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Prisoner of the Indies

Geoffrey Household

For my Celia because she loves Spain

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

Extract of a letter of the year 1603

About This Book

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

We had spread a net for mullet at the head of the St Germans River, and Paul Horsewell and I were lying on the grass waiting for the tide to come up the valley from Plymouth. To the west were the grey village and the square tower of the church, and all around us the rich pastures of early August. Many times I have remembered the dark green tide flowing up under the trees, for often enough I saw the same in Honduras and the forests of New Spain and would long for my own country where neither man nor field is parched by the heat.

I was then but thirteen, and Paul was twelve. We were near the end of our schooling, and talking, when we talked at all, of what we should do in the world.

‘I will tell you a secret if you will keep it,’ Paul said. ‘I am to sail for Guinea on my uncles’ next voyage to learn the trade.’

Paul was the nephew of William and John Hawkins, and had before him a sure future. Mr William was the greatest merchant and shipowner in our town of Plymouth. Mr John, the younger by twelve years, commanded the fleets. Both were in high favour at court, and it was said that Her Majesty and Sir William Cecil, who was afterwards made Lord Burghley, were partners in the brothers’ ventures, lending guns and ships from the Royal Navy.

For my part I had no friends in high places, and could only hope that some craftsman would take me as apprentice. My father had been a soldier. I know little of him except that he was a rare shot with a cross-bow and that he must have loved me since he left twenty pieces of gold with the Town Clerk of Plymouth in trust for my benefit. That was how I came to sit alongside Paul Horsewell in school.

My father served on board the ships of King Harry the Eighth and Queen Mary, and so had many friends in our port. He was killed on the walls of Calais in 1557, and my mother married a Frenchman who had small use for a child who could not speak his language and even then had a mind of his own. But I will say this for the man. He troubled himself to see that I was sent back to Plymouth. There I dwelt happy enough until that day with Paul Horsewell upon the valley side above the St Germans River.

‘I wish I could go with you and see the world,’ I said, ‘though I doubt if any part of it be fairer than this.’

‘Fairer no, but richer yes,’ said Paul.

Well, it was not the money that I wanted, though it was as hard for me as any other boy to say what I did want; so I stayed in two minds until a week later when the two Queen’s ships that were to join the venture sailed round from London into the Catwater. What with the shining brass of guns and trumpets, the pennants and the great castles fore and aft adorned with glass and scrollwork and carving, the Jesus of Lubeck and the Minion were the finest sight that ever I had seen, and little did I think that any fifty-ton pinnace trading between Plymouth and the Canaries was safer in a Biscay storm than they.

Soon after they anchored, I saw my first Spanish fleet. Seven great ships swept one after another into the Catwater without lowering their topsails in salute or any by-your-leave, driven by bad weather or so they claimed. John Hawkins fired on them, for which he incurred Her Majesty’s displeasure. But of that and of all the gifts and fair words exchanged I knew nothing, and only wondered at the splendour and order of so many proud ships.

So then I spoke with Paul Horsewell, who all the time was strutting along the quays with a feather in his cap and a dagger at his belt, and asked him to say a word for me to his uncle William. The very next day I was summoned by Robert Barrett – God rest his gallant soul! – who was Master of the Jesus of Lubeck. He was all sword and ruffles like a great gentleman, but his lace was somewhat dirty and he had a twinkle in his eyes. He kept them half shut, though a young man, as if he were ever in the wind and salt spray of the Ocean.

He sat in the ship’s waist watching the new cables loaded and stowed, and swearing foul oaths at the Chatham dockyards which charged Her Majesty for rotten rope. But to me he spoke kindly, asking many questions. When I told him that I could write a good hand, knew my numbers and a little Latin, he smiled and said that a boy was welcome who could copy an account and tot up the cargo of a pinnace; but more to the point was whether I could readily endure the motion of the sea. To that I replied that I had often fished for conger off the Eddystone and that the fish had nothing from me but the bait.

‘And who will weep for you when you are drowned or die of the scurvy?’ he asked.

I was ashamed not to have a ready answer to his question. Like all else in this world, that was partly the fault of others and partly my own. The Town Clerk had put me to lodge with a farmer and his wife who were kind to me but old. They gave me food and clothing, and I on my part worked manfully in the fields when I was not at school, for I did not wish them to find me a burden.

So I grew up without the ups and downs of a family, the kissing and the quarrels, the shouting and the love, taking my pleasure through my eyes like some poor, lonely boy in the pit of a playhouse. I did not know how fond I could be of my fellows and they of me until the Spaniards taught me to give and receive with more generous heart.

‘I hope my shipmates will weep for me, sir,’ I answered to Master Robert Barrett, ‘for I mean to serve well.’

‘And what will you eat on shipboard, lad?’ he went on, testing me to see if I knew how hard a life was that of a seaman.

‘Whatever there is, sir.’

‘And if there is nothing?’

‘Why then I have a small body and can starve the more easily!’ I said, seeing that a merry answer pleased him.

At that he clapped me on the shoulder and declared that he might do better for me than I thought. I should help to serve Mr John Hawkins, our General of the Fleet, at his table.

Being only an ignorant lad and thinking of tavern boys without any schooling, I said that, if it could be, I would rather learn a trade.

He roared at me, though without malice, that I should have learned a score of trades by the time I had been six months at sea. Every man must be prepared, he said, to try his hand at the craft of another, whether carpenter, gunner, cooper, sailmaker, seaman or soldier, and all must go aloft in a storm and serve the guns in a fight.

‘Aye, and in the after castle you will find men of learning and breeding who have kissed the hand of Her Majesty,’ he went on. ‘Learn to walk with them, Miles Philips, and then you may run where you will on your own!’

Now, that was very true; and indeed I learned to run on my own when every man’s hand could have been against me.

We sailed from Plymouth on Monday, October the Second, 1567, being six ships in all; the two which were chartered from Her Majesty and the four owned by the Hawkins brothers, which were William and John, Swallow, Judith and Angel, the Judith being commanded by Francis Drake who was afterwards knighted. A gay and glorious fleet we must have seemed to the watchers upon Beacon Hill, for Mr Hawkins dressed his ships as he did himself, outdoing for nobility the French and the Spaniards. Even little Judith of but fifty tons and Angel of thirty-three seemed like African birds flying into the sun.

Between decks and below the fore castle the men chose each his place on the bare planks, for there were no Indian hammocks such as Spanish seamen learned to take aboard with them. I myself slept on the pantry shelf of the after castle, and the other boys where they could. Paul Horsewell was in Minion as purser’s mate, of which I was glad. It would have been hard for him not to play the gentleman adventurer over a mere cabin boy, though he would have tried his best.

The next day did John Hawkins give his orders to the crew of the Jesus of Lubeck, which were: to serve God daily, to love one another, to preserve our victuals and to beware of fire. When he had spoken to the ship’s company and I was serving wine in the great cabin to him and Master Barrett with other gentlemen, he called me to him.

‘Miles boy, do you know why the Master chose you to serve me?’ he asked.

‘I do not, sir,’ I answered, ‘unless it be that I can keep my feet.’

‘More than that,’ he said, and turning to Master Barrett asked, ‘What is it the dons say, Robert, which you told to Sir William Cecil and made him laugh?’

‘That a closed mouth catches no flies, Mr Hawkins,’ said the Master.

‘Aye. A closed mouth is what I need, Miles. And my brother and Master Barrett thought you had it, for you have lived without a family to gabble with. Now, tell me, boy, where are we bound?’

‘It is said that you go to look for gold in Guinea, sir,’ I answered, ‘but also it is said that in the cargo are fine cloths and linen too good for the Negroes to buy.’

‘And where shall we sell them?’

‘Perhaps on the Spanish Main, sir, though all Plymouth knows that King Philip of Spain allows no foreign traders.’

‘And are we to disobey him when he and Her Majesty are at peace?’

To that I made no answer.

‘You are right, boy. Such matters of high policy are not for children,’ he said. ‘But remember this! In your presence I shall speak freely to my captains and, it may be, to bishops and governors and grave and godly men upon the Main. What you hear you will keep to yourself.’

I promised faithfully to do so.

Then Mr Hawkins asked me what was being said of him in the fore castle, to which I replied boldly that if I were to keep the secrets of the one I must keep the secrets of the other, but I could say this much: that we all loved him dearly and would follow where he led.

‘By the Lord, we have no lying lickspittle here, Robert!’ he cried. ‘But you may fairly answer this, Miles. You know that at our sailing from London the topsail yard fell from the slings and killed a poor girl among the crowd of our friends on deck. What do they say of that?’

‘Some say it was a bad omen, sir, and some that it will ensure good luck, being, as it were, a sacrifice.’

Mr Hawkins smiled, but Master Barrett was much disquieted. Like Francis Drake of the Judith he was a hot Protestant, or Puritan as they now call it, and believed that God would punish Catholics in the next life, and in this life it was the duty of the English. Mr Hawkins, however, at the time condemned no one for his religion and treated all lawfully and with great courtesy.

‘We must take a care for this child’s soul,’ Master Barrett exclaimed. ‘He speaks like an Indian of New Spain.’

‘But I am told they keep silent under torture, Robert,’ Mr Hawkins said.

On the third day out there was a dead calm and the shipmasters all rowed over to the Jesus of Lubeck. Then I learned the object of our venture, which was to capture wild men from the coast of Guinea and sell them to the Spanish settlers on the Main, all of whom were ready to trade with us so long as they had some excuse for breaking the law. Mr Hawkins reminded his captains that we were not pirates but peaceful merchants flying Her Majesty’s flag, and that we must treat the towns and governments with all ceremony.

When the boats had returned, there came a little grey rain from the north-west. Master Barrett ordered me to see that all the glass and plate from the great cabin were safely stowed, the hen coops lashed down and stores made fast. On deck the seamen were running life lines between the castles. I wondered at all this, but did not wonder long. The gale struck at us out of the dusk, and the Jesus of Lubeck lay over into the sea while the watch fought to get sail off her.

When night fell we were running before a Biscay storm under reefed foresail. I was never so afraid as that first night, for afterwards we were all too busy for fear. The stern timbers worked and ground against each other, and the seas thundered under the great after castle as if they would wrench it from the ribs. Beyond my pantry wall the rudder groaned as the helmsmen fought with the tiller.

Morning was worse, for I could see that all I had imagined in the night was true. The castle rose as high as the chimneys of Plymouth Town Hall, and then down it would go until I looked through the glass of the gallery into the heart of the green sea. There was no ship in sight but little Angel riding head to wind under a rag of sail, safe as a seagull. But all of us in the Jesus of Lubeck knew that if Master Barrett tried to bring her round, the force of the gale on her castles would capsize her.

The galley fires were all swamped, and Mr Hawkins’ cook and butler, though they had voyaged with him before, were rolling helpless on their fat stomachs and praying for deliverance. As for his page, Samuel, a London spark who thought himself a gentleman, he was nowhere to be found. So I went in search of Mr Hawkins, carrying some salt fish and biscuit and a flagon of ale with a heavy lid to it. I found him on the poop dressed in coarse canvas against the sea, and he thanked me as if he had been in silks and velvets at Whitehall.

‘Miles, child, from now on we shall fend for ourselves like the rest,’ he said, ‘for the ship needs every man and boy. Master Barrett here will set you a task. And see that you keep good hold of a line!’

Since my small weight was of no value at the pumps, the Master sent me to help the carpenters who were busying themselves with the safety of the heavy cannon. All had been secured with double lashings at the onset of the storm, but now and again a ring bolt would tear from rotten wood or a deck plank would splinter and lift. One of the culverins broke loose and charged down the waist, dragging rope and timber after it like a wild beast broken loose from its cage. The men at the pumps jumped for their lives into the rigging.

One jumped too late and was caught and crushed. I was near fainting at the sight and vomited up the little beer and biscuit in my stomach, for it was the first violent, bloody death that ever I saw, and I was not then accustomed.

I remember little of that day and the next. The deck was all noise and water and men who had dropped exhausted at the pumps washing to and fro at the end of their lines. Down below the carpenters were wading over the pebble ballast above the keel, caulking the leaks while I held the lanterns and the tools for them. Having nothing before their eyes but the black water surging from stem to stern and back, they began to be very fearful that the ship would strike before they could come up on deck.

I, seeing grown men in such a fright, hanged my lanterns on a nail and ran. But, scrambling up the ladders, I met Master Barrett coming down, and so pretended that I had been sent for more candles. When he heard what was the matter, he laughed at us and told us that if the ship went down those on deck would drown as briskly as those below; as for striking, we need have no fear, for we had made enough westing to pass clear of the End of the Earth, or Finistierra as the Spaniards call it.

On the fourth day the carpenters were caulking and patching one of the strakes amidships, and had set me up on a transom with a flaming, naked torch to give them more light. Here I could see the ballast on the bottom of the ship, as they could not, and suddenly I cried out, ‘God save us all, masters! Here be fish swimming over the pebbles!’

In the forward part of the ship we had found no leak huge enough to let them pass; so one George Rively made his way aft, holding me by my belt and the scruff of my neck as if I had been a candlestick and telling me to keep my torch high, for he would rather be drowned than burned.

When we were under the after castle, such a spurt of water hit him that it knocked him down, and I was left swimming with one hand and holding my torch with the other. Then, as the stern rose from the sea and the water plunged away to the bows, I screamed at what I saw. The old timbers of the stern, which I had heard from my pantry crunching one another at the seams, were bending apart. As the great weight of the after castle plunged down into the trough of the waves, the planks opened so that a man could thrust his hand between them.

At our shouts the carpenters struggled aft, up to their chests in water, taking the bosun along with them. He saw at once that there could be no stopping such leaks with tar.

‘Break open her cargo, lads!’ he ordered. ‘Cloth and wedges!’

The carpenters knew what he intended. As the bales of cloth tumbled down into the bilge, they cut lengths and rolled them up. Then they hammered like madmen whenever the stern rose from the sea, wedging the rolls between the planks.

It was enough to keep out the fishes but not the ocean, for as fast as we stopped one crack another opened. Seeing the Jesus of Lubeck so near her end, Mr Hawkins summoned the ship’s company in the waist, and told us that we should pray with him lest we die in our sins. All weeping together, we took courage from him, since his face showed no fear of meeting his Maker. Then, his duty done, he ordered those on deck to pump for their lives and those below to go on searching the ship for leaks.

On the fifth day the wind and the sea went down, and we had a fair breeze from the north driving us farther and farther away from home. Master Barrett was for returning to repair the ship but Mr Hawkins was for sailing boldly on to the Canaries in the hope of meeting the rest of the fleet. Though we had the voyage to Guinea and the crossing of the Ocean before us we could count on steady weather all the way, whereas if we returned to Plymouth we were in no state to meet a November gale.

For myself I did not fancy a year’s venturing in a leaky, rotten ship, but the warm air and blue sea were too pleasant to leave. And so thought every man of us. Moreover Angel and Judith were now in company, so that if the ship opened her planks under us, some at least would be saved.

On October the Twenty-third we sailed into Santa Cruz de Tenerife and anchored below the fort, having performed all the courtesies of the sea such as dipping our topsails and firing salutes. The great men of the island came aboard with some English merchants, and there was much banqueting and merriment while Mr Hawkins’ band played very sweetly.

Samuel was blown up like a pig, having eaten above forty of the fruit which the Spaniards call platanos. They are yellow and shaped like little curved cucumbers and the sweetest thing that ever I tasted. Thus with Samuel crying out that his end had come – for which I should not have shed a tear – it was I who served the wine, dressed all in blue velvet. When I first caught sight of myself in the cabin mirror I wondered who the boy was and where he had hidden himself during the voyage.

This was the first time I met Spaniards and heard their language. It seemed to me, being only a child, that there was trust and friendship between us. They treated Mr Hawkins as the great gentleman he was and laid their hands upon their hearts at the mention of Her Majesty. As for him, he always spoke of King Philip as his old master – having indeed done him some service when the King came into England to marry Queen Mary – and swept off his hat, bowing low. But I knew well that when he spoke of his old master to Robert Barrett he would give a wink and tip his hat over his eyes.

In spite of all this outward courtesy Mr Hawkins sent neither boat nor man ashore and chose to anchor with a scattering of Spanish ships between our three vessels and the guns of the fort. These ships they quietly moved during the fourth night, and we as quietly towed our own out of gunshot. Then there was much passing of letters and messages between the Governor and Mr Hawkins, each of them swearing that he had never doubted the good intentions of the other.

