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THE SPANISH ARMADA
The wind that blew steadily from the sea changed on that
Sunday, October 1, 1567, to the northeast, ideal for taking sailing ships out from the shelter of Plymouth Sound into the
English Channel. Six small ships, ranging in size from thirtythree to 700 tons, had been waiting in the Cattewater over a
month for such a day.
Since respect for religious custom meant they could not sail on
the Sabbath, the men aboard were thankful when Monday
dawned without a change in the wind. It filled the sails and
rippled the new banners and pennants as the little fleet sailed
in line, with brass cannons gleaming from the open gun ports
and drummers and trumpeters sounding martial fanfares. As
they passed alongside the throng of well-wishers waving from
Plymouth Hoe, the sailors crowded to the sides of the ships,
and the guns fired a salute that was answered by peals of
church bells from the town. Then, as the clamor of the bells
died away behind them, the sailors turned back to their regular
tasks, and the expedition’s leader ordered his ships to set their
course southwest for the open sea. Of all the 408 men on
board, he alone knew exactly where they were going.
John Hawkins, gentleman of Devon, capable seaman, and prosperous merchant, flew the royal standard of England at the
mainmast of his flagship, the Jesus of Lübeck. He also displayed his own personal crest - granted him by Queen Elizabeth
I after his previous and most profitable voyage - a black man
bound with a cord.
Three days out from Plymouth, Hawkins summoned his captains on board the Jesus. For the first time, he told them where
the ships were bound and what they were going to do. Their
first destination was the Portuguese-dominated coast of West
Africa, where they would trade with the natives for ivory and
gold. Then they would sail to the West Indies and barter their
bales of fine woolen cloth and taffeta and their crates of metal
goods for the sugar, hides, pearls, and spices that the Spanish
colonists would give in exchange.
The most important task of all, however, would be the purchase
or capture on the Guinea coast of as many black slaves as
Hawkins’s ships could hold. The blacks would be the most valuable part of the cargo once the Englishmen reached the West
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Indies. African slaves were in great demand by the Spanish settlers who had almost exterminated the native Indian population
by using them as forced labor on their plantations and farms.
The colonists, quite unprepared to do manual work themselves,
could never get enough slaves to meet their needs and were
willing to pay extremely high prices for them.
Although Hawkins had no official license from the king of Portugal to collect slaves, nor from the king of Spain to offer them
for sale, he did possess articles from the queen of England giving him permission to make the voyage. These he showed to
his captains. Then, he appointed a rendezvous at the Canary
Islands, 1,750 miles southwest of Plymouth, and dismissed the
men to their commands.
Although he was still only thirty-five years old, Hawkins had
already made two slaving voyages between the coast of Guinea
and the West Indies. The first, in 1562, had been carefully
planned and was brilliantly successful. His last trip, in 1564,
had brought a profit of 60 percent to its investors, among
whom was the queen herself. This time, she had again taken a
share and had contributed two ships from her navy, the
700-ton Jesus of Lübeck and the 300-ton Minion. The other
shareholders were noblemen high in the queen’s favor and respectable merchants.
Few people in the sixteenth century thought that slave trading
was morally wrong. There was nothing in the Bible that seemed
to condemn the practice of selling other human beings, and, indeed, many people did not even regard blacks and Indians as
human at all. Hawkins could command his men to “serve God
daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire,
and keep good company” with a clear conscience.
A high-minded and religious man, he set forth in hopes of
honor and profit from his third voyage to the New World. Later
Hawkins was to write of it: “If all the miseries and troublesome
affairs of this sorrowful voyage should be perfectly and thoroughly written, there should need a painful man with his pen,
and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths
of the Martyrs.” Even so, Hawkins could not have foreseen the
full extent of these “troublesome affairs” or that this venture
was to prove a turning point in the relationship between Eng3
THE SPANISH ARMADA
land and Spain and was to lead to one of history’s most famous
battles.
Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 had opened a
great age of discovery. Ships had rounded the tip of Africa to
find a sea route to India; the outlines of the two American continents had begun to emerge from the mists of uncertainty; and
Magellan had passed through the strait that bears his name,
just north of South America’s Cape Horn, en route to the first
circumnavigation of the globe. Rich native empires in Mexico
and Peru had been toppled, and their vast realms opened to
settlement. Daring explorers pressed the search for new El Dorados, and traders established commercial routes across the
Atlantic to the Caribbean and to the Indian and Pacific oceans.
Most of these voyages had been made under the Spanish or the
Portuguese flag, and Pope Alexander VI had rewarded these
two adventurous and Catholic nations by dividing the earth
between them. A line drawn on the map between the forty-first
and forty-fourth meridians west of Greenwich gave the West Mexico, the Caribbean Islands, and all of South America (except
Brazil, to which Portugal later laid claim) - to Spain. The East Africa, India, Sumatra, Java, and the rest of the Orient save for
the Philippines - was Portugal’s share. Ships crammed with silver, gold, pearls, silks, and spices sailed home to fill the
treasuries of the Spanish and Portuguese kings with fantastic
riches. And most of this wealth spilled right out again to pay for
the defense and maintenance of their vast colonial possessions.
But Europe, of course, did not consist solely of Spain and Portugal. Italy was a collection of separate states, with seagoing
interests chiefly contained by the shores of the Mediterranean.
Germany, like Italy, did not yet exist as a unified nation. It was
torn by continuous religious struggles on land after Martin
Luther had defied the Catholic Church, and the tide of the Protestant Reformation spread from one principality to another. A
powerful group of north German merchants, called the
Hanseatic League, controlled all the sea trade out of the Baltic,
but the league was not especially interested in expansion outside Europe. The Netherlands, as part of Spain’s empire, was
still without a national identity and had to follow the Spanish
lead.
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