On 7 September 1592, the Madre de Dios was brought into the harbour at Dartmouth. Seven decks high and weighing some 1,600 tonnes, it was the largest ship England had ever seen. It was also the richest. Its hold was packed with luxury goods: silk, damask, taffeta, calico; carpets, quilts, canopies; pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon; frankincense, camphor; ivory, ebony, porcelain.
The Madre de Dios belonged to Portugal, a Spanish dominion since 1580. It was bringing merchandise back from the East Indies. Early on the morning of 3 August, to the west of the Azores, it had been spotted by a fleet of some seven English ships, most dispatched for just such a purpose by Sir Walter Ralegh. By 10am, the English were close enough to open fire. The fight was long and brutal: it lasted through nightfall until around 2am the following morning.
When it was over, there was no time to waste. The English boarded their prize in darkness. On deck they found carnage. “So many bodies slain and dismembered… miserable people, whose limbs were so torn with the violence of shot,” one report runs. “No man could almost step but upon a dead carcass or a bloody floor.”
But English seamen swarmed through the ship, candles in hand, ransacking it cabin by cabin. The surviving Portuguese huddled in dark corners, crying misericórdia – mercy, mercy – surrendering again and again to whatever Englishmen they met. By the time Sir John Burgh came aboard, some time after day break, to claim the ship for Elizabeth I, its cabins had largely been stripped bare.
How much was it all worth? The Portuguese were said to value the ship’s cargo at four million ducats – around a million pounds at the time. There were rumours in the Azores that there were precious stones worth another million on board. But when all the goods were finally tallied back up in London, they were only valued at £141,000. A fortune, but some way short of a million.
What had happened to all those precious stones? No-one quite knows. But the general sense is clear enough: as one investor in the fleet said, it was all down to “the thievery of these lewd fellows”. The largest piece of jewellery – a great diamond pectoral cross – was alone worth some £125,000. It was never traced. Agents from London’s jewellers were waiting for the ship when it docked. One merchant named Bradbent bought 1,800 diamonds and over 500 rubies.
Elizabeth I, who had a ten per cent stake in the syndicate behind the voyage, rewarded herself half of the ship’s value. She took it in the form of pepper, its most plentiful commodity. There were in fact, some 3,652 bags of it – too much for a single trader to buy. Another syndicate was formed, which bought the pepper for a little over £80,000. The queen had to issue a warrant prohibiting the import of pepper for at least a year to help it recover its money.
But why was the Queen of England supporting piracy?
Strictly speaking, voyages like those that seized the Madre de Dios weren’t piracy at all. They operated under letters of reprisal, also known as letters of marque, a widely accepted form of retributive justice that dated back to the Rôles d’Oléron, an international maritime law from the early 13th century. If a merchant’s goods were seized in a foreign country, he could apply for a letter of reprisal through the Court of Admiralty, which allowed him in return to seize money or goods from that country up to the value claimed. The system was certainly abused and often ignored; but there was a system.
Which is to say, there was a line. But the line moved – and men jumped back and forth across it. Pirates were hunted down and hanged throughout Elizabeth’s reign. But pirates were also regularly employed on state business. This English ambivalence about piracy wasn’t something that developed from fear of imperial Spain; it is there right from the beginning of the reign.
Henry Strangeways – Dorset-born but typically operating out of Ireland since the late 1540s – captured some Portuguese ships from Antwerp in early 1559. By August he was in the Tower of London awaiting execution. Time passed. Nicholas Throckmorton, the English ambassador to Catholic France lobbied on his behalf. By October 1562, Strangeways was on his way from Portsmouth to Le Havre in command of a galley and eighty men to fight alongside England’s Huguenot allies.
Naturally, this ambivalence – this sense of a movable line – cascaded through the system. The mayor of Cork refused to act against pirates because the local economy needed their merchandise; in Cardiff, the magistrate Thomas Lewes habitually releasing on bail any pirates who were unlucky enough to get arrested. Across the country, vice-admirals, charged with suppressing piracy, turned a blind eye to it in return for cash.
Piracy wasn’t simply a problem for Spanish or other Catholic shipping. In 1577, Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon and president of the Council of the North, complained of “the great disorders of pirates upon the coasts, which if not seen into, the merchants and fishermen will hardly be able to go forth”. At the end of the following decade, Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster, was told that, “All the boroughs and towns in Scotland are inhabited by Protestants, but so wounded with infinite piracies… that they cry out that more than the third part of their goods is possessed by pirates of England.”
But there is no question that the Spanish were a particular target. In August 1571, De Spes, the Spanish ambassador, complained that 14 Spanish ships fitted out “for the suppression of the pirates infesting the Channel” were fired at by the guns at Dover Castle, causing great injury. In 1582, his successor, Mendoza, bitterly noting the activities of a Bristol pirate named Roberts, off-loaded his frustrations to Walsingham. “I am much annoyed at having to be always troubling you about the robberies of pirates,” he wrote. “In the four years I have been here, and in all the similar complaints I have made, it is never settled.”
