r-
1
ENGLISH SEAMEN
HOWARD, CLIFFORD, HAWKINS, DRAKE
CAVENDISH
ROBERT SOUTHEY
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
DAVID HANNAY
CHICAGO
STONE AND KIMBALL
1895
LONDON: METHUEN & COMPANY
CONTENTS
PAGE
LORD HOWARD OF EFFINGHAM 1
THE EARL OF CUMBERLAND- - 101
HAWKINS AND DRAKE - - 170
THOMAS CAVENDISH - - - 359
INTRODUCTION
WHITING to his friend Mrs. Hodson, on the 20th January,
1830, Southey tells her, " I have engaged to compose a
volume of Naval History in biographical form for the
Cabinet Cyclopaedia, not for love but for lucre, though it
will be done lovingly when in hand ". The volume grew
into volumes. In 1838 he had still to write that he was
" getting through the admirals ". Next year his strength
broke down under the strain of incessant writing, and
what was more fatal still, of reading continually through
the walks which he was, with some difficulty, persuaded to
take for the good of his health. The admirals remained a
fragment. The whole work was to have included an in-
troductory sketch of the Naval History of England down
to the reign of Elizabeth. From that point, in the words
of Southey's Preface, " it may be best continued in a bio-
graphical form ; because there are then materials for such
biography, whereby we are enabled to understand how
much depended upon the character of individual com-
manders'". The introduction filled the whole of one
volume, and overflowed much the greater part of a
second. The biographies had extended into a fifth volume
when the failure of Southey's intellect stopped his share of
the work, at the end of the life of Sir William Monson.
A life of the first Earl of Sandwich was added by Mr.
Robert Bell, and then in accordance with the evil fate
which has ordained that all histories of the Navy above the
rank of mere compilations shall be partial or fragmentary,
vi INTRODUCTION
there was an end of the effort of the Cabinet Cyclopaedia
to make good a discreditable defect in English literature.
Some portion of the blame for this want of complete-
ness must, even by those who are least inclined to find
fault with him, he allowed to rest on Southey. From a
passage in a letter written to John May on the 20th 7
January, 1836, he appears to have had an uneasy con-
sciousness that he had not so executed his work as to
leave him the possibility of rounding it fairly off in good
proportions.
" The fourth volume," he writes, " will contain the lives
of Essex, Raleigh, Sir William Monson, Blake, and Monk.
Then, not to extend unreasonably a work which was not
intended by the publisher at first for more than two
volumes, I shall drop the biography and wind up in one
volume more, with the Naval History from the Revolution
in continuous narrative. A good pretext for this is, that
the age of naval enterprise and adventure, and conse-
quently of personal interest, was past ; and the interest
henceforth becomes political, events are regarded, not
with reference to the principal actors, as in Drake's time,
but to their bearings upon the national affairs."
The word pretext is used, as was indeed uniformly the
case with Southey's English, in the most strictly accurate
sense. The distinction which he draws here is quite
arbitrary, and must be taken to be a species of confession
on the part of the writer, that he had allowed his work to
break far beyond all reasonable bounds, and must make
an effort to reduce it. Even if he had kept to the limits
which he set himself in this letter, his scheme would have
been out of all proportion. A Naval History of England in
which nearly two volumes were given to the period before
Elizabeth, more than two volumes to the lives of the men
INTRODUCTION vii
of her reign, of whom several were little at sea, and others
were mainly privateersmen and explorers, while one poor
volume was left for all the great series of naval events
between 1660 and 1815, would have been egregiously out
of drawing. But Southey did not even keep to the scheme
he sketched to Mr. May. His biographies ran beyond
the fourth volume as far as the middle of the fifth. He
would assuredly have been at the end of a seventh before he
was done with Monk ; and not five volumes, but five and
twenty, if not five and fifty woidd have been required to com-
plete the work on the scale on which it had been begun.
No publisher of any cyclopaedia has the purse or the patience
for such colossal enterprise, not even "the Long-Man of
the Row," who knew Southey of old and was his friend.
So the " British Admirals " was doomed by the act of the
author to be cut short. It was easy for Southey to talk
of giving one volume to the history of the Navy after 1660.
Such promises pass well in a letter, but it was not in his
nature to tie himself down to these narrow limits.
