It is only in the last 500 years ... that people began to think of the sea as free and open to all. taken-practices Drake regularly followed. But command is indivi sible, a lesson Doughty, with all his skills at selfadvancement, had apparently not learned. As the fleet wound its slow way down the South Atlantic, troubles involving Doughty kept popping up-trouble over the division of spoils from a Portuguese ship they had captured in the Cape Verdes, troubles over precedence and protocol-troubles similar to the problems that had arisen between Spanish lordlings and the tough Portuguese warrior Magellan, sailing these same waters. The "sweet smell of land," when the squadron made the Brazilian coast and commenced its long haul southward, did not mute these troubles. Duriqg the passage Drake got rid of the supply ship Swan, 50 tons, and the small Portuguese vessel they named Mary when they had taken her in exchange for the pinnace Christopher, 15 tons, which had accompanied the squadron from England. On 20 June 1578, as the Antarctic winter was coming on in violent gales, the squadron put into Port San Julian, 200-odd miles short of the Strait of Magellan. The ships were now just three in number: the flagship Pelican, 150 tons, under Drake as Captain General; the ship Elizabeth, 80 tons, under John Winter; and the little bark Marigold, 30 tons, under John Thomas. Drake planned a thorough refit and re-provisioning in San Julian. Sailing into the barren inlet, the men spied the gallows on which Magellan had hanged his mutineers, still standing after 58 years in that icebox climate. The place seemed ill-omened, and to psychic discomfort was soon added the dismal discovery, as Drake ordered the ships rummaged (cleaned out and fumigated), that they had been badly shortchanged in provisions for the voyage. Adding to these woes, the native Patagonians were hostile and would not make peace, though Drake refrained from reprisals after the killing of two seamen in an early skirmish. But there was yet another "mischiefe, wrought and contrived closely among our selves, as great, yea farre greater," as the official narrative has it. This was the evident division in the high command, with Doughty letting it be known to the gentlemen adventurers-about 40 of the total ships' companies of 160 men-that he, not Drake, had secured the Queen 's support for the voyage, and that he, not Drake, should lead from now on. Drake decided to act. He impaneled a jury of the gentlemen and officers (Doughty's peers) and held a trial of Doughty for fomenting resistance to Drake as the Queen's appointed captain general. In the course of the trial, Doughty, parading his important connections, boasted that he had consulted with Lord i3urghley, Elizabeth's senior counsellor. This was a bad slip. Drake, enraged, shouted that the Queen had ordered that the voyage was to be kept secret from Burghley, a conservative committed to a policy of appeasement of Spain. This rings very true. Other charges followed, making up a pattern of treacherous insubordination which endangered the squadron, its mission and every soul involved. The jury found Doughty guilty. Doughty apologized for his faults and reconciled himself to Drake. They had a farewe ll supper together, "each cheering up the other, and taking their leave, by drinking to each other as if some journey only had been in hand." Doughty then took Communion kneeling side by side with Drake, and was duly beheaded. So passed from the scene a troubled soul, a man whose fate it was to make trouble, perhaps without realizing the consequences of his acts. But everyone, including Drake, felt that Doughty had faced those consequences bravely at the end. The ships' people remained uneasy as the three vessels tugged at their anchors in the unending succession of gales and snow squall s that swept over the naked, barren landscape. 10
Doughty's execution stopped the threatening cabal of gentlemen and courtiers in the fleet by showing plainly that his was a losing game; it did not cure persistent doubts and unrest. Again Drake decided to act. Calling all the ships' companies ashore on Sunday, he gathered them to hear him speak on "some matter of importance." The fleet chaplain Francis Fletcher offered to preach a sermon. "Nay , soft, Master Fletcher," said Drake, motioning him aside, "I fnu st preach this day myself." "Masters," he started out, "I am a very bad orator, for my bringing up has not been in learning . ... " But he advised all hands to listen, for he stood ready to answer for everything he said back in England and to the Queen herself. He reminded them that they were "very far from our country and friends wherefore we are not to make small reckoning of a man, for we cannot have a man if we would give for him ten thousand pounds." He called for an end to the "controversy between the sailors and the gentlemen," and went on to make the famous statement that was to become a core doctrine of the Royal Navy, and which echoes down through the intervening centuries with fresh force and vitality today: But, my masters, I must have it left, for I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman. What, let us show ourselves to be of a company, and let us not give occasion to the enemy to rejoice at our decay and overthrow. "I would know him that would refuse to set his hand to a rope," he added, "but I know there is not any such here.,; And, indeed, if there was any such person on that desolate beach, he did not speak up then, or at any time from then on in the voyage. It is from John Cooke, a careful writer who sailed with Winter in the Elizabeth, that we have these words from Drake. It is from Cooke also that we have the full proceedings of the Doughty trial, in recording which Cooke was clearly anxious not to give offense to Doughty' s friends back in England. Drake 's force of character simply bursts through these constraints of time, space, and interpretation-and it seems to have worked a similar magic on the men. "The Intolerable Tempest" And so on 17 August, risking a passage in the dead of the Antarctic winter, the Pelican, the Elizabeth and the Marigold sailed out of Port San Julian. Three days later they raised the Cape of the Virgins, which marked the entrance to the muchfeared Strait of Magellan. This was as far as the knowledge of their Portuguese pilot, Nufio da Silva, ran. They had picked him up in the Cape Verdes, and he had helped their coastal piloting to this point. Few seamen, however, had gone through the Strait of Magellan and come home to tell the tale. Drake, with his customary sense of ceremony, struck his topsails in salute to Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, and took the occasion to rename the Pelican as the Golden Hind. The name honored Sir Christopher Hatton, whose family crest was a hind-an old term for a female deer. Hatton was a patron of the voyage and had employed Thomas Doughty, the man Drake had executed a few weeks earlier. Sternly practical reasons for the choice of this delightful name show through this gesture, as such reasons show through many of Drake's most elegant acts. The three ships ran through the strait in the remarkably fast time of 16 days, which was long a record. This, however, was the end of their peaceful sailing. On 7 September, two days into the Pacific, the ocean Magellan had named Mar Pacifico (and which Fletcher said were better named "Mare Furisum"), the squadron ran SEA HISTORY 80, WINTER 1996-97