Free The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson

voyage as Burghley’s spy. By the summer of 1578 Drake had Doughty taken prisoner and bound to the mast. When untied, Doughty was forbidden pen or paper or any books that were not in English (for Doughty was a learned man). One of the many curious facts about the two men is that Doughty and Drake remained friends, even after Drake had put Doughty on ‘trial’ for treason. At the end of the trial, they dined and received the Sacrament together. Perhaps there were no hard feelings, even the next morning, when Drake had Doughty beheaded.
    By now the crews of the various ships were demoralised and restless. What was the purpose of this arduous journey? They had begun it with the hope of gold. Now there was talk merely of discovering some fantasy Australia, and their commanders had fallen out among themselves. Conditions on a sixteenth-century sailing ship were cramped. Food was rationed, as was water. It was safer to drink beer than water, and each crew member was entitled to a gallon a day. Not surprisingly, there was much drunkenness. With no fresh fruit or vegetables available on the voyage, disease was rife, both among the human population of the ships and among the rats that travelled with them in great numbers.
    A month or so after Doughty’s beheading, Drake ordered all hands on shore for the Sunday service. He told the ship’s chaplain, Fletcher, that he himself would deliver the sermon. The sailors were by now half-mutinous, drunken, unruly, insolent and refusing to do their share of the work.
    ‘My masters!’ exclaimed Drake in his resonant voice as he surveyed the boozy, piratical, unshaven rabble on the Argentinian sands, ‘I must have it left. I must have the gentlemen to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman. I would know him that would refuse to set his hand to a rope.’ He had grabbed their attention, and made them frightened. Was he going to name the idlers? Keel-haul them after the Prayer-Book Matins? Finish reading the Collect for the Day and administer the cat? His men knew that Drake was a captain who was capable of worse harshness than this. But, no. With a rhetorical flourish, having said he ‘would know’ such an idler, he added, ‘I know there is not any such here.’
    Next, he turned to the captains and masters of the ships and dismissed every one from his post. He said that when he thought of the overwhelming difficulty of the task he had undertaken, it ‘bereaved him of his wits’. But he must have loyal obedience. No man from now on was obliged to stay with him. If any wished to leave now, they were to declare it.
    No human voice was heard; only the cry of gulls, the crash of the waves on the sand, the movement of the winds. Drake had his men in the palm of his hand.
    ‘You come then,’ he said, ‘of your own free will: on you it depends to make the voyage renowned or to end as a reproach to our country and a laughing-stock to the enemy.’
    There was no further dissension after that. Drake now reduced the squadron to three ships: the Pelican , which was at this juncture renamed the Golden Hind , the Elizabeth and the Marigold . The auxiliary ships were emptied of their stores and destroyed. On 21 August 1678 these three English fighting ships entered the Straits of Magellan. The Portuguese explorer and navigator Ferdinand Magellan ( c .1480–1521), after whom the Straits are named, was the first man to circumnavigate the world, but although he rounded the Cape from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, Magellan never made it home, being killed in the Philippines having accomplished about half the journey. Some of Magellan’s crew made the journey home in his ship the Victoria , but Francis Drake was the first commander to sail round the world. To sail through the Straits of Magellan is a hazardous undertaking. Most sailing ships since then have gone round Cape Horn to the southward, but Drake – in common with all his contemporaries who had thought about