This attempt at a history of the English Navy was de-
prived of all hope of ever being a complete work by the fact
that the author had to the full the defect of his qualities.
Whoever has gone over the authorities on whom Southey
drew, must have noticed the unerring tact with which he
quoted. It is commonly impossible to find anything which
he passed over, and which is yet conspicuously worth
quotation. But this fine quality of seeing, which in his
case was accompanied by an extraordinary dexterity in ex-
tracting and weaving together, has also its shadow from
which the possessor cannot jump. He who can see what is
worth quoting is sorely tempted to quote every worthy thing-
he sees. When he is, as Southey was, a man of enormous
circumambient reading (if the expression may pass) ; when
viii INTRODUCTION
he has not only read but remembers ; when all his know-
ledge has always been noted, marked for reference, extracted
into common-place books, docketed and indexed so that
it lies ready to the " wet finger " when wanted, it is odds
but he will find it hard to keep within bounds. The
temptation to bring out all that bears on the case, or even
only illustrates by comparison, is not all the writer has to
fight against, though in this, legitimate as it is, there may
be excess. He is very likely to be drawn into speaking of
things only indirectly bearing on his subject, but none the
less picturesque, or pathetic, or perhaps only quaint and for-
gotten, which he has met in his reading, and are brought to
his memory by his writing. Southey certainly found it hard
not to be prodigal of his learning. Old chronicles, old
narrative poems of Spaniards and Portuguese, lives of the
saints, stories of shipwreck, and of savage life which he had
read, in sober truth, by the thousand, and reading had
marked for reference, were habitually drawn upon by him.
It is never mere compilation. It is always an extracting,
arranging and fitting together of the pure ore of his matter
into something which is emphatically Southey 's own.
What would be bookmaking in a mere compiler is in his
case the making of literature. But at its best this pouring
out of the stores of knowledge is hard to reconcile with
brevity, and Southey could not be brief. He could tell
a story in the minimum of words, but he could not limit
himself in the number of stories he wished to tell. In his
Preface, he gravely promised that " no more of our general
history is included than was necessary for forming a con-
nected narrative, and for tracing the causes and conse-
quences of those events which are the proper subject of the
work ". In his text he observes his own excellent rule so
laxly that he cannot refrain from giving pages to the
INTRODUCTION ix
adventures in love and war of the Conde Don Pero Nino,
which he has to confess " are matters with which this
history has no concern". But they were picturesque;
they came from a romantic old Spanish chronicle ; they
supplied vivid little pictures of the life and the men of old ;
they were little known. Pero Nino plundered on our coast
about 1405, and with that excuse to give him countenance
Southey could do no other than decant the best of the
chronicle written by the Alferez Gutierre Diez into his
own pages.
This inability to turn from the picturesque, which was
not immediately gennaine to the matter, may have stopped
" The Lives of the British Admirals ^ from becoming a
history of the Navy, but it gives their charm and much of
their merit to the biographies from which this selection is
taken. One criticism which has been made on the naval
portions of Southey's vast literary work, must be noticed for
the purpose of estimating it at its real value. It is said that
he was ignorant of sea affairs, and therefore incapable of
either understanding them himself, or making them clear
to others. Now Soutiiey was perfectly well aware of his
deficiencies in this respect. When he was engaged in ex-
tending his quarterly article on Clarke and McArthur's com-
pilation into the immortal Life of Nelson, he wrote to his
brother, Captain Thomas Southey of the Navy, who had
fought at Copenhagen, a letter containing a string of
questions, and this paragraph :
" I am such a sad lubber that I feel half ashamed of
myself for being persuaded ever even to review the Life of
Nelson, much more to write one. Had I not been a
thorough lubber, I should have remembered half a hundred
things worthy of remembrance which have all been lost,
because though I do indeed know the binnacle from the
x INTRODUCTION
mainmast, I know little more ; tackle and sheets, and
tally and belay are alike to me ; and if you ask me about
the lee-clue garnets, I can only tell that they are not the
same kind of garnets as are worn in necklaces and bracelets,
and so fine facts have been lost because I did not know
where to store them in the ship, or in my recollection-closet
upstairs. There is something ridiculous, and something
like quackery in writing thus about what I so little under-
stand. I walk among sea terms as a cat does in a china
pantry, in bodily fear of doing mischief and betraying
myself ; and yet there will come a good book of it I verily
believe."