‘That is twice they have tried to stop me, Robert,’ I heard him say to Master Barrett. ‘But from now on they cannot, for they have no ships of war in the Indies.’

He was in good heart and twisting his moustaches, for news had come that Minion, Swallow and William and John were riding safe and sound off the island of Gomera. There we joined them, took on water and repaired the worst of the timbers. On shore I was merry with Paul Horsewell, being very glad to see each other again. We rode upon camels, which are not so fast as horses but better eating.

The fleet then sailed for Guinea and stayed between Cape Blanco and Sierra Leone for some twelve weeks. All that time I remained at my duties in the after castle, for Mr Hawkins would have no boys and weaklings ashore. Here and there were trading posts of the Portuguese, but they had never conquered and occupied the land as the Spaniards did in the Indies. So it was a land without law. French and English came and went as they pleased, trading for gold and ivory around Cape Blanco and for slaves farther to the south.

All I saw was the desolate, grey coast with the seas breaking on it, and the river mouths and islands all dark with forests, into which our boats and pinnaces would disappear. Days later they would return with a little gold, a few Negroes and half the men shivering with fevers and agues in the heat.

I myself nearly died of the fever, being two weeks tossing and turning on the hard boards, cared for by William Lowe who played the bass viol in the band. He was a red-haired dwarf with freckles on his face and as many jests in his mouth. He used to tell me that I must not die until I had seen the Indies and that afterwards I could do as I pleased.

Indeed, the ship was full of sick soldiers and seamen, not knowing what ailed them or why. Once the longboat returned with some of our men who had been hit by little arrows, laughing at their wounds which were no bigger than pin-pricks. But in two days their jaws were shut tight. They themselves boldly forced their mouths open with wedges, and then could talk and thought that they were cured. But all died.

By January we had only one hundred and fifty Negroes, most of them taken by force from the Portuguese. The fleet then sailed to Sierra Leone where two kings were at war. Mr Hawkins agreed with one of them to storm his enemy’s town on condition that we should have all the prisoners. But though our men had hard fighting before they could force the stockade and burn the town, the king played us false. Some of the prisoners were roasted and eaten in our sight, and most of the others were driven into the mud of the river where they stuck fast and drowned.

We left the coast with four hundred and seventy slaves in the holds; and whether this be honest trading or not I leave to the lawyers and churchmen. The Spaniards say that it is wrong to make slaves of the subjects of a Christian king. Therefore the Indians in New Spain are not slaves, though many of them are bound to the estates like the serfs in old England of whom we read in the histories. But the Negroes of Africa, they say, are in law wild men, and may be captured and sold as if they were lions or elephants.

For myself, I know that I was sorry for the poor blackamoors in the hold of the Jesus of Lubeck, chained and fed upon boiled beans, and I would not treat any human being so. Yet less of them died of fright than we of fevers and arrows, and those who lived were more fortunate than their fellows drowned in the mud or cut up as we do beef or mutton. These wild men are better treated by the Spaniards than by their own people, as I have seen, and after they have learned a Christian language and Christian prayers, which they do marvellously quick, they become grave and courtly men. When freed, as often they are, they may rise in New Spain to be overseers, merchants and even justices and may marry and meet with whomever they will.

Our fleet was now of nine sail. We had picked up an empty Portuguese fishing-boat on the coast, the crew of which had fled from French traders. Later we fell in with these Frenchmen, and two of their captains joined us. One was a stouthearted seaman of Dieppe, named Captain Bland. He commanded a fine Portuguese caravel. When Mr Hawkins asked him how he came by her, he answered, keeping a straight face, that she too had been empty, her crew having jumped overboard for fear of the English. We renamed her the Dei Gratia.

On the long voyage of the Middle Passage I found very true Master Barrett’s words to me: that I should be master of many trades before I came home to England. In the great cabin the gentlemen and the officers still dined off silver plate to the sound of music, but there were few platters to wash unless fresh fish were caught. All the good meat in the casks was finished, and the rest rotten. So the butler and Samuel took more work upon themselves – for the sake of the leavings from the table – and set me to cleaning the arms in the after castle and keeping them bright against the salt and damp.

Whenever the sails hung limp in the heat, the whole fleet practised at the guns. I learned to make up dry charges for the arquebuses and to load and care for the brass fowlers on the poop which were used to fire hail shot at boarders. This work of mine was daily inspected by Job Hartop, a master gunner though but twenty years of age, who, seeing that I loved his craft, taught me to load and aim the culverins and the big demi-cannon. Also I learned to use arquebus, pistol and cross-bow, so that by the time we reached the Indies I was on my way to become as good a ship’s soldier as my father before me. Though I had little in my belly, like the rest of us, my arms and shoulders were broadening into those of a man.

CHAPTER TWO

After a voyage of fifty-two days we sighted the island of Dominica and called for water. I wondered that the coasts and creeks and fair harbours should be so deserted, forgetting that only seventy-five years had passed since Columbus discovered the Indies, which now it is the foolish fashion to call America. Afterwards I found that there were Spaniards in great number but for the most part gathered in their noble cities.

Our first port of call on the Main was Margarita, where we found only fifty settlers who fled on our appearance, believing us to be no better than French pirates. Mr Hawkins sent letters on shore, as was his custom, saying that he only desired to be of service both to King Philip and Her Majesty. Thereupon the Governor asked him to dine, and agreed to deliver us sheep and oxen in exchange for our goods. But we on board were too hungry to wait. We rowed out to a rock which was covered with birds as large as geese, and filled our boats with them and their eggs.

We sailed west along the coast, but everywhere trade was refused as if our fine fleet had been some thieving pedlar at a farmhouse door. It seemed to me great pity that these brave settlers who saw their own ships but once a year should not be allowed to buy from us cloth to clothe themselves and Negroes to ride after their cattle and work their land.

But some of them found a way to trick their Governors. They secretly invited Mr Hawkins to take their town by force and refuse to surrender it until he had leave to trade. Both sides profited from this play-acting, and we did no damage that we did not pay for except in the case of Francis Drake, who, having small patience with Mr Hawkins’ liking of the Spaniards, blockaded the harbour of Rio de la Hacha and put two cannon shot through the Treasurer’s house.

We came at last to Cartagena which was the first true city I had seen, with a castle and well-armed men upon the walls. They were too strong for us to compel them to trade without an act of war. This Mr Hawkins would not undertake since he flew Her Majesty’s flag.

Here we had good proof that he was trusted. Outside the harbour was an island, all laid out as a pleasure ground for the wealthy citizens. In the garden we found many barrels of good wine, as they must have known we would. Mr Hawkins took them and left in their place bales of English cloth, value for value, with enough over to pay the King’s customs duties into the bargain.

But it was not wine that we wanted. We had hoped to provision the fleet at Cartagena for the homeward voyage. Now there was nothing for it but to call in the Islands, though we would rather have sailed clear away. It was August, and if we delayed we might be caught by the deadly winds which the Spaniards call Huricanos before we could pass through the Florida Channel and out into the Ocean.

On a calm day the ensign of the Jesus of Lubeck was raised to summon a council on board. The captains decided to take all goods out of our Portuguese caravel and sink her. Captain Bland of the Dei Gratia was resolved to remain with the fleet, and the other Frenchman to sail off on his own. So we were reduced to seven ships. Of the four hundred and eight Englishmen who had left Plymouth, three hundred and twenty remained, the rest having died in Guinea or at sea; and that was less, old seamen said, than would have gone to their rest under any other general but John Hawkins. Of the Negroes we had sold all but fifty-seven and lost very few.

We sailed slowly, for after nine months in warm waters the ships were foul with weeds, worms and barnacles. All was well with us until we reached the westernmost point of the island of Cuba. Then a storm blew up from the south-east and drove us into unknown waters. The William and John we never saw again and believed her lost with all hands, but by God’s Providence she came safe to Ireland. As for the Jesus of Lubeck, the following seas opened up her planks as they had in the Bay of Biscay, and again we were pumping and stuffing the leaks with such cloth as we had left to keep out the fishes.

She was far beyond saving now, but John Hawkins saved her, mixing with the seamen, his shirt open to the waist and the salt crusting his hair. He ordered the carpenters to cut away all the highest parts of the after castle. So while they plied their saws, axes and crow-bars and hurled overboard the galleries and cabins, Samuel and the butler busied themselves with mirrors and chests as if they were moving house from Plymouth to London, and I helped Job Hartop to dismount the brass fowlers and set them up on the new poop deck. Then we rode more easily, though for four days we were in terror of our lives.

When the wind dropped we laid our course down the west of Florida, sending out boats to look for a creek where we might careen and repair the ships; but, finding only shoals and beaches, the boats were called in, and all the captains came aboard the Jesus of Lubeck. What passed between them I remember well, and I can still see John Hawkins sitting at the head of the table in his black velvet and gold chain, with his beard and moustache now trimly pointed as if he were in his brother’s counting house.

The captains begged him to shift the men, guns and cargo from the flag-ship and then sink her, but he would not.

‘If the Jesus of Lubeck is a total loss, you can only gain by it, sir,’ Master Barrett said to him. ‘But if you bring her home, you must repair her at your own expense before you hand her back to the Queen.’

‘That may be so, but still I will not sink her,’ Mr Hawkins replied.

‘You will get no thanks from Her Majesty,’ said Mr Francis Drake.

Mr Hawkins beckoned to me to refill the goblets.

‘When you come to know her, as one day you will, Francis,’ he said slowly, ‘you will find her cunning, mean, always preferring to do nothing at all rather than some act which can never be undone. Yet when you see her eyes smile and hear the love in her voice, you will forgive our Gloriana all her faults as you would to a wife, for she is married to England. And whether or not she keeps faith with me, I will keep faith with her. So I will not sink her ship.’

These words stayed in my mind; and when I was near dead with misery, I would tell myself that Gloriana was my Lady and I her Knight, and that I would keep faith with her though the raggedest rogue in the New World.

A day later it blew from the north-east, driving us away from Florida and into the Gulf. None of the masters knew the coast of New Spain, so that we might as well have been on the moon without any pilot to tell us where the fleet could refit and take on stores. Even when we left Cartagena we were short of food and now we had been beating about in the Caribbean Sea for near fifty days.

On September the Eleventh we hailed a small Spanish ship, and thanked God when her captain closed with us and came aboard. He was a good, rough seaman, trading between the Islands and New Spain, who knew the coast and was ready enough to tell us where we were. He said that he had ridden out the storm in Campeche, and that the only port to leeward which we could reach was San Juan de Ulua, whither he was bound himself.

Master Barrett, who spoke very good Spanish, thanked him and asked why he had not run from us, seeing that his pinnace was newly cleaned and could sail closer to the wind than we.

‘I was glad to see your worships,’ he replied, ‘for I believed you must be a squadron of the yearly fleet from Spain.’

‘Is it due?’ Master Barrett asked.

‘Any day now.’

‘And is it bound for San Juan de Ulua?’

‘Of course. There is nowhere else.’

‘And what sort of harbour is it, friend?’

‘It will do until we have more Negroes to make it better,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘On land everyone is a gentleman.’

The Spaniard was ordered to stay with us so that he could not give warning of our approach. We also fell in with three other traders whom we compelled to join us.

Four days later we made San Juan de Ulua and were greeted as if indeed we were part of the great fleet from Spain. Our colours were so faded by sun and sea that the Treasurer and Mayor of Vera Cruz, which is the chief town and not far from San Juan, had come aboard us before they saw that Jesus of Lubeck and Minion flew the Lions of England at the main top and not the Castles of Spain. So when we sailed in, the guns saluted us with blank charges instead of ball.

The harbour gave good shelter from the north winds, but was the worst that I ever saw. There was only a little island of shingle, three feet above water at low tide, with a channel between it and the mainland. This pebble bank was faced with stone blocks on the inner side, forming a quay to which ships were moored with anchors out at the stern and their fore castles overhanging the island. For defence there was a gun platform with two batteries of heavy cannon.

As soon as the people of the port saw our faces and heard the English words of command, there was panic. The crews of the few ships rowed ashore. The gunners deserted their platform. The King’s Negroes working on the shingle swam across the channel. Mr Hawkins then sent for the Captain of the Port and assured him that we had only put in to refit and buy stores. He promised to do no harm to men or ships, not even if their holds were full of silver from the mines, and he talked as confidently of his old master as if King Philip and the Pope together had blessed his voyage.

On the evening of September the Sixteenth all was at peace and we were sure that we should be able to buy whatever we lacked. Boats came across the narrow channel to look at us, and the band of the Jesus of Lubeck played to amuse them. Fresh meat was roasting over the galley fires. The smoke hung over the decks in the hot dusk.

I was up early in the morning to lay the cabin breakfast when the watch reported that there were thirteen sail on the horizon. It was certain who they were: the Plate Fleet from Seville and Havana come to load the silver and gold of the Indies, and carrying on board the new Viceroy, Don Martin Enriquez.

When they saw our masts and pennants, they anchored off the island and sent the Admiral’s barge into the harbour with a high and mighty message from the Viceroy saying that if we dared to keep him out of New Spain by force, he had with him a thousand men who would see to it. To this John Hawkins replied that he himself was also a Viceroy since he represented his Queen, and that he cared nothing for a thousand men who could come no nearer than his cannon allowed.

That was true enough; so we had no fear of the Spaniards though we ourselves were less than three hundred. They still fought as in my father’s time, laying alongside the enemy and using their guns to kill men, whereas we shot low and used our guns to kill ships. Master Barrett was for defiance. It would be a fine stroke for the Queen and the Protestant religion, he declared, to send the dons packing. The Viceroy could land nowhere else but San Juan, as well we knew.

‘And for two years there would be no silver shipped to Spain,’ said Mr Hawkins. ‘But I fly Her Majesty’s flag, Robert, and therefore I must keep the peace if the dons will let me. She rebuked me for firing on them even in our own port of Plymouth where I had the right.’

So for the next five days there was such coming and going of banners and letters that it could be thought we were at anchor in London or Seville. Our ships were battered and foul, but there was no sign of rust to be seen. The colours flew bravely; the captains in their finest silks and velvets cursed the heat and the ceremonies; and all the while the gunners stood by the cannon, where the Spanish envoys could see them, with the ball and powder charges piled ready for action. Of all men on board the busiest were the cabin servants, I sweating more than the rest since Mr Hawkins had chosen to clothe me in a leather jerkin with the arms of Her Majesty in red and gold.

The upshot of it all was that the island and its guns – to which we had added some of our own – were to remain in our possession, that the Spanish fleet should anchor alongside us and that ten hostages should be given by each side to the other.

As soon as the Viceroy had agreed to our conditions, their fleet entered the channel and was moored to the harbour wall. They were to the north, and we to the south. Between us was an old hulk with the masts out of her. On our side of the hulk was the Minion, then the Jesus of Lubeck, then the rest of the fleet. On their side were the two galleons of the Indian Guard, first the Admiral’s ship and next to her the Vice-Admiral’s.

No armed Spaniards were allowed on the island, but many of the common seamen dropped from the bows on to the shingle and began to walk around. At that time, man to man, we were always the best of friends with the Spaniards, so we exchanged little gifts and told stories of our voyages so far as we could understand one another. They, too, had been short of food, but thought little of it. The Spaniards are better starvers than the English.

Our officers were less easy. But this I know, hearing so much in the great cabin: that none of them intended treachery. Our whole desire was for peace, since the two fleets were packed so close together that the Spaniards could bring their great numbers to bear on us.

In spite of all the solemn oaths which were sworn, the Viceroy never meant to keep his word. The first we knew of it was the sight of new gun ports being cut in the sides of Almirante and Capitana which are the titles they gave to the two flagships. That same night we saw armed men from the mainland going on board the ships, and heard muffled feet below the deck of the hulk. Our General warned Master Hampton of the Minion to be ready and sent Robert Barrett to protest to the Viceroy and to remind him that his honour was engaged. He never saw Master Barrett again.

It was near eight o’clock on the morning of September the Twenty-third and Mr Hawkins was taking his dinner early that he might have a full belly if it came to fighting. One of the Spanish hostages sat next to him, and I saw the hilt of a dagger hidden in the lace of his left sleeve. This I whispered to John Chamberlayne who was the soldier on guard at the door. He lowered his halberd, which he held for ceremony more than for use, and thrust it against the hostage, calling on the gentlemen at the table to search him. They found the dagger which I had seen and forthwith put the man in irons. I cannot say whether he intended to stab our General, but this much I know: that they had not given us as hostages gentlemen of quality but common fellows dressed in their clothes.