Tensions between the two nations dated back to the reign of Henry VIII. In 1543, Henry VIII aligned with Spain and declared war on France. English ships were licensed to seize enemy ships and merchandise. The English were none too discriminating in which foreign ships they targeted, and when Spain made peace with France they stopped discriminating at all.
By the 1560s, with the eruption of the French wars of religion and later the Dutch revolt, English ships were preying mercilessly on French Catholic and Spanish shipping from the Straits of Gibraltar through to the North Sea. They sailed under commissions from the likes of William of Orange or the Huguenot admiral Gaspard de Coligny. These seamen were certainly motivated by money; but patriotism played its part too. And then there was their Protestant faith.
John Hawkins led his men in daily prayers aboard ship. “Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire and keep good company,” he ordered his crew. And Richard Grenville spoke for many when he argued in 1574 that those parts of South America not actually occupied by Spain or Portugal – almost all of it, therefore – was “by God’s providence left for England”. But it was Hawkins who first pointed English ambition towards the Spanish Americas.
English merchants could trade on equal terms in Spain, thanks to a treaty negotiated by Henry VII. But the New World was different. All American trade was processed through Seville; ergo, any attempts to trade directly was in Spanish eyes de facto piracy. This was not new information: the English had traded in Spanish American goods through Seville since at least 1509.
Hawkins made two profitable but illegal voyages to the West Indies in 1562 and 1564, in both cases dealing in African slaves he had taken in Sierra Leone. The Spanish ambassador in London made Hawkins swear an oath not to enter Spanish-American waters again. But he did, of course. And his third voyage, which sailed in October 1567, ran into trouble.
Hit by Caribbean storms in August the following year – the planking of one ship sprang “leaks so big as the thickness of a man’s arm [and] living fish did swim upon the ballast as in the sea” – he took his fleet into San Juan de Ulúa, an island harbour in the Gulf of Mexico. Hawkins then seized the island.
Unfortunately for him, a Spanish fleet appeared on the horizon the following morning. A few days later, they attacked. Hawkins lost five ships and at least ninety men. Two ships survived: the Minion, under Hawkins, and the Judith, under a young Francis Drake.
Drake was ordered to come alongside the Minion to take on board some men. Instead, under cover of darkness, Drake sailed for home. “The Judith forsook us in our great misery,” Hawkins said. Whatever he thought of the ethics of Drake’s choice, Hawkins was faced with a practical problem. Drake had sailed off with all the food. On board the Minion, the men ate rats and parrots and made stews from ox hide. Around 15 survived the journey back.
As relations between England and Spain deteriorated, so voyages of reprisal – and no doubt outright piracy – began in earnest. There were legitimate mercantile claims, but there was a political argument too. As Walter Ralegh later said, “it is [Spain’s American] gold that endangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe”. To seize Spanish treasure then, either at source or in transit, would alter the balance of power.
Enter Francis Drake again. He made two modest sallies into Spanish waters in central America in 1570 and 1571, attacking small shipping along the coastal inlets around Nombre de Dios in Panama, where the Spanish collected all their silver from the Americas – often brought overland on mule trains – before shipping it back annually to Spain. He sailed again in 1572. This time he partnered with some Huguenot corsairs and, more importantly, with two communities of escaped African slaves who had established themselves on the isthmus.
Together they attacked the mule train. The attack wasn’t wholly successful; they had to leave much of the treasure behind. But Drake probably took some £20,000-worth back to England. He arrived in Plymouth in August 1573 a local hero; it is said the congregation of St Andrew’s church rushed out of the church in mid-sermon and swarmed down the hill to greet him. In Spain too his name was beginning to be noticed with foreboding.
In 1577, however, he set out on the voyage that would cement his legend forever. But it was never Drake’s intention to circumnavigate the world. The plan was to sail through the Strait of Magellan and plunder the western coast before returning home the same way. It was, in part, a commercial venture; one aim was to seek out peoples who might have gold and silver or spices to trade. It was also in part imperial, scouting for possibly territory “not under the obedience of any Christian prince” where England might plant a colony. But it was also a voyage of reprisal, even if Drake never bothered with formalities like acquiring a letter from the Court of Admiralty. To deceive the Spanish, the voyage was publicly described as a trading venture to Alexandria.
Drake’s fleet got under way at the end of 1577. By the time the reached the Strait of Magellan only one ship remained, Drake’s flagship the Pelican, which he renamed the Golden Hind in honour of Sir Christopher Hatton, an investor. Rounding the southern coast of Chile he took to plunder along the western seaboard of South America. The largest prize was taken on 1 March 1579, in the seas off Callao, the port for Lima a few miles east. It was the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, said to be nicknamed Cacafuego – shitfire – by the Spanish.
