. We’ll still see a lot of the fighting.’
Despite his disappointment in not being part of the battle fleet, he told his wife: ‘It’s great for a man my age to be back on the deck of his ship. It takes a steady hand to manage the Mariposa and I can do it.’
She thought him surprisingly old for such adventures and was downright disgusted when she learned that Captain Ortega was leaving too. She realized that this ended any hope of an immediate marriage for Cousin Beatrix, but she had faced such disappointments before, and surprisingly often they worked out well when years were used as the measuring stick instead of days.
She and Beatrix found solace in the fact that their men would be participating in this great adventure in a ship as sturdy as the Mariposa, for they had been assured: ‘That one will get us there and back.’ There were tearful farewells as the odd assortment of ships weighed anchor and headed out into the Caribbean, firing salutes as they passed through Boca Chica and coasted under the battlements of Cartagena.
Now came the months of tension. Since all available ships had been requisitioned by King Philip for his vast Armada, the mightiest invasion fleet ever to have been assembled, none were available to carry news to Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. The citizens of Cartagena remained in darkness while their home country fought great battles in its quest for domination of the known world.
Doña Leonora and her daughters met regularly with their priest, who preached but one message to the citizens of his walled city: ‘Since our men are fighting to protect God’s true religion, He will never allow heretics to win,’ and these words gave Doña Leonora comfort.
But when months passed with no news, she reasoned with her daughters: ‘If the news was good, surely the king would have spared at least one small ship to speed to us. No ship? No news? Disaster.’ Gradually this conclusion was reached by so many that even the priest’s reassurances began to sound hollow, and many whispered: ‘Who cares about victory? Will our ships return? Have our sons and husbands been lost in wintry seas?’ and gloom prevailed.
Then one morning a lookout cried the joyous news: ‘Sail on the horizon!’ and all ran to the ramparts to see the sturdy old Mariposa come down from the north as if arriving fr
om a routine trip to Cuba, and as it came parallel to the city and continued down to Boca Chica and the entrance home, watchers swore that they could identify this man or that, and word passed that Admiral Ledesma was among those returning, but others denied that anyone could be recognized from such a distance.
It was a most painful hour and a half as the lumbering Dutch ship sailed far south to make the turn, then disappeared behind the forts at Boca Chica, only to reappear in the lower bay in what looked to be excellent condition—‘She has her masts. No holes in her sides’—and as the ship grew larger coming up the bay, watchers could accurately pick out this man and that. Then came a triumphant cry: ‘Ledesma! Ledesma!’ and the governor’s white hair could be clearly seen.
When the ship gave no triumphant signal, Doña Leonora whispered: ‘It did not go well,’ and as she watched the close approach of the Mariposa she saw something which caused her heart to stumble. Don Diego, having brought his ship home from the wars with at least some of its crew, was so grateful to provident God who had guided him through terrible battles in the English Channel and fearsome struggles with his ancient adversary Drake that he fell upon the deck of his ship as it touched the wharf and kissed the planking. It was obvious to his wife that he was overcome with emotion, but she also saw that he was too weak to regain his feet without assistance from Captain Ortega, and she thought: The old man has suffered some terrible defeat, and her heart ached with love for him.
But as she watched him steady himself against Ortega’s arm, she saw him stiffen in the old way, throw back his shoulders as if facing one more enemy, and come ashore, where with a raised arm he silenced the cheers which would be deserved only by returning conquerors. Walking directly to where the assistant governors of the city stood, the ones who had protected Cartagena in his absence, he stood before them, nodded gravely, and announced in a clear voice: ‘Spain has suffered a terrible defeat. Let the bells be tolled,’ and all that mournful day the bells of Cartagena struck the slow, heavy notes that signaled grief.
In the afternoon, while the bells were still mourning, Ledesma had the courage to assemble the leaders of the city, and in subdued tones he and Ortega reported on the encounter of the big, slow ships of the Armada with the smaller, swifter ships of the English.
‘It started with a monstrous humiliation,’ Ledesma said, and Ortega confirmed: ‘We were not allowed to be a fighting ship. Nor did we even carry fighting weapons. When we reported to Spain to take our place in the fleet, we were sent to the rear.’ He was too ashamed to reveal what happened next, but Ledesma was not.
‘In the holds of our ship where we expected to carry guns and ammunition, what do you suppose we loaded? Hay. And in the holds where we could have managed heavy field guns and cannonballs, what did we get? Horses.’ He looked at the floor, then said softly: ‘You remember how we sailed out of here. Flags, salutes, men ready to die for the glory of God and King Philip. What we were asked to do, instead, was feed horses.’
‘But you did deliver them to the troops?’ a counselor asked.
‘We never found the troops,’ Ortega said. ‘They were supposed to be with Parma, a great general, somewhere in the Netherlands. He never appeared.’
‘You didn’t invade England?’ several men asked at once, and Ledesma said with a bitterness which had been growing for months: ‘We never got close to England. We never even got close to her ships.’
‘But the great battle? Our fleet against theirs?’ men asked in amazement, and Ledesma allowed his captain to explain: ‘We sailed right up the Channel, in splendid formation. Every one of our captains knew just what to do.’
‘And then? In the battle?’
‘We never had a battle. The English refused to come at us from the front, where they were supposed to. We’d have destroyed them. Instead, they came pecking at us from the rear … sending fireboats among our ships to disrupt us.’
The officials, appalled at what they were hearing, looked to Ledesma for explanations, and he said: ‘He speaks the truth. We never had a battle. We sailed up the Channel, fighting off the gnats that buzzed around us, and never made contact with our land troops. Sailed right past, and before long we were so far beyond England that their ships stopped chasing us. We escaped.’