Then a trumpet sounded from the Almirante. Instantly soldiers dropped from the bows of all their ships and charged the gun platform. They took it and slaughtered our men, who were dreaming that the Spaniards were their friends and not keeping good watch.

Meanwhile the hulk that lay next to the Minion was warped alongside her. Three hundred Spanish soldiers boarded her and swept the decks, whereupon John Hawkins cried out, ‘God and St George! Upon the traitorous villains and rescue the Minion!’

The men of the Jesus of Lubeck leapt down into the Minion and fought it out briskly hand to hand. I, being small and of no value in such play, ran to the brass fowler on the poop which Job Hartop had taught me to load and fire. I aimed at the swarm of Spanish soldiers still crossing from the hulk and did great execution amongst them since the charges were lying ready by the gun and I could fire as fast as I could sponge her out. But it was as well that Job had taught me to stand aside from a breech-loader, which, he said, was as likely to burn up the gunner as slaughter the enemy. I had fired but three times when the breech block and the stirrup which held it flew whining into the sea.

The hulk drifted away, and the Spaniards who remained on board the Minion jumped into the water or were cut down where they stood. It was then our turn in the Jesus of Lubeck, for we were boarded from the hulk and from boats alongside. But the great after castle, though half cut away in the storm, now repaid us for the trouble it had caused. With cross-bows and arquebuses our men fired down into the waist and made short work of the boarders. When the smoke cleared, the only Spaniards on our deck were dead or wounded.

Meanwhile both ships had cut their moorings, and the seamen at the capstans were hauling them off the island. Once we were clear of the hulk, there was nothing but sea and wreckage between us and the Almirante. Our gunners below decks at last had an enemy in their sights. After half an hour of our broadside, her powder blew up and she caught fire.

That left the Capitana to meet the fire of the Jesus of Lubeck and Minion alone. By the time we had done with her she was as full of holes as a sieve and settled on the bottom with her flag still flying and the Viceroy still on board, though most of his men had taken refuge on the island.

But we had no time to give him his deserts, for now the two batteries on the gun platform turned their fire on the Jesus of Lubeck. The foremast was shot away and five balls went through the mainmast. Our good old ship was now doomed to die at San Juan de Ulua, for she never could be moved. All the while our shot hurled up the shingle around the batteries and we on deck drove off boat after boat of soldiers who tried to board us.

Since Mr Hawkins showed no fear, nor did we. I remember that he called to Samuel for some beer which the boy brought in a silver cup. I forgave him all his airs and pride, for he came with steady hand and head held high. The General raised the cup and drank to the health of the ship’s company in the sight of all. As soon as he set it down by his side, a ball from a demi-culverin struck it and crashed through the bulwarks into the sea.

Thereupon he shouted in his great Plymouth voice which carried over the din of battle as it had over storm, ‘Fear nothing! God who has preserved me from this shot will also deliver us from villains and traitors.’

Elsewhere the fight went against us. Swallow was boarded and taken, Angel sunk and Dei Gratia so crippled that Captain Bland and his Frenchmen set her on fire and came aboard us. The general ordered Minion and little Judith to sail out of range and anchor, for they were now our only hope of escape.

In the evening these two ships came up on the landward side of the Jesus of Lubeck, where her tall sides sheltered them from the batteries. All our treasure and valuable cargo were carried over into Minion. The men and the stores of food were about to follow when the Spaniards sent fire ships against us, carried down the channel by the evening breeze. I was more frightened than by any gunfire. They drifted down on us all ablaze from stem to stern, with powder kegs going off on deck and the flames and sparks seeming to reach across the red water for us.

The crew of the Minion cut loose their furled sails and cast off the mooring lines. At once she began to move past the Jesus of Lubeck. Those of us who were shifting cargo tumbled on to her deck. Mr Hawkins in full armour jumped as the Minion passed under her stern and would have drowned if he had not grasped a halyard trailing in the water. Some launched a boat and followed, some tried to swim, some were left behind, among them Paul Horsewell. I thought I had seen the last of him for ever. He had been carrying his uncle’s silver plate over to the Minion and stood trembling on the poop till it was too late. I saw him throw the heavy silver into the sea and bend his knees to jump, but his courage failed him.

That night we lay at anchor in the channel. When morning came, we found that the Judith had gone. Why Master Francis Drake forsook us in our misery I cannot tell. It may be that he felt the coming change of weather and feared to be caught on a lee shore. But he was ever a man who cared for no orders but his own.

As for us, we were hardly clear of the channel before the north wind caught us. We had only two anchors and two cables left, and if one of them had parted the Minion would have been driven hard and straight on to a reef. All that Friday we were in terror of our lives, watching the anchors on one side, and on the other the Spaniards riding up and down the beach waiting for our certain end.

On the Saturday the wind veered, and we sailed off into the unknown waters of the Gulf. For fourteen days we beat about trying to reach the Florida Channel and praying that we might fall in with some land where we could buy cattle and take on fresh water.

We were soon in desperate plight, for the Minion had over two hundred men on board and not even enough food for her own crew. We were given daily two ounces of bread each. We boiled the cow hides which we had taken in trade and chewed them. We hunted the rats, and the lucky man who caught one would spit it on a stick and hold it over the galley fire while his comrades begged for a mouthful. The pets, which seamen always have, were eaten down to the last dog, cat, monkey and parrot. In the fourteen days all that came my way were some beans which I stole and a good, crisp piece of cat-skin which Job Hartop gave me.

Many of my comrades said they would rather be put on shore and trust to the mercy of the Spaniards than die on the voyage home. When Mr Hawkins heard them choosing this fate for themselves, he summoned the whole company to the waist and told us that those who wanted to try their luck on land should gather by the foremast and those who wished to stay by the ship should gather aft.

I was for staying, but Job Hartop put his arm round my shoulders and told me I knew nothing yet of the perils of the sea.

‘If you do not die on the voyage, Miles,’ he said to me, ‘you will reach Plymouth with your flesh rotten and without teeth in your head. That is no life – to be old before you are fifteen.’

‘But what of the wild Indians on shore? Will they not eat us?’ I asked.

‘Why, not till they have fattened us a little, boy. And you may be sure that we shall fall in with some Christians before that. Since we are no pirates, but sail under Her Majesty’s flag, I think they will hold us until they have King Philip’s orders. And this I tell you with my whole heart: that whatever they do to us will be less than what scurvy and starvation will do.’

So I joined Job by the foremast with several other boys, some because they knew they could not endure hardship like grown men, and some because they carried their brains in their bellies.

Master Hampton put down the helm and made for the coast of New Spain. On October the Eighth the Minion anchored off a desolate beach, and one hundred and fourteen of us were set on shore, two being drowned in the surf. While the ship took on water, John Hawkins stayed with us and embraced every man, swearing that he would not forget us nor would allow Her Majesty to forget. He provided each of us with six yards of cloth for trade, and if any man wanted money as well, he gave it. When the boats had gone, we sat upon the beach, all huddled together in the rain, and watched the Minion until the mist closed over her.

After quenching our thirst and eating a few berries which grew by the shore we took refuge on a hill. All night long it rained cruelly so that my spirits were very low. In the morning we formed in column of threes and marched in the only direction we could go, across the swamp with the forest on one side of us and the sea on the other.

As we struggled through the reeds we heard a hooting and whooping from the trees and out rushed a frightful band with hair down to their waists and painted faces. These Indians shot as well as English archers and killed eight of us with their arrows. Since we had no armour and no weapons but an old hand-gun and two rusty swords, we made signs to them that we yielded.

That was not the custom of their enemies, the Spaniards; so they ordered us to sit down and walked round us to see who we were and what we had which was worth taking. It was little enough: only the cloth we had for trade and our patched coats, shirts and canvas breeches. If these were black, they despised them, but if coloured, they took them. So I, who was wearing green broadcloth from Paul Horsewell’s sea chest, was stripped naked and would have been near to tears if Anthony Goddard had not laughed at me, saying that I should feel the heat less and need have no more shame than Adam before me.

This Anthony Goddard was a seaman of Plymouth who had learned good Spanish trading with the Canaries. He asked the Indians how we might reach a settlement, and their captain, understanding him, replied: ‘Tampico Christiano.’

So we tried to find Tampico and its Christians, some going north, and our party, led by Anthony Goddard, marching south-west. After being set upon by Indians, the others turned back and rejoined us, all but twenty-three. Twenty of these may still be living in the cities of Cibola. Three returned to England, having travelled so far and fast in one year that they came upon a French ship fishing in the cold waters of the north and took passage on her.

There were seventy-eight left to struggle on through the forests of the coast. Little did I think when I wandered under the broad trees of Devon, gathering branches for the fire or picking blackberries, that woods could be like these. We could not walk at all until those in front had beaten a path for us with cudgels. And whenever we came to more open country and scattered to find roots or fruit to eat, the Indians shot at us from the thickets.

But harder to bear than the arrows of the Indians were the little flies which the Spaniards call mosquitos. They covered my body and I soon learned to leave them in peace and endure the itching, finding that if I killed one while it was sucking, the place swelled as if stung by a bee. As I walked, I made wreathes of grass to protect myself from the flies, since I knew how to thatch and how to top a roof with a straw dolly in a fine, golden skirt. Some of the others watched me and did the same. We were all near naked by now, for those of us who had not been stripped by the Indians had their clothes rotted by slime and water and torn by thorns.

Time and again one of the seamen climbed a high tree, but nothing was to be seen until the twelfth day of our march when the look-out called down to us that he saw a great river and its mouth. Soon afterwards I heard a shot fired, but others said it was a falling branch. Then a cock crew, and we knew that Christians could not be far off.

CHAPTER THREE

At last we saw streaks of sunlight through the trees, and there in front of us was the River Panuco. Spaniards were trotting along the opposite bank, believing us to be bold Indians who dared to attack their town. As soon as they had sight of us, they crossed the river in canoes, their horses swimming behind them. They saddled up at a distance and charged us, lance in hand.

Anthony Goddard called to us that they would never hurt unarmed men and told us to kneel and surrender. They pulled up their horses a few paces from us and spoke with Goddard, who let them know that we were English. Though they had heard of the fight at San Juan, they were full of pity for us and at once gave us bread of their country wheat, which is called maize. Never again did it taste to me so good as then.

They took up the boys and the wounded behind them on their horses and told the rest to follow. I was greatly afraid of the man who would take me, although he covered me with his cloak. He had one eye, a matted beard over the scars on his face and lacked three fingers of his sword hand. Like a child I called out to Anthony Goddard that he meant no good. But Goddard, after speaking with the man and smiling, told me that the fearful wounds had been caused by a jaguar, and that he had covered me with his cloak because Our Saviour commanded him to clothe the naked.

This I always remembered when I met a Spaniard maimed by beasts, battle or disease – and there were many such – knowing that behind so terrible an aspect might be a simple heart filled with goodness and pity.

But now I was to find how fierce they can be when they believe it is their duty. The Governor of Tampico threatened to hang the lot of us, shouting that we were English dogs and heretics, and drove us into a little house no bigger than a pigsty. When Anthony Goddard presented him with a gold chain and asked for a surgeon to attend those of us who had open wounds from the Indian arrows, he replied that we needed no surgeon, for the hangman would soon heal all our troubles. But he kept the chain.

It is likely that there was no surgeon and that the inhabitants healed each other as best they could with Indian remedies. Tampico was a settlement of thatched huts with only two hundred Christians and their Indian servants. All they did was to work the salt pans, having no wealth nor anything to remind them of Spain but the orchards of oranges, lemons and pomegranates which they had planted.

On the fourth day we were taken out of our miserable hut and prepared ourselves to die, seeing halters of new rope all ready for us. But it turned out that we were to march to the City of Mexico, and the halters were only to tie us in pairs. I was bound to Richard Williams, a boy who had jumped from Swallow when the Spaniards boarded her and swum for his life to the Jesus of Lubeck. He was a poor companion in adversity, bewailing his fate and calling upon his mother, though she lived hard by Otterton in Devon and could do him no manner of good.

To guard us on the road were a band of Indians and two Spaniards on horseback. One was a young man who herded us on like cattle, riding alongside and hitting the weak and the stumblers with the butt of his spear. The other was old and full of pity for us.

Well he might be, for there was not a stout seaman left amongst us. All were weakened by hunger and fever, and many bleeding from wounds which would not heal. Even those who had gone barefoot in the streets of London and on deck soon had their feet bruised by stones and stuck full of thorns. Richard Williams was the luckiest. Being brought up as a fisher boy upon pebble beaches, he had feet like an African and needed no leather between his soles and the road.

As for me, I had always worn buckled shoes to serve in the cabin, so that my feet were soft. These shoes, rotted by sweat and the marshes, began to fall apart before midday, nor would the young Spaniard let me stop to try to bind them with rags. Soon the soles were torn off, and I shuffled along in bare feet with the flies buzzing round the blood.

When our guards at last ordered us to halt, we dropped on the bare ground still tied together in pairs. I was given a maize cake for my supper, but I could not eat it. All night I tossed and turned with the pain of my feet, listening to the whine of the mosquitos and the groaning of my shipmates.

In the morning I had no strength to move. Williams tried to drag me up, but I could only lie where I was with my hot, fevered head on my arms. There I think I would have died if it had not been for the cruelty of the young Spaniard. He beat me across the shoulders shouting, ‘Walk, you little dog! You enemy of God!’

Then he prodded me with his spear and kicked me until I got to my feet.

The road climbed and climbed into the mountains, and never shall I forget the loose stones underfoot. Little Richard Williams babbled of his home and tried to make me speak of mine. I answered him that I had no home but the Jesus of Lubeck which was at the bottom of the harbour with the bones of my good comrades, and that I wished to be dead also.

In the evening I thought that my wicked wish had come true for I saw hurrying towards us some men dressed all in white robes, with freshly shaven faces, holding out their hands in welcome. One of them came up to Richard and me and instantly cut the halter which bound us together. Putting his arms round our shoulders, he said to us, ‘Dear children, do not be afraid!’

Though he spoke Spanish, I understood what he said and forthwith burst out weeping like a baby.

These men were friars of the Carmelite Order who had come out to greet us from the town of Santa Maria. They took us all into their monastery and gave us so much meat and fruit that at first we made ourselves ill. And some of us died of their wounds, this charity coming too late for them.

These good Carmelites also clothed us in the white cotton cloth of the Indians which was great comfort to our open sores. My feet were anointed and bound up, and sandals so lovingly fitted over the linen that in two days I could bear the pain of walking. I thought that if the friars in England were as kindly and charitable as those of New Spain it was a great pity that King Harry the Eighth turned them out.

Before we took the road again, Anthony Goddard spoke with the old man and thanked him for showing such mercy as he could, whereas his comrade had none.

‘I, too, have marched naked in my time, Englishman,’ he answered, ‘with no clothes but a belt of rotten leather and nothing in my hand but a sword. And it is to me and such as me that King Charles and King Philip after him owe their empire.’

But the young man with the spear, he said, had come out only two years before to make his fortune, and wished he had never left his home in Cadiz for the huts of Tampico. Yet he had servants, which he never had in all his life before, and treated them very ill as he did us. He thought he would be a gentleman and so would not work. If we paid no heed to him, we should soon see that it would give him no pleasure to beat us.

We left Santa Maria and limped slowly onwards under our cloud of flies, bound in pairs as before. But my shipmates now had more spirit in them. When the young man struck and cursed them, they cursed him back in good, round English. Once he backed his horse into the line so that Richard Williams and I, pulling in opposite directions to escape the hooves, both fell down. I pitched with my hand upon a plant like our teasel, which grows close to the ground and bristles with fine thorns. This I picked up – since my hand was so full of the prickles that a dozen more made no odds – and in a fury thrust it under his horse’s tail.

The poor beast bucked and bounded as though it were mad and threw its rider, spear and all, into the prickly pears by the side of the road, then bolted off until the old man most skilfully caught it at full gallop. Thereafter the young Spaniard became more of a lazy gentleman than ever and left his duties to the headman of the Indians, telling him to kill anyone who stumbled and fell. But the Indians were too cautious to shed our blood without a better order than his, and would not meddle with us.

We travelled for five days, climbing higher and higher so that I gasped for breath and was near fainting with the heat of the sun. At last we started downhill, each pair tripping and falling against the pair in front, for we were again as weak as when we came to Santa Maria. Then we reached flatter ground and were suddenly surrounded by a crowd of Spaniards who had ridden out to look at us; so we knew that we must be near to the City. Whether they killed me or not I did not care, for at least there would be an end to walking.