Southey knew wherein he was deficient, and knew also
where to go for help to make his deficiencies good. He
had many naval officers among his acquaintance, and
applied to them, to his brother, and to his friend Admiral
Burney, the author of the Discoveries in tJie South Seas, for
help. Moreover he had what was better than this, namely,
a literary honesty which kept him from writing about
those technical things which he knew he did not under-
stand, and a literary instinct which taught him to extract
what is of universal interest from amid a mass of techni-
calities. Human character and the motives of human
action in what is general to the race, were the matters
possessing interest to him. No doubt his work would
have been better still if he could have added his brother's
professional knowledge to his own vast reading and artistic
faculty. Then indeed we might have obtained a History
of the English Navy such as we can hardly hope to have.
But the combination is yet to seek. Only pedantry (and
it is quite possible to be pedantic about the bobstay and
the brailing of the lee yard-arm) will prefer the merely
particular and technical to the universal and human. If
INTRODUCTION xi
any one wishes to see how little professional knowledge will
avail of itself, let him turn from Southey's Nelson, or any
of the lives given here, to Schomberg or Brenton. If he
wishes to see how poor a guarantee it is for mere
mechanical accuracy let him read Captain White's
strictures on Admiral Elans' 1 account of the fighting in
the Basse Terre of St. Kitts. He will find one experienced
naval officer accusing another of grossly misunderstanding
the meaning of a simple sea term.
Accuracy in technical matters is no doubt one of the
virtues of the author of biographies, but at the risk of ap-
pearing to speak lightly of the expert, it may be affirmed
to belong distinctly to the minor class. The first duty of
the biographer is to give a living and credible picture
of his man. To do this he must possess the general
knowledge which gives him a fair understanding of the
surroundings of that man's life, and the sanity of judg-
ment which makes him a safe critic of character or conduct.
The general knowledge brought by Southey to these
studies of the Elizabethan seamen has never been equalled
by any other English writer on the subject. He was
minutely familiar with the history of the Spaniards and
Portuguese. With the colonial and maritime sides he
was perhaps better acquainted than with any other. He
had therefore always at command a vast stock of instances
with which to illustrate the actions of our own adventurers,
and to complete the picture by showing against what manner
of men it was they fought. When he has to tell of the cap-
ture of Portuguese carracks he draws on his learning for tales
of their disasters in Eastern Seas, in the beginning of the
voyage which ended with the attack of the English rovers.
When his story takes him to the Straits of Magellan he
seizes the first plausible excuse to recount the dreadful fate
xii INTRODUCTION
of Sarmiento de Gamboa^s settlement. These digressions
may be proofs of his tendency, of which he was himself fully
conscious, to " allow his steed to expatiate on the fields of
prolixity," but they fill up the picture, and complete its
general truth.
The sanity of judgment which Southey brought to
these studies of the Elizabethan heroes is hardly less rare,
and is assuredly not less necessary, than his learning.
Writers on this, the most romantic period in the
history of our adventures at sea, have commonly found it
difficult to avoid one of two kinds of excess. Some have
condemned the generation of Drake and Hawkins as mere
slavers and pirates. These have been the smaller number,
and in our time they have fallen silent. There is therefore
no call to insist upon their error. Of late the tendency has
been to go into the other extreme, and to maintain, by im-
plication if not in so many words, that slave-hunting and
piracy were intrinsically very noble occupations when they
had as their consequence the doing of a damage to the
Spaniards or Portuguese. They are excused, or even gloried
in, as parbs of the strife between the children of Light
and the children of Darkness. In a sense perhaps they
were; but it must be confessed that the methods of the
children of Light, and their motives as they are to be
gathered from their own words, were curiously like those of
their enemies. Both indeed could appeal to religion as sancti-
fying their gold-hunting adventures. Cortes and Pizarro
had the extension of the true faitli much in their mouths,
and in some measure in their hearts. Hawkins, sailing from
the coast of Senegambia with a holdful of kidnapped negroes,
on his way to a smuggling venture on the Spanish main,
supported himself amid the miseries of a tropical calm, by
remembering that the Lord will not suffer His elect to
INTRODUCTION xiii
perish. AVe need not think him a hypocrite, but we shall
be very credulous if we see more in his religious faith
than a proof of the happy facility with which men can
persuade themselves that what is agreeable to their in-
terests or passions is also acceptable to God. There is a
sentence in Raleigh's Discoverie of Guiana which throws a
most instructive light on the motives of the Elizabethan
adventurer. Sir Walter had been descanting at length on
the many advantages which El Dorado, the gilded king
of Manoa, would derive from the protection to be afforded
him by a garrison of English " younger brothers, and all
chieftaines, and captains that want employment". He
ends with the following significant sentence : " In which
respects no doubt he will be brought to tribute with great
gladnesse ; if not, he hath neither shot nor yron weapon in
all his empire and therefore may easily be conquered "".
