Blunt, gritty and dour with acute porcine eyes, Hawkins was the pioneer of the English slave trade that was to become a financial juggernaut of profit and cruelty, though at this point the trade was still dominated by the Portuguese. In the first half of the century, 120,000 slaves were traded across the Atlantic; in the second half, the figure had doubled to 210,000. The gold from Colombia and the silver from Peru were even more valuable: two fifty-galleon treasure fleets sailed back and forth between Europe and the Caribbean, while another sailed across the Pacific to China. By 1590, Philip’s fleets delivered eleven million pesos a year. Elizabeth appointed Hawkins controller of the navy, for which he helped design light, fast ships that could circumnavigate the globe and outfight the majestic Spanish galleons, but he also led more raids on Africa and America.
Philip was infuriated by the English ‘pirates’. Yet the Spanish bought their slaves until in 1568, at San Juan (Mexico), they routed a Hawkins flotilla: the Devonian cousins barely escaped with their lives. But Drake had identified the weakest link in the sea transfer of silver from Peru, by land across Panama then by sea to Cadiz, and found allies to assist his heists.
In 1572, he negotiated with King Bayano of the Maroons in Panama. The slaves on Spanish plantations in Jamaica and Panama regularly rebelled and soon founded their own rebel Maroon communities ruled by elected kings, who were often kidnapped African royalty. In the gold mines of Venezuela, a slave from the Bay of Biafra named Miguel killed his cruel foreman and escaped, founding a community that he structured like the Spanish monarchy, with himself as king, his wife Guiomar as queen, crowned by their own bishop, before King Miguel was killed and his queen re-enslaved. Now, raiding Panama, Drake encountered King Bayano. A Panama Maroon named Diego negotiated an alliance and became Drake’s companion on future voyages. In March 1573, Drake succeeded in capturing an entire convoy of Spanish silver.
Elizabeth and her retainers invested in his transcontinental anti-Habsburg raids. ‘We’d gladly be revenged on the king of Spain,’ Elizabeth told Drake, ‘for divers injuries that we’ve received.’ In December 1577, five ships set off from Plymouth. Drake, accompanied by Diego and possibly other ex-slaves, argued with his co-captain during the journey: Drake accused the captain of witchcraft and betrayal and had him beheaded. Sailing into the Pacific, losing his other ships, he captured Spanish treasure ships, sailed up the Californian coast and across the Pacific to the Moluccas (where Diego died of wounds), before limping back to Plymouth in his
Drake was knighted, but his ascendancy as naval adventurer was challenged by another tough son of the west country. Walter Raleigh was also a member of the Plymouth cousinhood, but younger, smoother and romantically literary, an irresistible combination of killer, lover and poet.
His half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, nephew of Drake through his wife, had fought with the Dutch Sea Beggars and then helped organize a ferocious reconquest of Ireland which had never been fully subjugated by England. The Plantation, a cleansing operation in which Catholic Anglo-Norman-Irish earls who had traditionally run the island were replaced by Protestant, English lords and settlers, was led by the same west country men who were driving the war against Spain. Gilbert, joined by Raleigh and Drake, treated Ireland like a conquistador, decorating his camp with rows of Irish heads. It was almost a rehearsal for later conquests: when they captured Spanish troops, sent by Philip to aid the Catholic Irish, Raleigh personally helped behead over 200 of them. The cousins were granted 50,000 acres in Ireland. When Drake was there he joined the slaughter of 600 retainers of the Irish chieftain Sorley Boy MacDonnell.
Gilbert and Raleigh were friendly with Elizabeth’s magus and astrologer, John Dee, who was so influential that he had cast the stars to choose her coronation date. In 1577, Dee wrote his