When we came to the lake which fills the Valley of Mexico, I thought the fever was on me and that again I dreamed what I saw, which was a shining city in the middle of the water, reached by four causeways. Till then I had believed that the Spaniards lived in settlements not so good as a small Devon market-town, or in strong forts like Cartagena. Yet here was a dominion which far surpassed London in the broadness of its streets and the magnificence of its buildings. So said those who had seen our capital; and I, who had known no greater town than Plymouth, was astounded, for Mexico was larger than six Plymouths, and that without counting the Indian townships which lay in the valley round about it.

The streets were built straight and at right angles to each other so that from the causeway I could see a mile in front of me. Sweet water ran in channels down the streets and between them were canals where the Indians paddled canoes piled high with all the produce of the country. Around the city the birds sang most marvellously and in great numbers, and the scent of flowers and herbs from the fields was very dainty. Our men exclaimed at the wonder of it all, their great oaths sounding oddly in voices that were so weak. Even Richard Williams ceased to blubber and wipe his nose on his cotton smock, blowing it with his fingers like a man.

Our guards made us sit down in the middle of the great square, where we huddled together on the pavement expecting that the crowd who came running would spit on us or throw stones. But they smiled kindly and gave us whatever food or money they had ready. And those who had nothing in their hands sped to the market stalls and bought meat and hats for us. They all knew that we had fought at San Juan de Ulua, but it was enough for them that we were Christian men who suffered.

We were taken in two large canoes to a tannery where we spent the night. In the morning priests came to see us and ask what we believed, for the people of Mexico then knew little of the English except that we had returned to the Catholic Church under Queen Mary, and they thought that under Queen Elizabeth we were free to be Catholics or heretics as we pleased.

Anthony Goddard told the priests that we were as good Christians as they, and made it appear, when he interpreted for us, that we had given the right answers whether we had or not. I and some others could say the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, which we did. Others said it over in English, which satisfied the priests.

Being now, as we thought, out of our troubles, fourteen of us died. As a boy, I could only see the pity of it both here in the tannery and at Santa Maria. Since then I have learned that a man who is afraid to be left on the road to die alone will keep marching though his feet bleed and his body be racked with pain. But when he feels that it is all over and that he has no more need to fight for his life, then he gives up.

So it was with me, though I did not die. The skin came off my body where it had been scorched by the sun, and my wounds from the thorns, the flies and the road would not heal. I had agues like that which I had upon the Guinea coast, and the worst of it was that as soon as I was cured of one fever another would strike me down.

For six months I was in their hospital, together with prisoners taken at San Juan and the other sick of our own party. We were all most kindly treated. Gentlemen and gentlewomen would visit us, bringing us sweets and marmalades and giving to us generously whatever we needed. I wish that a Spaniard in England could be sure of such friends in his distress. But we are a middling people. As Christian charity is greater among the Spaniards, so is their cruelty.

When at last I was sound in body, I was ordered out of the hospital with many others and sent to Texcoco prison. Here were no sweets and marmalade. Indeed we should have starved to death if it had not been for one Robert Sweeting, whose father had been an English merchant in Spain. I met many such in my wanderings. They or their fathers had traded in the ports of Spain during the good old days of our alliance, marrying Spanish wives and maintaining the Catholic faith. Being as much of one nation as the other, they were welcome to travel and trade in the Indies.

At Texcoco we were given no work and had no chance of earning money to relieve our wants. This was due to the audacity of some of our comrades who had finished the march in fair health and been sent to Texcoco gaol instead of hospital. They were set to carding wool alongside Indian labourers, which was work for women rather than the seamen and soldiers of John Hawkins. So they rioted in the workshops and chased their Spanish masters through the streets. Job Hartop, who had pleasured us all on the Jesus of Lubeck with his gunpowder fireworks, terrified the poor Indians by his jumping squibs and nearly set the town on fire. So the wool masters sent at once to the Viceroy, begging him to hold his prisoners somewhere else and swearing that they were devils and not men.

Therefore we late-comers were left to rot idly in gaol. After two months of it we could bear the dullness of our lives no longer and broke out, the whole band of us, without thinking where we could go or how we should defend ourselves. Keeping together, we ran off into the night. The rain poured down and it was very dark. When the sun rose, we found that we had not reached the hills which we could see from our prison, and were on the outskirts of the City of Mexico. We were all taken and brought before the Viceroy who threatened to hang us for breaking out of the King’s clink.

I bowed my head like the rest of our ragged band and showed my penitence. But I was not much afraid, remembering that since I came to New Spain there had been few days – except when I was in hospital and not worth a piece of rope – that some angry Spaniard had not threatened to hang me. And yet, thanks to these same Spaniards, there I was more hale and hearty than ever in my life.

The Viceroy did not punish us at all, nor those who had beaten their masters either. I take it that just as Mr Hawkins was ever careful to commit no offence against the Law of Nations which could be censured by Her Majesty, so this false Don Martin Enriquez did not wish to make his treachery worse by some act which might be against the policy of King Philip, and did not know what to do with his plaguey prisoners.

Instead of hanging us he confined us in the courts and garden behind the Viceroy’s Palace. There, to our great joy, we found the hostages who had been given by Mr Hawkins at San Juan de Ulua and Master Robert Barrett with them. There, too, among other prisoners-of-war was Paul Horsewell whom they had treated well after they found he was the nephew of Admiral Haquines as they called him. Since I thought Paul dead and he believed me to have sailed for home in the Minion we two fell upon each other’s necks and spent a week telling our adventures.

For four months we stayed in the closed garden, where I had my fifteenth birthday. I was strong for my years, but slightly built as any Spaniard – which was little wonder since we were given only two sheep a day between a hundred of us and two loaves of bread each, no bigger than a halfpenny loaf in England. We passed our time in singing songs, both those of our own country and many sweet songs of France which Captain Bland’s men taught us. William Lowe could play any tune he heard and our guards would bring him any instrument he asked for. Sometimes they joined us and sang us the songs of Spain, which seemed to me strange and sad.

Then the Viceroy, being weary of our company and our voices, confined the hostages and Master Barrett in his own house and made a proclamation in the city that any gentleman who desired an Englishman to serve him should come to the garden and take his choice. They came in scores, very glad to have us. What the good old man had told us on the march from Tampico was very true. Every Spaniard wished to live at leisure, and well he might in so rich and fertile a land with Indians to do all the work. But there was great need of foremen, stewards and overseers. For such duties we were a godsend, willing to turn our hands to any work and thankful to be fed, paid and rid of our rags.

So there we stood like countrymen at a hiring fair in Devon, except that no farmer would have taken on such villainous, stinking scoundrels, some still clad in the Indian cotton which the friars had given us, some in nothing but half a shirt and a pair of old charity breeches.

A fine little man in black and red taffeta, with a neat beard and a heavy silver chain upon which hung an emerald, smiled on me and enquired what was my trade.

‘I was page to Señor Haquines, sir,’ I answered, which was a lie, but Samuel was not there to deny it.

‘Well, will you be page to me?’ he asked.

‘I would be page to the devil, sir, if I could be a free man with it,’ I said.

My Spanish was not yet good, but I could be witty with what I had. And, like any boy of my age, I was inclined to prefer a jest to good manners.

‘And I see I shall have a devil for my page,’ he laughed, ‘who has, I doubt not, robbed and killed enough of my poor countrymen.’

‘I swear to your worship that I have never robbed a soul,’ I replied. ‘And as for killing, it was you Spaniards who started it.’

‘So I have heard. But enough discussion! Is there anyone else I should take to grace my establishment?’

Now, it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to take one of several boys who would be company for me. But then my eye fell upon William Lowe, who was standing behind the rest with his poor head bowed, sure that no one would choose him. His red beard was nearly down to the ground, and he wore a doublet which came to his ankles. Though a young man, he looked like an old, hairy, freckled monkey.

‘Take him, sir,’ I said, ‘if you love music in your establishment.’

‘But he does not seem human.’

‘Indeed he is unfortunate, sir. But when you have heard him play the viol you will say that he is more than human.’

And so it came about that William Lowe and I entered the service of Don Gil Alvarado, who was a great nephew of that Alvarado who took the city for Cortés the Conqueror, and a very rich man.

Don Gil lived like an earl in England, for he owned a silver mine in Zacatecas, an estancia on the borders of Chiapas, where he bred the finest horses in New Spain, and a town house on the east of the city. His gardens looked on to the lake, and the front of the house upon the market-place and church of San Lazaro where once had been a temple of the Aztecs. Upon all such heathen sites the friars had built churches.

I was washed, clothed and perfumed. When I had learned the manners and service of the house, it became one of my duties to stand outside the door and ring a bell at dinner and supper. Whoever wished might then come in from the street to eat at our table. Such liberality was beyond belief, yet all that Don Gil and Dona Elvira, his wife, expected in return was that those who frequented the house should attend them in public. I have seen Dona Elvira go to church, covered with laces and jewels and attended by a hundred men and twenty gentlewomen, besides her maids. You may be sure that I did all I was told to the best of my ability, for never in my life had I lived in such luxury and never shall again.

As for William Lowe, his red beard was trimmed to a fork and he was dressed in a long robe of embroidered taffeta so that his short legs could not be seen. I used to tell him that he needed but a crown to be King of the Elves. He soon wearied of playing the viol to Dona Elvira’s lute, for she made too many false notes. So he persuaded Don Gil to let him form a band for the house. That was rare in the City of Mexico where musicians only played together at church festivals and in the theatre which was opened while I was there.

So William got together some of the Aztec Indians with their reed flutes and a Tlaxcalan woman who was maid to Dona Elvira and had learned the lute better than her mistress, and one of Don Gil’s Negroes whom they called a slave but was treated as fairly as the rest of the servants. He could play any wind instrument, but first came to our notice by telling us stories without words upon an Indian drum.

William had little trouble in making the Aztec craftsmen refashion their flutes to our scale. They can turn their hands to anything. They are goldsmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors, saddlers and embroiderers, and they will work so cheap, living a whole week with nothing but maize cakes and a groat to buy vegetables, that poor young men who come out from Spain cannot follow their trades. That, Don Gil told me, was the reason why so many Spaniards were idle, and not their vanity at all.

But what most endeared us to our master was the earthquake. We had felt little ones before, for they are common in the City of Mexico, but this swayed the whole house gently and long. Everyone fled into San Lazaro market-place, leaving William and myself behind. We followed them at our leisure, I bearing a flagon in one hand and my lady’s lace mantle in the other. Thereafter was much talk of the cool courage of the English. But in fact we had been ignorant of the danger. We were so used to our duties in the Jesus of Lubeck that we knew no reason why we should cease to serve and to play because of a little swaying under foot.

When I was seventeen, Don Gil made me his chamberlain: a great place indeed. My duties were to see that all was shipshape in the houses and among the servants, which came easily to one trained by Mr Hawkins, who never left anything to chance which could be cured by foresight. I had also to attend my master on his journeys, the pair of us going splendidly dressed, armed and mounted.

It was fortunate for me that the jennets of New Spain are well schooled and of even pace, for the only horses I had ever ridden were Devon cart-horses going to and from the fields. Don Gil saw that some day I should disgrace him by falling off so he sent me down to his estancia with an old soldier, who not only taught me to ride like a Spaniard, but to know a good horse from a bad. And that was of great benefit to me, as you shall see.

In 1572 my master feared that he would have to close his silver mine for lack of Indian labourers. They were not slaves, so they could not be forced to work in the mines if they preferred the fields, as most of them did. Don Gil proposed that we should visit the mine together and that I should stay there to take charge of it.

‘But, Don Gil, I know nothing of mining,’ I said.

‘As to that, nor do I. But the Indians do, and my Negro foreman as well,’ he answered. ‘All I want of you is to make all shipshape as you call it. See that the carts and oxen are there when they are needed. See that the Indians do not lack quicksilver and brine and lead for the fining of the ore. They will stay idle for a week because a horse has lost a shoe. Make sure that they have what they need when they need it, and I’ll warrant you will get more silver with fifty men than they get now with a hundred.’

When he saw that I hesitated, though always wishful to please so gay and kind a master, he told me that I might make myself rich without depriving him of his due. If the Indians and Negroes liked me, he said, and if I treated them as friends and comrades, they would work for me on Saturday after their wages had been paid and their week was over. All the silver they won I could keep for myself. That was the custom, and the mine-owners did not frown upon it, since it was proof that their Indians were content. They would not work on a Saturday for an overseer they disliked.

It was a lonely life I had, for there were not a hundred Spaniards in all Zacatecas and none of them near. There I first began to learn Nahuatl, which is the Indian language of New Spain and understood by most of the tribes even if they do not speak it in the same form as the Aztecs. My Negro overseer, Señor Sambo, so called because he came of the people of the Samboses many of whom we had caught ourselves in Guinea, tried to teach me his language as well, but I could make nothing of it. On my part I taught him to read and write and to ride, and he became so pleasant a companion to me that I wholly forgot he had been a wild man and a cannibal in his youth.

Together we hunted the Beasts of Cibola, which are like our oxen, but have short horns and long hair and a hump on their shoulders which is higher than the rest of their bodies. The Indians told me that they lived in great plains far to the north and seldom wandered so far as Zacatecas.

All this while I had no thought of escape, for if I continued to prosper I could buy a passage to Spain, thereafter making my way to England. If I were refused a licence to embark – which was very likely, since I was still a prisoner, though in name only – I might buy a pinnace and, as I dreamed, secretly collect some seamen from among my old companions.

CHAPTER FOUR

We who remained in the country were all men of humble birth. Of the others, thirty left for Spain in 1569 when the Plate Fleet which had fought us at San Juan sailed with its cargo of treasure. Among them were Anthony Goddard and the ten hostages. The next year more were sent back, including Master Barrett and Job Hartop.

Now, though King Philip scrupled to kill and torture his prisoners, he was ready enough to look the other way while the Holy Office of the Inquisition did it for him. We heard of the evil fate of our countrymen. Being all Protestants, they were handed over to the Inquisitors at Seville. Most of them were condemned to years of rowing in the galleys and Master Barrett was burnt at the stake. He was very strong for the reformed religion; it is said that when he was asked to interpret a sermon to the English, he preached a sermon of his own instead, calling the Pope a rascally knave and his doctrines false.

In New Spain we had no reason to be afraid, so long as we attended Mass and confessed our sins. For my part, though I was never a firm Catholic, I thought it better to serve God in their way than not at all. Nor could I forget what good Christians were the friars, always protecting the helpless whether they were Indians or English prisoners.

So I never suspected what danger I was in when a man wearing dusty black garments and accompanied by two armed attendants rode up to me while I was weighing silver in the yard of the mine. He too was armed with a long sword though he seemed by his dress to be a churchman, having a white cross upon his doublet and another on his cloak.

‘You are the Englishman, Miles Philips?’ he asked.

He had none of the courtesy with which we in New Spain treated one another, but I replied to him that I was indeed Miles Philips and that my house and I were at his service.

‘You are required in the City of Mexico by the Reverend Doctor Moya de Contreras.’

‘And who is he?’ I asked, for by now I knew the names of the chief clergy of Mexico. Many of them had dined at Don Gil’s house, giving me little presents as page, greater ones as chamberlain and their blessings with both.

‘He has been sent to us by the Holy Office for the spiritual health of the inhabitants of New Spain.’

I answered that it was a great honour that so learned and pious a churchman should require me, and that I would despatch a rider to Don Gil Alvarado to ask if I might go.

‘Don Gil has nothing to say to it,’ he replied. ‘You will come now.’

He showed me the written order of the Chief Inquisitor. When I offered him silver, his two attendants looked black and laid their hands upon the hilts of their swords. So I only stopped to give my dear Señor Sambo some orders, and to choose the worst horse we had in case Doctor Moya or his messenger should not see fit to return it to Don Gil.

He spoke little to me on the journey, treating me as if I were already dead and damned, but I learned from his attendants that he was a lay brother of the Order of St Dominic. These villainous fellows, known as the Familiars of the Inquisition, serve as spies and informers upon the innocent, and as armed guards when their holy masters pass through the streets.

I was taken straight to the City of Mexico and shut up in a dark cell. I did not pass before any magistrate or justice, and I was not allowed to stop on the way to see any of my friends nor Don Gil Alvarado. I am sure that all of them asked what had happened to me, but, when told in whose hands I was, they could not help me. Not even the Viceroy himself had power against the Holy Office.

I was all alone in the darkness for more weeks than I could count, with not a soul to speak to except the gaoler who brought my food. He told me that I was not the only heretic to be taken up and that all the English prisoners throughout New Spain were there in prison with me. When I begged that I might share a cell with one of them, he said that the Constable of the Prison would not allow it.