‘But your duel with Drake, the one you told us about when you left … the one you were burning to fight?’
‘We never saw Drake, nor Hawkins either. They darted in and out among us like falling stars at night.’
‘They were there,’ Ortega said. ‘We could tell by the way the English fought, but we never saw them.’
‘But your fleet did escape?’ a local leader asked, and Ledesma nodded: ‘We lost a few ships, but most escaped,’ and Ortega said: ‘Our admiral here received honors for what he accomplished. He started the invasion in command of twenty-three cargo ships and brought twenty of them safely through battles and attacks of fire and the heaviest gunfire Drake and the others could throw against us. Cartagena can be proud of its governor.’
‘But the horses?’ asked a man who had a country estate outside the walls. ‘What did you do with the horses?’ and Ledesma turned away and refused to say it, indicating with his left hand that Ortega should: ‘When we couldn’t find the cavalry that was supposed to get them, we thought we would carry them back to their farms in Spain, but the order came: “As we start on our long sail around Ireland, all ships must be lightened.” ’
‘And the horses?’
‘We threw them overboard. In the middle of the Channel.’
‘Were they able to swim to shore?’ the countryman asked, and Ledesma had to say: ‘No one knows.’
At this point the listeners shifted in their chairs, obviously eager to hear more details about the fighting, and one asked: ‘But if you escaped up the Channel, and fled around Scotland and Ireland, most of your ships must have made it back to Spain. So the defeat couldn’t have been as bad as you made it sound at first,’ and Doña Leonora, who had been listening intently to this broken narrative, saw her husband’s shoulders sag and his face pale.
‘Too much for one day, my dear friends. We’re home and six of the other ships from Cartagena will be coming in too, I trust. We’ll talk later,’ and without further amenities he left them with Ortega, who continued the dismal story, except that he also avoided any discussion of the passage of the ships back to Spain.
When Doña Leonora led her husband to bed she saw how exhausted he was, not from the sea voyage home, for he loved his old Mariposa as one of the sturdiest ships in the ocean, but from the anguish of being forced to report on the humiliations and disasters that had overtaken the little fleet he had taken from Cartagena. As soon as she observed his response to her first questions she knew she must stop and allow him to sleep. She asked: ‘Did your other ships carry horses too?’ and he groaned. Then she asked: ‘If you saved twenty of your ships in the battle, how many did you get back home to Spain?’ and he turned his face to the wall, indicating that he could accept no further conversation. He was one more valiant warrior, the same in all centuries, who had come home from battle unable to explain to his wife what had happened.
Next day, however, when he again met with the elders of his city he was prepared, with Ortega’s help, to speak frankly about the catastrophes in which he had participated: ‘We were led by a complete ninny, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, a man who hated the sea, who got violently sick when a ship rolled, and who had warned the king: “Since I do not know how to fight ships, I will do poorly,” and he did. The English outsmarted him at every turning of the tide.’
‘Was he a coward?’
‘Spaniards are never cowards … but they can be stupid.’
But the men kept asking: ‘You sailed that great fleet to England and never fought a battle?’ and Ledesma said: ‘Not in the old style, no. Great ships lunging at each other? No. More like trained dogs worrying a bull till he staggers.’
‘And you never saw Drake or his ship?’
Very s
lowly Ledesma said: ‘I never … saw … Drake,’ but Ortega voiced what he had intimated the day before: ‘But we knew he was out there,’ and when someone asked how, he said: ‘By the results.’
‘Now tell us … what happened to the fleet as it passed Ireland?’ and bracing his shoulders, Ledesma turned to his captain: ‘Ortega, what happened to our sanity at Ireland? Why did we Spaniards throw the whole thing away?’
The question was one that would haunt naval historians for the next half-millennium, and even then no sensible answers would be produced. However, Ortega, as one of the few captains who had brought his ship safely through the disaster, did know certain basic facts: ‘We had no proper charts. They failed to show how far Ireland jutted out into the Atlantic. When our ships turned south prematurely they ran into headlands that shouldn’t have been there, and driven by the gale blowing so strong from the west, they couldn’t tack to escape those terrible rocks.’
The tale having been properly launched, Ledesma, always willing as the commander of an operation to assume his share of the blame when things went wrong, said quietly: ‘We should have had a safe run home to our Spanish ports. No English ships were harassing us. But we lost twenty-six of our largest Armada vessels … an entire navy … not one ship down as a result of enemy action. In the wild storms of the North Atlantic, sheathing came apart. In mournful darkness they collided and sank. But most of them, running before the fierce winds of approaching winter, crashed head-on into those dreadful headlands of western Ireland, drowning half the crew, depositing the others near naked on the inhospitable shore …’
Shaking his head at the magnitude of the disaster he had escaped because of his own superior seamanship, he indicated that Ortega should continue: ‘Tell them of what happened when our shipwrecked men were lucky enough to make it to land,’ and the captain revealed an incredible tale: ‘By the time we left Spain for here, all we had were rumors, but I questioned three of our sailors who escaped the terrors of Ireland, and they told a story of such horror that it flashed through the fleet. It seems that whenever a Spanish crew reached shore, one of three things happened. Some were stripped naked by the wild Irish peasants and most killed on the spot. Those who survived fell into the hands of Irish landlords who sought favor with the English and were either slaughtered or turned over to them. And those who surrendered honorably to English officials were murdered one by one, and in public, to teach them a lesson.’