Let me protect you, for a consideration, or I will plunder
you. It may be doubted whether the great " Inga " of
Manoa would have found much to choose between Sir
Walter Raleigh of the county of Devon, and Don Gonzalo
de Pizarro of the kingdom of Estremadura.
Southey never forgot such revelations as this, and his
picture of the Elizabethans is the better for it. He drew
them the more like what they unquestionably were, namely,
such men as the Spanish " conquistadores," with the advan-
tage of belonging to a more many-sided and capable race ;
as lovers of adventure and lovers of gold, with a business
and governing faculty, which the Spaniard had possessed
in an eminent degree, but was losing rapidly as the six-
teenth century drew to its close. The picture agrees better
with the evidence than that figure of the Protestant hero
or humane knight-errant which has been made to do duty
for that slave-hunter and intrepid liar, Hawkins, or the
xiv INTRODUCTION
self-seeking intriguer who was Raleigh. Yet Southey
knew that a man may be a slave-hunter, may be greedy
for gold, may intrigue, and still be brave, be patriotic, be
loyal to his comrades, magnanimous at times, and ready to
risk life and fortune for a cause. There are some who
cannot be taught by any evidence that this combination of
apparently incompatible qualities is not only possible but
very human. It is too what supplies the humour of life.
Some few words may be said on the style of these lives.
Southey himself denied that he had any style. " As for
composition,"" he wrote to his son-in-law Warter, " it has
no difficulties for one who will ' read, mark, learn and
inwardly digest ' the materials upon which he is to work.
I do not mean to say that it Is easy to write well, but of
this I am sure, that most men would write better if they
did not take hah the pains they do. For myself, I con-
sider it no compliment when any one praises the simplicity
of my prose writings ; they are written, indeed, without
any other immediate object than that of expressing what
is to be said in the readiest, and most perspicuous manner.
But in the transcript (if I make one) and always in the
proof sheet, every sentence is then weighed upon the ear,
euphony becomes a second object, and ambiguities are
removed. But of what is now called style not a thought
enters my head at any time."
By what "is now called style, 1 ' it is to be presumed
that Mr. Warter was understood by his father-in-law to
mean mannerism. Southey could with complete truth
protest that no wish to write differently from the accepted
standard of English had at any time entered his head. To
write "English such as every one from Chaucer to Sir
Thomas More, and from More to Cowper, could under-
stand," to write it with perspicuity as a first " and with
INTRODUCTION xv
euphony as a second " object was his aim. But to succeed
in doing so much was to attain to a style, and not only
so, but it was to write in the only way which it is safe
to take as a model. Those whose style is individual are
some of them among the greatest of men of letters ; but
though they may be delightful to read, and great to inspire,
it is fatal to follow them. Now when, as at some other
times, what is called style is too often only a deliberate
attempt to be peculiar, the prose of Southey cannot be too
carefully read. It will show those who may be in danger
of being misled by the popularity of certain models that
it is possible to be perspicuous without being pedestrian,
to consider euphony and yet not to be precious, to be
manly and yet not violent. They may be sure, at least,
that in following his path they will be in no danger of
falling into absurdity.
The lives contained in this volume have been chosen for
reasons which perhaps ought to be given. No excuse
need be assigned for reprinting the "Hawkins and Drake".