Now, the reason for such cruelty was this: that we should be so overjoyed to talk with others and to see the light of day when we were brought before our judges that we would answer without thinking all the questions they put to us.

So it was with me. I was led into a great room with so many windows that the light hurt my eyes. Before me there were writers at a table, and a little above them four men in black and white robes. Behind them was a tall crucifix, before which I bowed and crossed myself in the manner of the Spaniards. A little to one side was Robert Sweeting, ready to act as interpreter if one were needed. When our eyes met, he made no sign. Though a devout Catholic and married in the country, he may have thought himself in danger also.

These four Inquisitors had nothing cruel in their countenances and at first seemed to me calm and kind. And so they may have been by their own lights, caring only to save our souls even if they had to break our bodies. That they did with a right good will, for they bore a hellish hatred towards Protestants and especially the English.

First they asked me if I knew my prayers, so I said over to them in Latin the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria and the Creed.

‘And how were you instructed in England?’ Doctor Moya de Contreras asked me.

I answered that I had been taught with other boys by a good old chantry priest in Plymouth.

‘Was he a Catholic or a heretic?’

‘He was a Lutheran under King Henry, a Catholic under Queen Mary and a Lutheran again under Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.’

‘Did you not feel that he was unworthy to be a priest?’ asked another, who was Juan de Bonilla.

‘Why, no, most reverend doctor,’ I answered, ‘for who was he that he should disobey the government and the bishops?’

I could see from their faces that they were much shocked by this, and the secretaries at the table were scratching away with their turkey quill pens as if their lives depended on it.

‘So you do not believe that His Holiness the Pope is above them all?’

To this I could only reply that I was very willing it should be so in New Spain, but that in England it was a matter for Her Majesty and not for me.

Then a third Inquisitor, who was Juan Sanchez, leaned over to his fellows and I heard him say that I was more a pagan than a Catholic or Protestant, and that if Montezuma had ordered me to worship in the great temple of Tlatelolco I would have done so because he was the king.

They went on to ask me many questions about the doctrines of the Church, which I could have answered very well. But I pretended I knew nothing of them, having now my wits about me, and swore that if I had offended I was penitent. So I was taken back to my cell and left in the darkness again.

I could bear it no more. I had endured my solitary suffering with manliness because I was sure that I would be set free by the Inquisitors as soon as I could speak with them, thinking them like other Spaniards who are so stern one day and so merciful the next. But now that I was thrown back into my silent cell again, I could see no end. I beat my fists against the stone until they were all bloodied and shouted to the gaoler to let me out or I would kill myself.

He came to my call, knocked me down and threw my pan of drinking water in my face, swearing that he would put me in chains if I did not cease my bawling.

Crouching at his feet, I begged him that for God’s sake he would give me a word of comfort.

‘With much pleasure,’ said he, ‘and it is this: do not cry before you are hurt!’

‘They cannot hurt me worse,’ I muttered.

‘You think so, young fellow? Wait until their reverences have done with you!’

I did not understand what he meant, thinking only that he threatened me with some vile dungeon beneath the level of the lake. But I was soon to learn.

A week later two gaolers carried a man into my cell and dropped him on the stone floor, where he lay groaning. We could only see each other as shadows. I spoke to him first in Spanish and then, when he made no answer, in English. He was Morgan Tillert, a seaman of the Judith who had been taken prisoner on the harbour island.

‘They have stretched me on the rack, Miles,’ he said, ‘and there is not a whole bone in my body.’

I could do nothing for him but hold his great hand and bathe his forehead, for a man who has been racked suffers afterwards as much pain as he did during the torture, and only time will cure it.

Next day he spoke to me between his groans and told me that the Inquisitors were laying traps for us which we, being simple, honest men, never perceived. Morgan had sworn his oath before them that he was and had always been a good Catholic, and expected to be believed. So he might have been, if he had not been too ready to chatter with Doctors of the Church as though they shared a tavern bench.

Morgan was taken back to another cell and put together with George Rively, the carpenter with whom I had gone to find the leak which let the fishes into the Jesus of Lubeck. This Rively was an ardent Protestant, who had refused to answer questions or to say that he was penitent. Perhaps he had too slow a mind. Perhaps he wished to be a martyr. He was a strange fellow, tall and fat with a face as large as if he had an egg in each cheek and without hair on head or chin.

A fine time Tillert and Rively had of it together in the cell, abusing the Pope and Purgatory and I know not what, while all the while Don Pedro de los Rios, the fourth Inquisitor and their secretary, was listening at the door! So Morgan Tillert was taken to the torture chamber and racked till he confessed that he had been a Catholic and was now a heretic. They asked him when he had been converted and by whom, stretching him until he screamed and answered that it was on the voyage and by Francis Drake himself.

Now that they had put the rack into my mind they left me so long alone with my fears that I began to think I was forgotten. Whenever I heard the gaoler’s key in the door, I dreaded that my time for torture had come. Yet I would say to myself that pain was no great price to pay if only I could see the light and hear human voices.

But I was never racked, for it pleased these fiendish Inquisitors to torture my soul instead of my body. When my spirits were so low that I refused my food, they would give me a companion; as soon as I gave way to my joy, they would take him away again.

Once they put me together with Paul Horsewell, and you may be sure that we never mentioned religion, having so many memories of Devon which we doubted if we should ever see again. He had grown somewhat fat with sitting still in gaol and had shifted himself too little while he was at liberty, being employed upon writing and accounts. He desired me to speak loudly that he was indeed the nephew of Haquines, for the Inquisitors doubted it because his name was not the same. So we pretended to be practising our Spanish and spoke of his uncles, William and John.

Afterwards one William Collins was brought to me: a hard seaman from Gravesend, forty years old, who had shared a cell with little Richard Williams. He was no longer little, but he still called upon his mother. And when William Collins would rage around the cell, swearing and cursing as was his custom, Richard would weep and tell him they would both be burned at the stake for his blasphemies. Then Collins refused to share the bed with him, saying that he had lice on him. No doubt they both had, for I never knew Collins not to be lousy unless his clothes were stiff with sea salt.

But for me he was very serviceable. He would have it that if a man knew how to go about the business he might learn as much news of his fellows in prison as if he were in irons on shipboard. He taught me how to win the favour of the gaolers, saying that they were all the same rogues and bullies, whether in London or Mexico. Also he showed me how to listen at the walls, and my ears became so sharp that I could hear what was said on the other side, although when I was first confined I should have thought the murmurs were but the rustling of a rat. I found little pleasure in his talk, but when he was taken away I no longer felt so alone, for I knew who were in the neighbouring cells, how they fared and whether they had been tortured.

Meanwhile the four Inquisitors busied themselves in taking our confessions, denying that we had told the truth and questioning us all over again until no man remembered what he had said or what his companions had said and was ready to give any answer they put in his mouth, especially when stretched upon the rack.

They neither tried us nor made clear accusations, so that we could not stick stoutly to the truth as even a poor, ignorant man may do in a court of law. Most of us swore that we were no heretics and stood by it. But then Doctor Moya de Contreras would read aloud the confession of some bewildered seaman and ask the miserable wretch before him whether he was of the same opinion. Whatever he answered, it was sure to be heresy.

I remember him reasoning with me as gently as any father.

‘Now, young man, you had a shipmate little older than yourself, one Thomas Hull, who tells us that he confesses to God without the intervention of the saints. What have you to say to that?’

It was plain enough to me that Thomas had meant to testify that he had not been taught to confess to a priest; but what with saints, sacraments and confessions, he was all at sea. If I replied that I agreed, I should prove myself an obstinate heretic; if I said I did not, I should show too much knowledge. So I pretended to be childish as an Indian and answered that, as there were no more images in the English churches, I supposed the saints had left us.

Then, hoping to get from me some accusation against my comrades, Doctor Moya asked me what prayers we had on shipboard. I told him that when night fell and the new watch came on deck and the hourglass was turned, we would all gather round the mainmast bare-headed and recite a psalm, the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.

‘And you all willingly attended this service?’ he asked.

‘If we did not, the bosun with his rope’s end would soon make sure of it.’

‘And the Admiral Haquines himself, was he a Catholic or a Protestant?’

I answered that he had great faith in God and Our Saviour and that he would always pray with the dying, writing down their will, setting their hearts at rest and taking such care of their souls as he could; but whether he was a Protestant or not neither I nor any man could tell. He forced nothing upon us but vigilance for our persons and the ship.

I was a year and a half in the darkness of the prison, never knowing what the end would be. I had not committed any offence against man, but only, they said, against God. And to that I had no answer. I could not call angels to give witness for me nor put the devil on his oath to swear that I was not his servant. So there was no law, as it seemed to me, to hinder them from keeping me in gaol without any sentence till all the pleasures of youth were finished and done.

I was now nineteen years old, and grown in my cell from a youth to a man. I no longer wept and beat upon the walls, but for many hours together lay on my straw in misery, at last comforting myself with dreams of what I would do if God were to move these ruthless men to have mercy on me.

Sometimes I would linger upon the splendours of Don Gil’s house and the thousands of silver pesos which I could gain at the mines, telling myself that the Indies offered a finer life to a man of courage and good will than any I could make for myself at home. But what mostly I saw among the shadows of my cell were the brown tide coming up under the oaks, the red cattle knee-deep in buttercups and the pale blue mist of summer evenings when men and women, singing together, rowed up the rivers of Plymouth after the day’s work was done; and I never doubted that I would rather be fisherman or farmer in Gloriana’s England than a gentleman in New Spain.

At last there came a day when I heard the gaolers clanking down the passages, the creak of doors being opened and the steps of my comrades as they shuffled and limped over the stones. When the door of my own cell was opened and the gaoler pushed me out into the light, I was in great fear for I believed the hangman had made ready.

We were summoned to the inner courtyard of the prison. There we were told that the very next morning an Auto da Fe, as they call it, would be held in the great square of Mexico, at which we were to declare our penitence and receive our sentences. We were sixty-eight English prisoners and nearly as many Spaniards, whose offence was to leave a wife in Spain and marry another in the Indies. They were sure that mercy would be shown to them, as indeed it was – although it seems to me that to leave a poor woman in Spain, neither married nor unmarried, is a worse crime than to obey Her Majesty in matters of church worship.

Then into the courtyard came the Familiars of the Holy Office with grave faces and dressed all in black. They set down a pile of pieces of yellow cloth, and made every man take one and put it on. They call these San Benitos. The cloth has a hole in the middle for the head, and the two flaps hang down over the breast and back, each having a St Andrew’s Cross of red cloth sewed on to it. In spite of our troubles we could not help grinning at each other, for we looked like the fools in a company of village players.

When we were dressed in our fool’s coats, a secretary read our confessions over to us and warned us that we must not deny them. We were taught how to answer the Inquisitors, in what order we should walk to the place of judgment, when to stand and when to kneel. And they were so busy with all this playacting that none of us got any sleep. I could not but remember Mr Hawkins, and how, when he wished to receive or say farewell to some Spanish governor, he would marshal his gentlemen and soldiers the day before the ceremony so that they should be perfect in their salutes and the handling of their weapons.

In the morning, which was February the Twenty-eighth of 1574, each of us was given for breakfast a cup of wine and a slice of bread fried in honey. Then we slowly marched in procession to the great square outside the cathedral with a rolling of drums and a solemn blowing of trumpets and flutes, all so out of tune with each other that I thought it pity they should burn poor William Lowe instead of making him their bandmaster.

Each man, holding a long, green candle in his hand and wearing his San Benito, was accompanied by two pious Spaniards. This they performed as a religious duty and also out of friendship. The two who walked on either side of me were the old soldier who had taught me to ride and the husband of Doña Elvira’s maid.

Don Gil himself was too great a man to appear by my side, but had sent me a message which the old soldier whispered with his eyes on the ground and his lips moving as if in prayer: that he was powerless to interfere with the sentence pronounced on myself and William Lowe, whatever it might be, but that when the Church had absolved us of our sins and handed us over to the justices for punishment, he would bribe the officers to make it easy for us.

There was such a mass of people in the streets that the servants of the Holy Office had to ride their horses into the crowd to make way for us. This was the first Auto da Fe which had ever been held in New Spain, and so grand a festival that two weeks before they had sent drummers round the city to declare it a public holiday. The Indians had never been so contented, I think, since their priests used to drag prisoners to that same square and up the steps of the temple to have their hearts cut out.

We, too, went up steps, and were placed on benches on a big wooden stage. Doctor Moya de Contreras and the other Inquisitors mounted their own stairway and sat down opposite to us, dressed in their black and white robes like four proud magpies. After them came the Viceroy and his Officers of State, and took their places under a rich canopy to shade them from the sun.

A train of priests and friars flowed up as well, so many that I feared the stage would break under their weight. Then sheriffs of the Holy Office commanded silence.

First the Inquisitors called upon Roger, Chief Armourer of the Jesus of Lubeck. He was by birth a Dutchman, with a surname so hard that I have forgotten it. He lived and slept in his forge and seldom mixed with the ship’s company.

His confession was read out, by which he freely admitted that he had been a Protestant. Doctor Moya de Contreras asked him, ‘Do you repent or will you continue in heresy and lose both body and soul?’

To which Roger replied that he repented and begged to be forgiven.

It seemed as if that were all, for the Chief Inquisitor smiled on him, gave him absolution and promised mercy. But what he thought merciful was a sentence of two hundred lashes and six years of rowing in King Philip’s galleys.

So it went on. William Collins got ten years in the galleys; Morgan Tillert two hundred lashes and eight years; and the rest two or three hundred lashes and from five to ten years. George Rively was sentenced to be burnt at the stake, and I choked with sorrow – for they should not see a tear on me – when I remembered how he held me above his head, saying that he would rather be drowned than burned.

Then Doctor Bonilla called out in the silence:

‘Stand up, Miles Philips!’

I stood up, holding myself decently though I was trembling all over, and was asked if I repented of my heresies; to which I replied, as who would not, that I repented very heartily.

When I had been absolved and received into the Catholic Church, I waited to hear how many strokes I should receive, telling myself that now I was a grown man I must endure pain as bravely as my comrades. But my sentence was only to serve five years in a monastery and to wear my fool’s coat all that time.

That was the judgment on all who had been so young when our fleet left Plymouth that they could never have learned the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Therefore they treated us as they would Indians or pagans, and not as men who had once been Catholics and now were Protestants, which the Inquisitors considered the worst crime imaginable.

Indeed Doctor Bonilla gave it as his opinion that we lads had not the intelligence to understand the meaning of a trial by the Holy Office. In that he was right, for to this day I see little purpose in trying a man for what he thinks rather than what he does. But I had enough intelligence to know what my questioners were at, and to put the blame on Her Majesty who was safely out of their reach in London, and please God may ever be so!

To my great joy they gave the same sentence to William Lowe who was not so young as the rest of us. He had pleaded that he had never had any Christian instruction, whether Catholic, Protestant or what you will. It may be that he belonged to the Older Religion and had learned his music from the devil. In the eyes of the Holy Office that was not such a sin as to be a heretic.

When the Inquisitors had sentenced us, we were taken back to our prison. On the way we saw the Familiars of the Holy Office piling up stakes and faggots to burn the body of poor George Rively. I say his body, because they had enough human kindness left in them to strangle him first.

After we were all back in the courtyard, the seamen who had been condemned to the galleys shed tears and cried out against their fate, for they feared they would never see England again nor their wives and children. As for the lashes, they comforted each other, swearing that it was nothing for men such as they who had learned to bear pain and hardship. Those who had received lashes on shipboard – which was common under Master Hampton of the Minion, but seldom inflicted by Master Barrett – bared their backs to show their weals and scars, and said that they had forgotten the punishment a week after it had been suffered. That was not true, but men in great terror will maintain such things.

In the morning a troop of horses was led into the courtyard. My comrades, naked to the waist, were mounted on them with their legs tied underneath. The Inquisitors had sentenced them to be beaten on horseback so that the whole city should see their punishment, which could only be by raising their poor backs above the heads of the crowd. So they rode out of the prison, one after another in a line, each man followed by his executioner with a long whip. In front rode two criers calling out to the people to come and see how the enemies of God, the English dogs, were beaten.

As soon as they were outside the gaol, we could hear the roar of the crowd shouting to the executioners to lay on hard and draw blood, which I thought very strange in so kindly a people as those of New Spain. In England when man or woman is beaten through the streets or hanged and quartered the spectators do not yell for blood but laugh and crack jests. Choose which you will. All I know is that a crowd is a cruel thing, without pity.