It was evening by the time Drake pulled alongside the Cacafuego. There are different versions of what passed between him the latter’s master, San Juan de Antón, but one of them has Anton replying to Drake’s demand that he surrender by saying, “What old tub is that which orders me to strike sail?” The Golden Hind opened fire while its men leapt aboard. The battle was over before it had begun. The ship’s cargo included silver bars, silver coins and gold, amounting to some £140,000 in value. “Our ship shall be called no more the shitfire but the shitsilver,” its Spanish pilot reportedly said.
Drake sailed back into Plymouth on 26 September 1580. He wasn’t a local hero, this time. He was a national hero. “His fame and name became admirable in all places,” the historian John Stow wrote, “the people swarming daily in the streets to behold him, vowing hatred of all that durst mislike him.”
Many plans to exploit Drake’s circumnavigation followed in its wake. But the problem was, as Drake himself discovered when he returned to the West Indies in 1585-6, there was a difference between projecting power through piracy and raiding, which England did well, and maintaining it, which England lacked the capacity to do.
Perhaps the nation’s reliance on men like Drake spoke as much to desperation and vulnerability as anything else. Year after year, Elizabethan seaman patrolled the Atlantic hoping to capture the biggest prize: the Spanish treasure fleet. England’s peril was surely imminent; perhaps its deliverance might be too. Drake’s voyage of 1585-6 was something “whereupon dependeth the life and death of the cause”, a despondent Walsingham wrote in July 1586, after a series of Spanish victories in the Low Countries. It did not, of course. But that it felt like it might to someone as clear-thinking as Walsingham is revealing.
Drake sacked Santo Domingo, Cartagena and San Agustin on that voyage, but the pickings were slim. At Santo Domingo, he demanded a million ducats to stop him destroying the town. When this was refused, he burned part of it down. It was a civic version of an old pirate torture: binding combustible matter between a man’s fingers and applying a flame. Eventually, when only part of it was left standing, the town paid him 25,000 ducats. Drake burned the rest of it down anyway.
If at the state level there was a line between piracy and reprisal, where was the private, ethical line between self-interest and national interest? It’s hard to know. Towards evening on 21 July 1588, for example, as English ships engaged the Spanish Armada in the Channel, Drake, in the Revenge, was given orders to lead the pursuit of the Spanish overnight. He was to hang a lantern astern for the rest of the fleet to follow.
But one Spanish ship, the Nuestra Señora del Rosario had collided with another. Lagging behind, it became separated from the main fleet. Drake saw an opening. He had the lantern extinguished and, under cover of darkness, slipped away. Sunrise found the Revenge alongside the Rosario. Its captain surrendered without a fight. Did Drake know that the Rosario, one of the Armada’s pay ships, had some 50,000 gold ducats on board? Almost certainly not. But he took a third of it for himself anyway.
Martin Frobisher, another sometime pirate who served the crown too, was incandescent. “Like a coward, he kept by [the Rosario] all night, because he would have her spoil,” he said of Drake when the Armada crisis was past. “He thinketh to cozen us of our shares of fifteen thousand ducats; but we will have our shares, or I will make him spend the best blood in his belly.”
Frobisher had been part of the fleet that took the Madre de Dios; his role had been to patrol the Spanish coast in case the treasure ship got through. But it was another participant, the earl of Cumberland, who nearly bagged an even bigger prize two years later, when his ships encountered the 2,000-ton Chinco Chagas. It was, the Venetians heard, the richest ship ever to sail from the East Indies.
The English fell upon it near the Azores. After a ferocious gun battle lasting several hours, the bow of the treasure ship caught fire. Some of the Portuguese sailors waved flags of parley, but their captain refused to surrender. The Chinco Chagas burned all day and night. The following morning, the fire finally hit her powder store. The explosion “blew her abroad,” Nicholas Downton, an English captain, recalled, “so that most of the ship did swim in parts above the water”. Its treasure went to the bottom of the sea.
Looking back on Elizabeth’s reign in 1598, Richard Hawkins, John’s son, wrote: “That the war with Spain hath been profitable, no man can with reason gainsay. And how many millions we have taken from the Spaniard, is a thing notorious.” English ships captured or destroyed well over a thousand Spanish or Portuguese ships during between 1585 and 1603. In the first three years of the war alone, they caused some six million ducats of damage. Spanish trade with France and Flanders practically came to a halt.
And the scale of all these small private wars is remarkable. In 1563, Philip II was told, there were 400 English ships sailing under letters of reprisal off the French coast. Later in the century, Iberia’s Atlantic seaboard teemed with English ships too. There were “never less than two hundred sail… upon their coasts”, it was later said. Voyages to Spanish America were necessarily rarer, but still undertaken in some numbers. Drake aside, at least 74 English voyages comprising 183 ships sailed for the West Indies between 1585 and 1603. There were likely many more.
But, like the Chinco Chagas, the very greatest prizes always remained tantalising, just a little out of reach.
This piece first appeared in All About History in February 2024.
Mathew Lyons 
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