Plymouth (6 page)
Authors: Laura Quigley
Hawkins’ small fleet was then battered in a storm near Florida and they urgently made for the port of Vera Cruz to make repairs. In Vera Cruz, they were excited to discover Spanish treasure ships there awaiting the arrival of the Spanish fleet to escort them to Europe. However, they did not have the strength to seize them, so they peacefully tried to refit their ships. When the Spanish fleet reached the city, however, hostilities began – and suddenly the English ships found themselves under attack. All the Englishmen on shore were killed and the
Jesus
riddled with shot as Hawkins and his men jumped across to the
Minion
. Using the
Jesus
as a shield, the
Minion
and the
Judith
survived the attack, limping home – and leaving the survivors remaining in Vera Cruz to suffer imprisonment, torture and burning alive at the stake at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.
The Elizabethan House on New Street is a fine example of the Tudor houses built for sea captains. Narrow, but on three storeys – the spiral staircase winds around an old ship’s mast – the house must have been very overcrowded when, in the 1800s, it was split into rooms to house a dozen families.
The ghost of an eight-year-old girl is thought to roam the first floor. She has been seen many times peering through the window onto the street, by those wandering past as well as visitors inside the house. Visitors and staff complain of ice-cold spots in the house. A cradle on the upper-most floor has been observed starting to rock all by itself, and heavy furniture has been heard scraping across the floor in the room above when no one else is in the building. Before I knew of the haunting, I myself visited the house, and felt one very cold spot on the first floor and an almost overwhelming urge to re-arrange the furniture…
The haunted Elizabethan House.
Just over 100 years later, another Plymouth sailor was captured by the Inquisition at Vera Cruz: he swiftly converted to Catholicism and saved his life. A Frenchman called Louis Ramé recorded his treatment at the hands of the Inquisition at this time after he refused to convert: he was clapped in irons and kept in a dark cell for years on end, fed on drugged food that eventually drove him close to madness.
The treachery of the Spanish fleet hardened Drake and Hawkins against the Spanish and Catholicism. Drake’s family had earlier been left homeless by a Catholic Rebellion and the embittered, half-starved men arriving back in Devon were determined to avenge themselves against the Spanish Catholics. Hawkins’ revenge was subtle. In 1571 he became a spy, pretending to be part of a plot to betray Queen Elizabeth I, while offering his services to the Spanish in return for releasing some English prisoners of war. Sir John’s ruse succeeded and, gaining the trust of the Spanish, he discovered and foiled the Spaniards’ plans to invade England. But in 1588, the Spanish would return in greater numbers than ever before.
To protect England, Drake was said to have sold his soul to Satan at Devil’s Point, a headland in Plymouth Sound near Devonport, notorious for its dangerous currents. In 1588 it was rumoured that Drake met at Devil’s Point with a coven of witches and concocted the terrible storms that drove the Spanish Armada north and west, away from England’s shores. If you are on Devil’s Point in July, in the early morning fog, it is said that you will hear the disembodied voices of Drake and his coven raising the winds that blew the Spanish away. While at Devil’s Point, Drake whittled on a stick: each wood shaving that fell into the Sound, it was claimed, formed a mighty fire-ship that brought death and destruction to the Armada. If Drake really did do a deal with Satan, it is good to know that, in July 1588, Satan was on the side of the English.
Sir Francis Drake’s heroic image stands proud on Plymouth Hoe and in Tavistock, the town of his birth – but over the centuries the stories of his daring exploits have all been linked with witchcraft and devil-worship.
Francis was the eldest of twelve sons living with his family in Tavistock when their farm was attacked in the midst of the 1549 Western Rebellion. The family fled to Plymouth. The young Francis was apprenticed to the sea and ended up working for his cousin, John Hawkins. After the horror of Vera Cruz, Francis Drake took his own revenge on the Spanish by theft – no longer was he a trader, but a patriotic pirate. Sheltering in a small natural harbour he called Port Pheasant, he surveyed the Spanish treasure port of Nombre de Dios, a small shanty town that twice a year loaded up the treasure ships with gold and silver mined in Peru and Bolivia. Drake’s plan was to fortify Port Pheasant and from there to raid the treasure ships.
In 1572 Drake returned to Port Pheasant with two ships, the
Pasco
and the
Swan
, with his brothers John and Joseph, and enlarged his forces by enlisting the local Cimarrons – by dreadful irony, a group of escaped slaves who hated the Spanish. In July, Drake’s forces made their first attack on Nombre de Dios, sixty men stealing into the town and heading for the battery of guns on the shore. Drake led forty of his men into the town, beating drums and sounding trumpets. The inhabitants, thinking they were being attacked by a sizeable force, fled in terror, but a small force of musketeers bravely remained behind and took on Drake’s men in the market square. Drake’s trumpeter was killed and Drake was shot in the leg.
A second force, led by Drake’s brother John, then attacked the Spaniards from behind, and the two brothers headed for the governor’s house where the gold and silver were stored. Just as the Spanish forces were re-grouping, a thunderstorm struck and soaked Drake’s men and their weapons, leaving them dispirited and defenceless (their gunpowder being sodden). Drake urged on his men, only to discover that the governor’s stores were empty – too late! The treasure ships had left just weeks before.
Drake managed to escape, bleeding but alive. He then decided to wait for the next delivery of gold and silver, coming via mule train from Panama to Venta Cruces, but his brothers did not survive the wait. John died from wounds he suffered during the failed raid on Nombre de Dios, and Joseph – like many of Drake’s men – succumbed to yellow fever. The raids on the Spanish mule trains from Panama failed too, and with his ships now unfit for the journey home, Drake’s voyage was turning into a disaster.
A chance meeting with a French privateer called Guillaume le Testu changed their fortunes. Le Testu told Drake of another mule train laden with treasure heading for Nombre de Dios and their combined forces successfully captured 190 mules, each carrying 300 pounds of silver. Le Testu lost his life, but Drake managed to steal a Spanish galleon and returned home at last in 1573 with £100,000 worth of gold and 15 tons of silver ingots.
In 1577 Drake set out with a small fleet, telling everyone he was heading for Alexandria, when in fact he was determined to try his hand at sailing around the Strait of Magellan and into the Pacific Ocean, for the first time, to investigate any Spanish settlements worth raiding along the western coast of South America.
Drake accused Thomas Doughty of witchcraft, mutiny and treason on extremely tenuous grounds – the arrival of a sudden storm. Doughty was beheaded. (LC-USZ62-135589)
The first few weeks of the voyage were a catastrophe. By the time his fleet had reached South America’s eastern coastline, they had already lost one boy overboard and been attacked by Moroccan pirates; an attempted mutiny then resulted in the execution of his former friend Thomas Doughty on the shores of Port Julian. In the end, only the
Golden Hind
made it into the Pacific.
As he was setting out to sea, Drake’s first wife, Mary Newman, agreed to wait for him for seven years before considering marrying again. Before the seven years were up, however, thinking she would never see him again, she agreed to marry one of her many suitors. As they stood at the altar about to become husband and wife, a cannon ball crashed down between them. It is said that Drake fired the shot from the Antipodes as a warning, to remind his wife of her promise.