They were carried back to the prison in the afternoon, where surgeons attended to their wounds. Since they had been condemned to serve in the galleys, they could not be allowed to die and cheat King Philip. We did for them what we could, sitting by our friends and begging wine and fruit for them from our former gaolers, which they readily gave. Their backs were so raw that one could see the bone. Yet Morgan Tillert told me, when he could speak, that it was no worse than being lashed at the cart’s tail in London, and that his executioner soon wearied of swinging a whip in noonday heat.

The next day those of us who had been condemned to serve in monasteries were taken away by the friars, and we never saw our comrades again. When the yearly fleet sailed from San Juan de Ulua, they were shipped to Spain to serve in the galleys. And there they must have died on the rowers’ benches, for only one was ever heard of again.

CHAPTER FIVE

William Lowe and I were sent to the monastery of the Jesuits, where we had to work without pay and wear our San Benitos continually. But since we were no longer enemies and heretics they treated us very kindly. I was well fed and had a neat, whitewashed room of my own and clean bedding, both of which were luxury to me after the filth and darkness of the prison.

These Jesuits, like all the friars I met in New Spain, were brave, Christian men. Their first duty was to care for and protect the Indians, bringing them gradually to the love of Our Saviour and desiring that religion should not be dismal for them but gay with dances and processions. Some of the friars were mestizos, sons of Spanish fathers and Indian mothers, and not only preached in Nahuatl but wrote books and plays. They also preserved what they could of the strange writing of the Indians and of their pictures and records.

At first both William Lowe and I were set to work in the kitchen, and no place could have been more welcome to us, as the good friars knew. When I had been there some months and recovered my strength, the Prior, Don Cayetano, sent for me to his room.

‘What would you like to do, Miguel?’ he asked.

They all called me Miguel – which is Michael in Spanish – since Miles was too hard for them.

‘Anything which pleases you, father,’ I answered, ‘for I am glad to serve you and only wish to show my gratitude.’

‘You are a strange lad,’ he said, smiling. ‘I think we shall make a good Catholic of you yet, for there is no hatred in you.’

To that I made no reply, for my heart was burning with hatred of the Holy Office and all its works.

‘What is done, is done,’ he said, knowing well why I was silent. ‘It is the future we must think of, Miguel. Now, I have heard you try to speak to the gardener in Nahuatl.’

I answered, kneeling before him, that I hoped it was no sin and that I still remembered the little I had learned before I was arrested.

‘No sin at all,’ he said, raising me up gently and blessing me. ‘The more languages a man can speak, the more he may do the will of God. Would you work for us with the Indians? I hear that in former days they liked you.’

I said that I doubted if I was proficient enough in the faith to be a missionary.

‘A fine missionary you would make!’ he laughed. ‘No, what I have in mind for you is to take charge of the workmen who are building our new church.’

Now, it may seem absurd that I who had no knowledge of masonry and could not even mix mortar should be put in charge of Indian builders, but Father Cayetano explained to me, just as Don Gil had, that they knew what was wanted and could work from a plan with very little help.

Then he led me to the window of his room, from which could be seen a part of the great square of Mexico.

‘There stood a high hill of stone,’ he said, ‘and on top of it the temple of the War God and all round it courtyards and palaces. Four years after Cortés took the city, all was level with the ground, and the Cathedral and the Viceroy’s Palace were nearly finished. This whole vast work was done willingly by the Indians, thousands upon thousands of them, building for us Spaniards as they were accustomed to build for their kings.’

‘So all I have to do is to see that wood and lime and stone are there when needed?’ I asked.

‘More than that, Miguel. I should prefer that the overseer be one of us, but as soon as a brother can speak Nahuatl he is sent out alone to preach the gospel. So I choose you. And if you wish to please me, be as gentle with your men as one of us would be.’

He reminded me of the laws. The Indians are not allowed to drink wine or pulque, for they are very fond of it and much given to beastliness when they have too much; it is a strong beer made from the juice of the maguey plant. They may not ride horses or mules, nor have arms on their persons or in their houses, not even a knife with a point. All these laws and many others I was to see that they obeyed, he said, not as a spy upon them but as a father takes care that his children do not run into trouble.

‘May I have William Lowe with me?’ I asked.

‘No, Miguel. You can make your way in life. He, being afflicted, cannot. So we shall keep him in the kitchen and train him in the fine art of cooking. Then he will have an honest craft and be sure of a living, for though we greatly honour musicians in New Spain, we do not much care if they starve.’

He took me down to a little square alongside the great canal, where the Jesuits were building their new church. It had been the site of a temple of the Fire God, Huehueteotl, where the Indians used to burn their captives alive after throwing a powder in their faces to dull the pain. The Holy Office was somewhat more merciful in first strangling them.

When we arrived, the workmen all knelt before Don Cayetano, who made a gesture with his hands that they were to rise at once. The Indians do not make proper distinction between saints and priests, like Thomas Hull. They were dressed in their graceful mantles, some of which are handsomely dyed or embroidered along the edges, and in cotton trousers, for the friars will not permit them to wear the maxtli or loin-cloth. They came from Tlatelolco in the north of the city, where their grandfathers had fought to the last against the Conquerors.

The Prior told them that I was to be their overseer and that they should come to me with their needs and troubles. I could read nothing in their faces and I thought at first that they much disliked to be commanded by a man in a fool’s coat.

The foundations of the church were laid out straight and true. The Indians were starting to raise the walls with fine blocks of stone. When the Prior had left us, I walked round the work, talking to the masons and the stone carvers, and found that all obeyed a chief named Jose. His mantle was caught up over the left shoulder, and the band of figures in blue and red was broader than that of the rest.

One of the men, who had recently come from Texcoco on the other side of the lake, asked Jose in Nahuatl why I wore a yellow cape.

‘So that they may see him from far off,’ Jose answered. ‘He is an enemy of the Spaniards as we are.’

I had no wish to be known as an enemy of Spaniards and ordered back to prison by the Holy Office. The only chance I had of ever returning home was to wait until common folk ceased to remember that I was an Englishman. So I said to the chief in my stuttering Nahuatl, ‘I am the friend of all who are friends with me. Let neither of us ever say that the other is an enemy of the Spaniards.’

He understood me, but only answered that if I wished to learn his language he would teach me himself and soon have me speaking it as well as I did Spanish. And as he promised, so he performed.

My first and second years passed as pleasantly as could be, considering that I was not a free man. I was permitted to go out of the monastery at certain hours, and Don Cayetano sometimes gave me leave to see my comrades. Richard Williams was serving his sentence with the Grey Friars, and Thomas Hull with a College of Priests, where he died of his former hardships. As for poor Paul Horsewell, his spirit was broken. There had been some argument amongst the lawyers over his sentence so he had not been released from prison with the rest of us. When some Spanish criminals dug their way through the wall with nothing but an old horseshoe, he escaped with them. For that he was punished with a hundred lashes, the Holy Office not caring whether he was the nephew of Haquines or the devil. Another of us, John Perrin, was as rude and ungovernable in his monastery as if he had been in a den of Gravesend thieves. The Inquisitors tried him all over again and sentenced him to four years in the galleys.

Besides these, whom I saw seldom, I had good friends among the Spaniards and mestizos of the city. They laughed at my fool’s coat (when there were no spies or Familiars near) and would say most courteously that it became me. To make jest of my disgrace, they once put a spear in my hand and a helmet on my head, and swore that I looked like a knight errant from the story books with my device of St Andrew’s Cross fore and aft.

The friars, too, had some liking for me, and I for them. They did not hide from me what they thought of the coming of the Holy Office into New Spain and of their needless cruelty, though piously swearing their obedience to the Pope who must know best. They would have me always remember that the Inquisitors were merciful to Spaniards who were suspected of being Jews or heretics, and with the Indians most patient, considering them children who should be brought to the knowledge of God by kindness.

When they saw that I could both speak and write Nahuatl, they encouraged me to try my hand at translating from Latin and Spanish. This I could do but poorly, being by nature a man of the sword rather than of the pen. Yet I was not displeased with my rendering of some of the Psalms of David, although Don Cayetano smiled at them and said he feared I was still more a heathen than a heretic.

Among all my friends I loved the Indians best, and it seemed to me great pity that I might not go outside the city to visit them in their quarters. They are a most loving people, quick in understanding and ingenious with their hands. But all of them hate the Spaniards, except the friars, never forgiving them for the bloody conquest. Yet they obey because their kings had long accustomed them to obedience.

They taught me to play a game which they called Tlachtli. Each side defends a hole in a standing stone, through which the other side tries to throw a ball, only touching it with elbows hips or knees. Very seldom does it pass the hole. When it does, the winners take all the clothes of the losers. This made it a hazardous game for me, who could be sent to the galleys if stripped of my fool’s coat. In the days when the Aztecs ruled in Mexico, the game was played in courts like our tennis courts. My workmen and I were content enough with two ruined walls.

The ball was made of the hardened juice of a tree: a most curious substance durable as wood itself, yet bouncing higher and more freely than our balls of leather stuffed with feathers and hair. If the Indian craftsmen could mould the juice into strips as well as balls, wheels might be shod with them and carts and coaches move more silently through our city streets.

The Chief was my closest companion. When we were alone, I called him Xolotl, not Jose. Many of the simple Indians were proud of the names in which they had been baptised; but Jose, being a descendant of the royal house of Texcoco, set great store by his native name which was that of a god and an emperor. So he used one for the street and another for the house, as they say.

He would often come to the monastery on a Saturday to talk Nahuatl with me and to teach me to read the Aztec picture writing. It was so outlandish that I could never do more than read a date, but I learned much of their history and their gods.

One day I asked him if many of his people were still heathen.

‘Not here in the City of Mexico,’ he answered, ‘for we all see that your religion is better than ours was. We were so eager to please the gods, Miguel, that we thought nothing too good for them. That is why we offered them the hearts of human beings, for what greater gift could we bring? We know now that what should be offered to God are the thoughts of the heart, not the heart itself. But just because we are good Christians, we need not forget the splendour of our ancestors.’

I said that I wished I could have seen them as they were, that paintings and drawings were not enough and hard to understand.

‘You shall see them, Miguel,’ he answered.

I thanked him but thought little of it. The Indians often speak in parables, and what they say must not be taken as a plain word.

Some days before the date of the Aztec New Year, Xolotl told me that they still celebrated some part of the ceremony in secret and that they trusted me enough to allow me to watch. Much as I longed to go, it was to gamble with my life. If I were to be seen in my fool’s coat in the Indian quarter of Tlatelolco, I might be accused of encouraging the Indians to heresy or disobedience; if I took it off and were recognised, I should be tried and sentenced again. Either way, nothing that the friars could do would save me from a far worse fate than those suffered by Paul Horsewell and John Perrin.

I reminded Xolotl that there were many spies among the three hundred thousand inhabitants of Tlatelolco, eager to gain favour with the Spaniards by reporting offences against the law, but he smiled at my distrust, assuring me that they would say nothing of the ceremony for fear of having their throats cut. As for my San Benito, he would hide me in a canoe where I could change into Indian dress.

The Prior willingly gave me leave to spend the early part of the night at the house of Don Gil Alvarado, where I was ever welcome. Don Gil himself was compelled to be very distant with me, since the Holy Office was displeased with him and the other gentlemen who had employed prisoners without caring whether they were heretics or not. But the mestizo servants were fond of me, and I could trust them.

So there I went in my fool’s coat and drank with my friends in the kitchen, telling them when I left that I had a message from our gardener to theirs and that he would let me out by the side door. The gardener, who had been warned by Xolotl, kept watch for me while I took off the San Benito by the water steps as if I were about to swim in the lake. When the canoe came past, loaded with vegetables, red, green and white, just as they come from the floating gardens of Xochimilco, I jumped in with my gown and the yellow cloth rolled under my arm and was instantly hidden between baskets.

It was dusk when the canoe turned into a narrow, dark channel. There the two Indian paddlers dressed me in a maxtli and a cloak which was so rich with embroidery that I was clearly to be a noble of high rank. Then we landed by secret steps at the foot of a courtyard. It was surrounded by tall Indian houses, which are beautiful from the outside with many little windows, but the rooms within are too many and too small.

I did not recognise Xolotl when he greeted me, for I could hardly see his face between the gold ornaments which hung from his head ring and the war standards which were attached to his arms, waist and shoulders instead of being carried in the hand like ours. He told me that in the shadows it could never be known that I was not an Aztec. Indeed the sun of New Spain had burned me nearly as brown as they, and my hair was near as dark. But in full daylight I could not pass as an Indian, since my eyes were blue and my hair wavy rather than straight.

Around this closed courtyard were sitting hundreds of Indians; those of high birth on chairs, the others on the ground. In order that I should not have to pass through the crowd and arouse too much curiosity, I was led through the house to a chair among some old men who were chiefs of their clans and held in special honour.

They knew who I was, receiving me with great courtesy into their company. They explained to me that the dance which I should see was of a war in which the sun was slain, and that the Knights of the Jaguar would fight the Knights of the Eagle.

As we spoke, the two bands entered the courtyard. They wore armour of quilted cotton hardened with brine, which gives such good protection against swords and arrows that the Spaniards, when they first came to New Spain, preferred it to their own steel which was too heavy in the heat.

The cotton armour of an Eagle Knight was painted like the plumage of a bird. His helmet was of the shape of an eagle’s head with the face of the warrior looking out between the upper and the lower beak. He had a tail made from the tail feathers of an eagle, and more eagle feathers beneath his shield. Behind his back and over his head was a great crest made of the feathers of all the birds of the air set in basketwork like flowers in a narrow flowerbed.

The Knights of the Jaguar were less fantastic and more terrible. The faces looked out between the jaws of great cats. Their shields and armour were spotted. They carried their standards supported on their shoulders like Xolotl. These were strange devices of wood, very light but as large as the whole body of the man, decked with streaming feathers and stars and fountains of feathers.

The swords of both sides were of wood, in which were closely set fragments of a glass which they collect from the slopes of the volcanoes around the lake. Before the Spaniards came they had no knowledge of iron. But with these glass-toothed swords of theirs they could hack their way to the flesh through the weak points of any armour, as Cortés and his band of heroes found to their cost.

The two arrays danced and cut at each other, taking the blows on their shields; and never did I see so mad a whirling of feathers. When the Aztecs fought against the Indian allies of the Spaniards, it must have been as if angels from the coloured windows of churches were in battle. But wicked angels they were, thinking only to drag out prisoners, burn their hearts and hang up their skulls in the temples.

When the dance was over, they all took to drinking pulque. Xolotl, having removed his great golden head-dress, then took me on one side and asked me if the English would help them to drive out the Spaniards. I could see now, he said, how his people would fight if they had steel swords and horses. I answered him that indeed we would be willing and that I myself would act as interpreter for our general, but that it was a matter for Her Majesty and her Council, which he very well understood.

This much is certain; that if we could set an army on shore, the Indians and the Negroes would join us. But it would not be so profitable a task as to hold for ransom some harbour on the Main or in the islands. The City of Mexico is so far from the sea that we could no more maintain an army than in the heart of Spain itself.

I warned Xolotl to lower his voice, for we were among the old men who were chattering wildly and careless of what they said. The Indians think it a disgrace for a young man to be drunk, but the old are allowed to drink as much as they please since they have so few other pleasures.

‘Oh, they are already at three hundred rabbits,’ said he, ‘and can hear nothing but themselves.’

I asked him what he meant by his rabbits, and he told me that was the way they measured the effect of pulque. At twenty rabbits a man was cheerful and at four hundred he was unconscious. Between those two extreme limits they distinguished many steps. I would reckon by their measurements that when Mr Hawkins, Master Barrett and the officers dined in the great cabin they would seldom exceed one hundred rabbits, but might reach two hundred when there were Spanish dignitaries to be entertained.

The hour was now late, and I was in a great taking lest I should not be safely back in my monastery before the gates were shut. The knights, the paddlers who had brought me and even Xolotl himself were well rabbited, and had determined among themselves to conceal me in the hills. But I had no wish to live as a fugitive with little chance of ever returning home.

So I was obstinate with them. At last Xolotl called to two of the women and ordered them to paddle me back, fruit, vegetables and all, to Don Gil’s water steps. During the dance the lower windows and galleries had been full of women, dressed in their embroidered smocks and skirts with their hair loose on their shoulders. They are gentle and devoted creatures, but not to be compared with Spanish women. Loveliest of all is the mestiza, having the good qualities of both races and the bad of neither and a skin so golden that never such treasure came out of the mines.