The life of Lord Howard of Effingham contains as full an
account of the Armada as could be written on the evidence
accessible to Southey. The Earl of Cumberland was an
accomplished and adventurous noble, which would of itself
entitle him to a place among the typical heroes of an
aristocratic age, but his voyages to the isles also show the
character of the naval warfare of the time exceptionally
well. Of Cavendish we cannot say that he was one of the
greatest in achievement, still less that he was one of the
highest in character of the Elizabethans, yet he was the
third captain of any race, the second among Englishmen, who
circumnavigated the globe, and his life has this value, that
it shows the cruel and greedy side of that aristocratic spirit
of which Cumberland was the chivalrous representative.
xvi INTRODUCTION
A few notes are appended merely to point out what
research has added to Southey^s knowledge. It is but
little, and no part modifies in any way the estimates of
characters which are to be found in this selection from what
I will venture to describe as on the whole the finest
portrait gallery of the Elizabethan sea heroes in the
English language.
DAVID HANNAY.
ENGLISH SEAMEN
LORD HOWARD OF EFFINGHAM
/^~>HARLES, eldest son of Lord William Howard, and
\^_^ grandson of Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk, was born
in 1536. Margaret, his mother, was daughter of Sir
Thomas Gamage of Coity, in Glamorganshire. His father
was one of the courtiers who accompanied King Henry to the
Field of the Cloth of Gold, having (it is recorded) in his
retinue eleven servants and two horsekeepers ; he assisted as
proxy for his brother, the duke and earl marshal, at the
coronation of Anne Boleyn ; and, after the conviction of his
niece, Queen Catherine Howard, was found guilty, with his
lady, of misprision of treason, for not having revealed what
they knew of her misconduct, and condemned to perpetual im-
prisonment, with forfeiture of their goods, and of the profits
of their lands during life. This sentence was soon remitted,
in consideration of his services, " and it may be of his inno-
cence ". He attended on Henry at the siege of Boulogne ;
and, in the ensuing reign, was " one of the first favourers and
furtherers, with his purse and countenance, of" what Fuller
calls " the strange and wonderful discovery of Russia," being
one of those who were incorporated as merchant-adventurers
to Moscovy ; and, " at their own cost and charges, provided
those ships to discover territories unknown, northwards, north-
eastwards, and north-westwards ". The expedition is memor-
able botli in naval and commercial history: for the commander,
2 ENGLISH SEAMEN
Sir Hugh Willoughby, after discovering Greenland, was frozen
to death, with all his ship's company, in a haven on the coast
of Lapland ; and the second in command, Richard Chancellor,
who had fortunately parted company with him, entered the
river of St. Nicholas, travelled to the court of the Czar Ivan
Basilowitz, delivered the king's letters to that sovereign, and
obtained for the English the privilege of a free trade in any
part of his dominions, being their first entrance into Russia.
On the accession of Queen Mary, he was created a peer of the
realm, by the title of Lord Howard of Effingham, and ap-
pointed High Admiral of England and Wales, Ireland, Gascony,
and Aquitaine ; the queen, " in consideration of his fidelity,
prudence, valour and industry," constituting him "her lieu-
tenant-general and chief commander of her whole fleet and
royal army going to sea for the defence of her friends ". In
the discharge of this office, he kept the seas about three
months ; and having met with Philip, then Prince of Asturius,
escorted him to Southampton, and attended his marriage with
the queen. At the commencement of the following reign, he
was one of the persons empowered to conclude peace with
France.
Under such a father Charles Howard was trained, serving
under him by land and sea. He was about twenty-two years
of age at the accession of Elizabeth ; and his " most proper
person " is said to have been one reason why that queen
"(who, though she did not value a jewel by, valued it the
more for, a fair case) reflected so much upon him ". * She sent
him to France, after the death of Henry II., on an embassy
of condolence and congratulation to the young king. He was
elected one of the knights for his native county of Surrey,
in the Parliament of 1562-3 ; and afterwards distinguished
himself as general of the horse in quelling the rebellion of the
Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland. In the ensuing
* Fuller.
LORD HOWARD OF EFFINGHAM 3
year, he commanded ten ships of Her Majesty's " navy royal" ;
which, when the Emperor Maximilian's daughter, Anne,
sailed from Zealand to marry her uncle, Philip II., were