My two paddlers would not go as they were, but must needs change into their market clothes. And they dilly-dallied, as is the way of women, plaiting their hair and I know not what. But once they were in the canoe they paddled as fast as any man.

When we came to the Alvarado gardens, the blackness of night had gone and the waters of the lake were grey. With dawn so close upon me I dared not walk through the streets; so I asked my fair paddlers to turn into a canal which ran close to one side of the monastery and to make their escape as soon as I had landed.

I hid my gown and fool’s coat under red peppers in a little basket and began to steal along the walls of the monastery looking for a way in, though I knew well it would be hard to find. The stones were sheer and smooth, and all the windows which opened on the street were barred with iron. While I skulked from shadow to shadow, a night watchman saw me and came running up, shouting that I was an Indian thief and that he would have me beaten to death. I fell on my knees and begged for mercy, since in such a plight the Indians never resist. God preserved him from looking in my basket, for if he had seen my San Benito I should have been forced to kill him or to be lit like a candle in the great square.

Having no fear of so tame an Indian, he presented his pike at my breast and carelessly ordered me to get up. Then I, seizing his spear above the point, gave him such a push with the butt that he fell into the canal. While he splashed and spluttered, shouting for the watch, I ran round the corner into a lane at the back of the monastery which by good fortune was empty. Here was our stable door, with a stone arch above it, high enough for a coach to drive through. I could not climb the door, but at least I could get rid of my basket. So I threw it over the gate, praying that it would be picked up by some friendly friar who would think twice before denouncing me.

Meanwhile the watchman had pulled himself out of the water on to the street, still bellowing for his comrades. He ran the wrong way, but it could not be long before they all caught up with me; nor could they mistake me in my noble cloak with broad bands of colour.

I stood there wondering what I should do and looking at the great Indian aqueduct bringing fresh water into the city, the arches of which stood out against the dawn. Thus it came to my mind what quantity of water we used in our kitchens, bath and wash-house, and how the waste left the monastery. The channel at our end was roofed with paving stones, and high enough for a man to crawl on hands and knees.

I knew that its course was straight and that it must enter the canal not far from the point where I had pushed in the watchman. Whether it was closed by a grating and how long I must hold my breath once I was inside it I could not tell; but anything was better than to be dragged to prison by the watch and recognised as Miles Philips.

I ran back to the edge of the canal and let myself down into the water. I found the mouth of the conduit easily enough, for at that season the level of the lake was low, but the top was only a hand’s breadth above the water. While I hesitated, sure that if I ventured in I should be stuck or drowned, I heard the horses of the watch trotting along the street which bordered the canal. Seeing that I must be discovered if I remained in my white clothes on the surface of the water, I drew a deep breath and entered the pipe.

It was more a passage for an eel than a man, but if I lay on my back I could catch a little air between my mouth and the slime of the roofing. It was now easier to go forwards than back, so on I went, thrusting with knees and elbows, until the channel had risen enough to allow me to turn over and crawl. At last I saw an iron grating above me. Lifting it with my shoulders, I found myself in the kitchen courtyard.

Here I had some hope of safety, knowing that William Lowe would help me, though he had now become as devout a Catholic as any friar. I crept through the kitchens and into his room, where he lay snoring, with his red beard spread over the coverlet. I wakened him softly, but at the sight of a wet and stinking Indian over him he fell to praying that he might be delivered from so horrid a nightmare. When he found that it was his old companion of the Jesus of Lubeck, he saved my life a second time, hastening to the stable gate and picking up my gown and fool’s coat, the basket and the red peppers which lay on the paving. On the way back he passed several brothers who had just risen to go to matins, but they thought nothing of seeing the cook with his vegetables.

As soon as he returned to his room I dropped my wet mantle and maxtli on the floor and dressed myself. The bell was ringing, and I had just time to slip into chapel before the service. Since I was under no obligation to attend it, Don Cayetano greatly approved me, saying that I showed a commendable spirit after enjoying the vanities of the world. As for my Indian clothes, William Lowe used them to mop his room and after that to scrub his stove, so that they became rags only fit to throw away.

The fright I had been in and the thought of God’s mercy which had preserved me caused me to go cautiously and decently about my business for the rest of my time. The Prior reported well of me to the Holy Office, and I was set free at the end of three years instead of serving the full five.

Then there was a great to-do, such as Spaniards love, over taking off my San Benito. All of us youths who had been condemned were led to the cathedral in procession with music and images and enough friars to fill the city of Plymouth. In the sight of the congregation our fool’s coats were pulled over our heads with the choir singing fit to burst their throats and the priests walking and kneeling and turning about as if they had been so many soldiers.

Indeed I remember once confessing my sins to Don Cayetano and saying that all this moving around and changing of garments distracted my soul and that I much wondered why the service should be exact and precise as that of a palace guard.

To that he answered: ‘My son, it is because we ourselves are the soldiers of God. And this day, while you watch your Indians building, I lay it upon you to consider this thought in silence instead of talking follies with Xolotl.’

It surprised me that he should say Xolotl and not Jose. I could never tell how much he knew. Of this I am sure: that when the porter informed him, on the night of my adventure, that he had not seen me pass in through the gate, the good Prior replied that I might have come in when he was not looking, and refused to search for me.

I would willingly have remained a Catholic if all were as wise as my dear friars. But it was too hard for me to be patient with flummery. There in the cathedral I could scarcely keep a solemn face when my fool’s coat was hung up with as much ceremony as if it were a flag of battle. All our coats were there in line, of those condemned to serve in monasteries and those sent to their death in the galleys. Every coat had written under it the name of the man and his sentence, and above it; A Heretic Lutheran Reconciled. Over the coats of those who had been burned, of whom there were two more after George Rively, was written: An Obstinate Heretic Lutheran Burned.

CHAPTER SIX

We were now free to do as we liked and to earn a living as best we could. I myself would have gone back to work in the mines and make my fortune if I had not distrusted the Holy Office. I had been warned that their spies would keep a watch on us for years to come and on me more than the others, since I was reputed to be a bold spirit. It was little use to make money if I were in continual danger of being imprisoned and losing the lot.

So I decided to show myself a settled, common man and to learn a trade which would get me employment wherever I found myself. I took the name of Miguel Perez and bound myself to a mestizo silk weaver for three years paying him one hundred and fifty pesos to teach me his craft. It was a good business, for in the City of Mexico are woven taffetas, satins and velvets as fine as those of Spain, which are readily sold to the many rich and shipped to the Main and to Peru as well. Our blacks were better than the Spanish, though the other colours were not so bright.

But still the Inquisitors could not forget me, and several times their Familiars accused me of planning to return to England and to become a heretic again. To that I would answer that I could not understand why they should suspect me, since escape was impossible even if I wished it, which I did not. The truth was that they feared this Miguel Perez who could speak Spanish well enough to pass as a Spaniard, and Nahuatl so easily that the Indians would help him to travel among forests and volcanoes wherever he pleased.

One day I was much disquieted to be called before Doctor Bonilla. He asked me severely why I did not marry, to which I replied that I was learning a trade and could not afford wife and house until I had set myself up in business. But this did not content him. He forbade me to leave the City of Mexico, threatening to have me burned if I went near San Juan de Ulua or any other port.

With the other English he was not so hard, for most of them had taken wives, showing that they meant to remain good Catholics and settle in New Spain. Paul Horsewell married a rich mestiza, a daughter of one of the Conquerors, and got with her a fine house. Richard Williams married a Basque widow, who, I doubt not, took the place of the mother upon whom he used to call, and had a fortune of four thousand pesos as well. William Lowe obtained permission to sail for Spain, where, it is said, he also married. And several of the others were given Negroes or mestizas for wives.

So I who remained a bachelor was out of favour. Whatever excuses I offered, the Holy Office suspected that I had not yet lost hope of a wife and children in my own country. And indeed I had not, and marry I would not, though there were maidens in plenty who were ready enough.

It was now the year 1579 and Master Francis Drake was upon the coast of New Spain. No English captain had ever appeared before in the South Sea, which some call the Pacific. The inhabitants of the ports were peaceful as if they lived in paradise, with never a thought that war could come near them. They had no defence against a ship so heavily armed as The Golden Hind, beyond such men and horses as could be raised from the settlers inland. So Master Drake had an easier time of it than at San Juan de Ulua.

The Spaniards were marvellously afraid that he would march up from Acapulco and take the City of Mexico, never thinking that he had not the men for so mad a venture and that he could not arm the Indians even if they dared to revolt. Carts began to roll out of the city, carrying the wives, children and money of the rich. Men polished their rusty armour and looked through the attics for their fathers’ swords. The Viceroy took a roll of all the able-bodied Spaniards and mestizos in New Spain, who amounted to thirty thousand; but he could only raise a force of eight hundred, sending two hundred of them to San Juan and the rest to the South Sea.

He sent for Paul Horsewell and myself and asked us what we knew of Francis Drake who was a brother to Admiral Haquines. Fearing that we might be denounced as renegades, we both swore that we had never heard of the man, hoping that the Viceroy could not call for the records of the Holy Office which proved that we knew Drake very well. As for being a brother of our old commander, we said that John had only one brother, William, who was sixty years old or thereabouts and Governor of Plymouth for the Queen.

Then Paul Horsewell was returned to his home, praying that the Viceroy, the Inquisitors, Francis Drake and the devil himself would leave him in peace with his pretty wife and his secretaryships. I was ordered to go down to Acapulco as interpreter for Don Robles Alcalde de Corte who commanded the force there. The Holy Office gave me leave, for it was very necessary to be able to bargain with the English if they took a town and held it for ransom.

Since New Spain was so peaceful, the only war Don Robles had ever seen was against wild Indians in the Sierra Madre, where he had been struck by an arrow and claimed to have won a great victory in spite of his wound. The Indians, I concluded had retreated to their fastnesses after an exchange of shots, as they always do.

Don Robles and two hundred men put to sea in a little ship of sixty tons and two pinnaces. We were rocked no more than babes in a cradle, but they were all most vilely sick. Francis Drake could have sent us to the bottom with no loss to himself, and all I asked was that I should not be killed by a cannon shot before I could swim to The Golden Hind, say who I was and be free at last of the danger in which I lived.

When Don Robles had recovered and could look around him he was in great humour to find himself an admiral with a handsome cabin, wherein he could give play to his generous nature. He had brought enough stores on board for a voyage to the moon and he entertained us all right nobly.

At first he was somewhat haughty with me, but when I had admired his wound, his armour and his moustachios, he began to make a pet of his tame Englishman and would have me teach him Nahuatl to pass the time. He was a man of fine stature, always ready to laugh at his own jests or those of others. Though no soldier, he would have fought to the death as gallantly as he played upon the guitar.

Our sailing master, whose name was Segarra, was a good fellow as all Spanish seamen are, and told me much of the South Sea and the Philippine Islands where he hoped to settle. He had often sailed to Peru, a voyage which may take as long as from Havana to Spain, and once he had gone to China and Japan, returning with silks, spices and an earthenware as thin as glass which they call porcelain.

He and Don Robles would dispute together jovially and at the tops of their voices, the Admiral demanding that his soldiers be put aboard Master Drake as soon as he was sighted, Segarra assuring him that our fleet of three poorly armed ships would be sunk or disabled by the English guns and that his soldiers would have to swim before they could fight.

‘That cannot be!’ Don Robles would protest. ‘There are no braver men in the world than those I command!’

‘It is true we are Spaniards,’ Segarra answered, ‘but even a Spaniard must be trained. Why, any fellow with a sword and a feather in his cap can enlist as a ship’s soldier, and no questions asked!’

‘Then are we to submit to English pirates as if we were snivelling friars?’ the Admiral roared.

‘Not if you will tell your friend the Viceroy to listen to the ship masters of the coast,’ said Segarra.

He explained that a ship which could cross the Ocean and come through Magellan Straits into the South Sea must be sturdy and slow. But on the coast of New Spain, where there is seldom stormy weather, ships could be built for speed, with finer lines.

‘Give me a vessel such as that,’ he cried, ‘and I would tear and torment the English like a dog baiting a bull!’

What he said was very well reasoned. If the Viceroy should indeed listen, I fear there may be no more such venturing between Peru and New Spain as that of The Golden Hind.

When we were south of Guatemala we met with ships coming up from Panama who told us that Drake had left the coast. We much wondered where he could be, never dreaming that he had sailed to the north beyond the conquests of the Spaniards and that he would return to Plymouth round the Cape of Good Hope, having compassed the whole world. Then our little fleet returned to Acapulco, with the interpreter much downcast. I had been so glad to sail the sea again after eleven years that I was too sure of obtaining freedom, either through battle or being wrecked upon some desolate shore.

The Viceroy ordered me to remain at the weaving shop and to be ready to leave at an hour’s notice, since he expected that Drake would be forced by hunger to return to the coast. I know not why he thought me so necessary, unless it was that I could endure the hardships of sea and land better than those other English who lived at their ease and took their orders from their wives.

But it is the habit of Spaniards to be very fierce and imperious, and a month later to think the matter not so pressing. So when Don Robles Alcalde de Corte asked for my services as his sailing master, he readily obtained permission.

Don Robles had taken a liking for the seafaring life, but preferred to enjoy it upon the Lake of Mexico. He bought a little brigantine of shallow draught, and fitted her out gaily, like the most comfortable tavern that I ever saw. He gave out that he meant to spend his evenings searching for the treasure which, it was said, King Guatemoc had thrown into the lake when the City was captured.

‘But why, Don Robles, do you need me more than another?’ I asked.

‘Because there are very few rascals who both speak Nahuatl and can keep their mouths shut,’ he replied, giving me a great dig in the ribs.

Now, every idle Spaniard had been diving after that treasure for the last fifty years and had never found more than rotten vegetables, so I asked him if he really believed that he could discover it.

‘We shall look for it with discretion, Miguel,’ he said, ‘and for the rest of the time we shall amuse ourselves, for upon the high seas the captain and his sailing master may do what they will under God.’

Through Xolotl I engaged a crew of four and a cook, none of whom could speak a word of Spanish, and Don Robles and I set off on our evening voyages around the lake. Sometimes we would search for treasure in full sight of the City, but when night fell we would sail off to the opposite shore and take on board a party of his friends and their lasses.

Till then I had diverted myself only among the humbler sort of men and women. So at first I was astonished to observe how these grave gentlemen with their vast estates and half a score of private chaplains could abandon themselves to gaiety. They admitted me to their friendship and, I fear, to much of their naughtiness, but at least I learned to walk with men of breeding, as poor Master Barrett told me that I should.

After we had made a dozen such voyages in as many weeks, I came down from the shop one evening to take command of my brigantine and found a brass cannon mounted in the bows, Don Robles sitting by it with a goblet in his hand and his eyes all alight with some knavery.

‘Now you will be gunner as well,’ he said. ‘Tonight we are going to look for the English!’

‘Aye, aye, Admiral!’ I answered, and went to examine the gun, which was an old fowler such as we had on the poop of the Jesus of Lubeck.

When we had cast off and my Indian mate had taken the tiller, I went below to find out what in heaven’s name was afoot.

‘You would not believe, being young, what wickedness there is in this world, Miguel,’ Don Robles said. ‘Foul slanderers dare to repeat that you and I and our good friends are a disgrace to the City and that we never look for treasure at all. Now, since we have been unable to find any gold to give to the churchmen, the next best gift would be some duck.’

This was very well contrived, for the lake was full of wild fowl. So I cleaned the gun and measured out the charges and the canisters of small shot.

During the winter we made it our custom to drift down upon the flights at evening and dawn and loose off the fowler. And now if the justices or the clergy were too curious as to how we spent the rest of the night, no one was more indignant than Don Robles. He claimed that not only was he supplying the monasteries with fat duck, but teaching his friends to load and fire a cannon so that there would be no shortage of gunners to defend the City if Drake came up from the coast.

Meanwhile I plied my trade of weaver, and took my sleep at the hours of the siesta whenever I was required as sailing master. My master did not frown upon me if I was not steady at my work, for Don Robles and many of his friends brought their custom to our shop.

Once I was summoned by a finicking canon of the Cathedral who questioned me with such delicacy that I could pretend not to understand his meaning. I pleaded that I was a poor man, very willing to sail Don Robles’ brigantine and fire its gun after my day’s weaving was over, but of what passed below deck I knew nothing and could only say that the gentlemen made music and were very merry.

My good Admiral laughed at this and said he believed the canon wished to sail with us. But there was worse to come. Doctor Bonilla called me before him. He asked no questions – perhaps not desiring to know too much since Don Robles was so intimate with the Viceroy – but told me sternly that if I were not sent to row in the galleys as a suspected heretic, he could condemn me none the less as an offender against public order.

This alarmed Don Robles who laid up his brigantine, retired to his estates and advised me to make myself scarce for a while. He obtained from the Viceroy leave for me to go to Amecameca on my master-weaver’s business.

We were a whole party of merchants, collecting hides and goods from the estancias for shipment to Spain by the fleet of 1580. My master traded in cochineal, a brilliant red dye made from crushed beetles, which may be sold at a high price in any city of Europe. He had a good stock of the highest quality, and desired me to see it safely packed and sealed.

Since my companions were all wealthy men, he saw that my clothes were of the best and mounted me on a horse which he borrowed from his cousin. Now, as I have said, my old soldier taught me to know the breeding of a horse and its value. This one was of Barbary stock, not so swift as some of the Spanish but of very great endurance.

When I had ridden to Amecameca and tried out the horse in visits to the estancias, I knew that my chance of escape had come. First I thought of riding north to Florida where I should not be known; but as soon as I heard that the fleet was ready to sail from San Juan de Ulua I remembered the words of Segarra: that any man might enlist for the voyage who presented himself with arms and the bearing of a soldier. Once on board I should be out of reach of the Holy Office before they could find out what had happened to me. I had enough money to buy arms, for I had sewn a goodly number of gold pieces into the quilts of my doublet.

San Juan was three days’ journey to the east. When the moon rose I saddled up my Barbary and rode him hard all that night and all the next day down through the forests of pine and cedar, arriving on the second night at the town of Vera Cruz, which was fifteen miles from San Juan. Even if one of the company of merchants guessed what I had done – and why should he trouble himself? – I should be safe at sea before search was made for me on the coast.

I meant to rest in Vera Cruz only long enough to buy sword and helmet. But I had just stabled my horse and gone to a tavern to refresh myself when I was arrested and brought before the mayor and justices. There was neither rhyme nor reason in this, for no letter concerning me could have reached the town or even been written.

‘You are Enrique Villalta y Carvacal, son of Pedro Villalta of the City of Mexico, and I have orders to detain you,’ the mayor said to me.

I had heard of Pedro Villalta. He was enormously rich and had a son who was always in trouble with the authorities. It appeared that this young man was secretly trying to buy his passage on the fleet to Spain, disobeying the orders of his father and the High Court.

I denied that I was Enrique, claiming in a lordly way that I was on business to the fleet and that if they interfered with me they would soon know who I was. Not a word of it would they believe. Whether I much resembled this Enrique I am ignorant. So, I think, were they. It was enough for them that my clothes were costly, that I had ridden hard and fast and that I had changed a piece of gold in the tavern.

As always in Vera Cruz, the night was hot. The mayor and his fellows were holding court in the open air, while the crowd of people walking in the square gathered round to listen. As I was being led away to prison, the devil put it into the head of a poor man to speak up for me. He was selling hens and had two baskets of them slung from his shoulders, cackling like himself.

‘Your worships are committing a wrong,’ he said. ‘I have often seen this man in the City of Mexico. He is not a Spaniard at all, but an Englishman.’

The justices abused him, saying that I had paid him to lie, that he was in the plot to help me to escape from my father and that he had better take care or he would be sent to prison with me.

Then the wretched chicken-seller had to tell all he knew: that I was one of Haquines’ men and that I had worn the San Benito for three years in the monastery of the Jesuits.

The justices told him to stand aside, and asked me if what he said was true. Try as I might, I could not deny it against the word of the chicken-seller who had only wished to help me and had placed me in the worst fix I ever was in. It was plain to the justices that they had caught a bigger fish than young Enrique Villalta and that the Holy Office would be grateful. As for me, I saw that I should go to Spain after all, but in the fleet of the next year and sentenced to the galleys unless they burned me first.

I was put in gaol with a ball and chain on my legs, and there I remained for three weeks. Now, an ordinary Spanish prison is much like ours. The company is merry, but if a man has no money to buy food he must depend on charity or starve. I thought it wise not to unsew my doublet in such society, and lived on the few pesos in my pocket. I also found friends, as it was likely I would. Being myself so long in disgrace, I was acquainted with many poor men who found it hard to live honestly in New Spain.

There was a thief who had been among those who broke out of gaol with a horseshoe, carrying Paul Horsewell with them. He had been recaptured on the shores of the Sea of Cortés, condemned to the galleys and was now waiting to be put aboard the fleet. There was also a light-fingered rogue named Panchito whom I had known in Zacatecas. Señor Sambo had caught him loading his horse with our silver and was about to cut his throat; but I, thinking he might entertain us with his company, as indeed he did, gave him a seat at our table and sent him on his way with no silver but with a flask of pulque to lighten the journey.

Panchito had been seized at San Juan when pilfering merchandise. His accomplice, a Spanish seaman, narrowly escaped. This man used to visit Panchito daily, bringing wine and food – which Panchito had the kindness to share with me – and all the news of the town. He said that I should be sent back to the City of Mexico by the wagon train after the fleet had sailed.

Both greatly pitied me since I had committed no crime at all. Panchito got his friend to bring into the prison two good knives with a strong file at the back of the blade, so that we might cut through our irons whenever it was likely to profit us. He sold me one of them, which I hid in the foot of my left boot.

It came to me only just in time. Three days later I was called before the justices and never saw Panchito again. The ball was taken off, and new leg-irons were forged for me, joined by an iron bar between the chains so that I could hardly stumble along. My wrists were confined in manacles chained together and to an iron collar round my neck. In that plight I was helpless as the hens of a chicken-seller.

I was flung into the cart which was to take me up from Vera Cruz to Mexico. It was the leading wagon in a train of sixty, and I had it to myself, being a piece of merchandise of great value to the Holy Office. We started early in the morning, for which I was thankful. If we had still been in the low country of the coast at nightfall, I should have been tormented by mosquitos without a hand to brush them off or scratch myself. This town of Vera Cruz is so unhealthy that any woman expecting a child is sent inland well before her time. Every morning they drive two thousand cattle through the streets to trample down the dust and filth, believing that this takes away the evil vapours. But it did no good that I could see.

As my cart bumped over the road, I passed the time trying to slip my hands, which are long and slender, out of the manacles. The task was very painful but at last I succeeded in it, and could even put the manacles on again. The drivers, walking alongside their mules, were busy urging them on and paid no attention to their prisoner. The creaking and groaning of the high wheels covered any noise that I might make. So I freed my hands, took the file out of my boot and started to file through my leg irons.

A day’s journey from Vera Cruz the plain comes to an end and the road begins to climb into the mountains. By the mercy of God a wheel of my wagon broke at the bottom of the hill. The driver set an Indian carpenter to work on it, and meanwhile the rest of the train passed on and halted at a tavern up the road kept by a Negro woman, who, you may be sure, made more money than ever she would on the coast of Guinea.

Here the hill is so steep that it is the custom to take the mules out of three or four wagons and harness them together. The teams then draw up each wagon separately and come down for another. My driver unhitched his mules, cursed me for a spy and a Lutheran who had brought him bad luck, and all cantered away into the dusk jingling their bells.

The Indian soon finished mending the wheel and went off to the tavern, hoping to get a cup of the forbidden pulque for his labour. So I was left alone. Up the hill the drivers and the mounted guards were all shouting and cracking their whips, trying to get the whole train to the top before they camped for the night.

I worked away at my leg irons until the file cut through and I could bend them apart. Taking two small cheeses and some cold maize cakes, which the driver had given me so that I should not die of hunger on his hands, I ran off into the woods. It was now dark. Soon I no longer knew where the road was; but now and again I could see the faint light of the candles in the tavern. Keeping it always behind me, I stumbled fast uphill between great boulders and the trunks of trees.

CHAPTER SEVEN

After hiding my leg irons under a bush and covering them with moss so that it should not be known that I had broken free, I rested and slept a little on the top of a ridge. I had climbed higher than I knew, and at dawn I could see the road to Mexico beneath me and the camp of the wagon train. Far down in the forest the drivers were looking for me, believing that I must have rolled out of the cart and could not have gone far. The mounted guards were riding wherever they could go – and that was no great distance, for their horses were useless in such tangled country.

Across the valley to the north I saw blue smoke rising from the rocks and then the red sparkle of a fire. I made my way towards it, approaching very cautiously though I did not apprehend there would be Spaniards in such a wilderness. When I came nearer I saw that a hunting party of Indians were roasting a deer for their breakfast.

I called to them in Nahuatl, saying that I was English and had been imprisoned by the cruel Spaniards. They answered at once that I should have no fear and join them.

With my mouth full of their venison, I told them how we had not had so kind a reception when we were trying to reach Tampico twelve years before. That was no wonder, said they, for then the Indians had known nothing of the English and taken us for some new tribe of shipwrecked Spaniards whom they dearly wished to slaughter, and dared not for fear of revenge; but in these days all the Indians of the coast knew that there were other white men who also had horses, ships and guns.

They marvelled that a man who was not born in their country should speak their language so easily. They had heard of my friend, Xolotl, but did not greatly respect him or the Tenochca either, as they called the Aztecs. They themselves were Totonacs who had joined with Cortés as soon as he landed and fought alongside the Spaniards. But in spite of their services their people had not been well treated and relieved of taxes, as the Tlaxcalans were. So they had taken to the wild mountains where the Spaniards could not come at them.

I asked them if they would file off the iron collar from which my manacles were suspended. Since they were but Christians in name and, for all I knew, might think their own gods would like a taste of me, I did not much relish the knife so close to my throat. But they were as gentle with me as I could wish and soon had my collar off.

I was now beyond all pursuit, and my purpose was to put as many leagues as I could between myself and the City of Mexico. Outside the towns New Spain is still empty, so I was hardly likely to fall in with anyone who knew my face and my story.

One of the Indians willingly consented to be my guide. He brought me to one of their great villages, and glad I was to see it, since I was so trembling with fever that I could scarce drag one foot after another for more than twenty miles. When we arrived, an Indian doctor took me to his house and put me in a hammock well wrapped in quilts. Then he gave me a drink of herbs and pulque so strong that I reached four hundred rabbits. But I awoke free of fever and suffering only from weakness.

These Totonacs were never conquered by the Aztecs, and therefore lack their arts and luxuries such as embroidery and carvings and fine featherwork. But they have handsome earthenware of an orange colour, gallantly painted, and they live very well. They have plenty of deer and game – which is scarce in the hills around Mexico – and fruits and tame turkeys to go with their maize bread. They also roast a fat slug which lives on the maguey plant and is excellent eating with red peppers.

They have little religion, whether Christian or pagan, and still do honour to Xipe, the god of seedtime and planting, who was also worshipped in the City of Mexico. At his festival his priest is dressed in a human skin, stretched to fit him very exactly. They would not tell me if it was still their custom to flay a prisoner to get the skin, for they begin to be ashamed of such beastliness.

After I had been three days in the town I bought from an Indian for six pesos a little red mare, which he must have stolen since they are not permitted to possess horses or to ride. She was old but sure-footed with powerful quarters, and I thought her well fitted to carry me over mountains and through the woods.

So I started off gaily enough. But I was only a few miles from the town when I saw on the path ahead of me a Franciscan friar, mounted on a fat, grey pony. He was waiting for me, having heard the hooves of my mare in the silence of the mountains, and I could not avoid him. No Spaniard but a friar would have ventured alone into that country where there was nothing to be gained but Indian souls and no one worth conquering but Xipe.

I found to my great dismay that we knew each other very well. He was a certain Brother Bernardo who spoke Nahuatl and was much loved by the Indians of Tlatelolco.

‘Miguel Perez!’ he cried. ‘And what are you doing here?’

‘I am riding for the good of my health,’ I said.

‘Then ride fast and pray that you are not discovered! I have heard that you are forbidden to leave the City.’

‘Would you have me obey the Holy Office?’ I asked.

‘Miguel, I will only answer you this: that God did not give us a body to be burned and tormented, but as a humble home for the soul. To a servant of St Francis, even your red mare must be a little sister. Then think how much more are you my brother, even if you were a heretic as I am sure you are not.’

I knew at once that I could trust him and I told him my story while he exclaimed at the pity of it, saying that I was no enemy to the Church or to Spain and that it was wrong to persecute me because I wished to return to my country.

‘What is your advice, dear Brother Bernardo?’ I asked. ‘You and your order know all the roads of New Spain. Where shall I go?’

‘Now where shall we send him, Isabelita?’ he asked his pony, who pricked up her ears at the sound of her name.

She was in a condition to please the eye of any horseman, and I thought it must be a happy life to be the little sister of a good Franciscan friar.

‘Isabelita was born in Honduras,’ he went on, ‘and she tells me that there are many little ports along the coast where an honest Spaniard like Miguel Perez could take a ship for the Islands. In Honduras no one will ever have heard of him. Meanwhile ride on with us, and we will set you on your way.’

We travelled together for three days, staying in Indian houses. The people thereabouts knew and loved him, and freely gave food to him and his Isabelita as well as money for his good works. When at last we parted, he going towards Yucatan and I to the south, he gave me all his money, amounting to twenty pesos, saying that I needed charity more than any man he was likely to meet on his journey. Out of courtesy I could not refuse it.

So on I went, travelling through the high valleys of Oaxaca and Tehuantepec. Sometimes I would sleep in Indian villages and sometimes in the open, never needing to tether my mare, who would stay close to me for fear of wild beasts. But there are few in those highlands except the puma, which the Spaniards call the lion, and he will not attack a man, though, being curious as any cat, he will follow at a distance.

My course was now easterly, and the City of Mexico left so far behind that I was sure there could be no hue and cry after Miguel Perez. I often called at the estancias where I was made very welcome. There cannot be such hospitality among Christians anywhere as the people of New Spain show to one another.

In these lonely places where one Spaniard and his family lived among thousands of Indians I wondered that the Indians did not fall upon them and kill them. One such Spaniard in Chiapas, whose nearest neighbour was distant two days’ hard riding, told me that it was because the Indians had great faith in the justices. If an Indian is beaten or ill-treated – it is no crime to abuse him with foul words – he will wait patiently for a chance and walk to the nearest town to make a complaint, taking a friend with him as a witness. And the justices, who call the Indians their orphans, will punish their own countryman, however rich he is.

This, said the good man, is the reason why the Indians are so tame, being before the law as rightful subjects of King Philip as the Spaniards. It may be so where the friars and the Governor are strong. But many Spaniards are cruel, and the justices too far off for an Indian to visit.

Soon afterwards I lost my way among the rivers and hills and wandered for more weeks than I can count, being fevered for most of that time and tended by Indians. I think that I was so near to death that I was cured, just as a man who recovers from the plague cannot catch it again. However that may be, I never had another day’s sickness in the Indies.

Seeing that I could not reach the coast of the North Sea, however long I tried, I took the high road to Guatemala and stayed in the town until my mare and I had recovered our strength. There were only eighty Spaniards, all prospering. The Indians, too, were the wealthiest I saw in New Spain, for Guatemala lies neither too high nor too low and is very fertile land, well watered.

The morning after my arrival I was brought before the justices, not so much to account for myself as that they wished to hear what news I had and to offer me employment if I wanted it. Among them was one very old man who had been regidor or chief magistate of Guatemala. He had the face of an eagle, with no hair on his head and a white tuft on his chin. His voice rumbled in his chest like distant thunder and he spoke with the sharpness of a soldier.

‘What are you doing, lad?’ he asked.

‘I am seeking whatever there is to find, your worship,’ I answered. ‘And if there is nothing, I still take pleasure in the search.’

This seemed greatly to delight him, and he declared that I was a true Spaniard, not a booby sitting in comfort and served by Indians. He held out to me his trembling hand and told me to take it and to say thereafter that I had shaken hands with Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

I took it gently and bent to kiss it, for this man was the last of the Conquerors left alive, who had fought with Cortés from beginning to end and won fame in the terrible battle of the causeways when they took the City of Mexico. He had been born in 1492, and it was a marvel in my eyes that one man’s life should span the time between Columbus’ first sight of the Indies and this New Spain of cities and churches.

‘Aye, the last of them, Don Miguel,’ he said, ‘blind and deaf and in poverty.’

Truly he was neither, but he complained as the old do because he had never made a fortune and could no longer see what was under his nose nor hear unless one spoke boldly into his great hairy ear.

‘Where do you come from?’ he asked me. ‘Castile or Aragon, Leon or Asturias or Extremadura?’

He rumbled the splendid names with tears in his old eyes, remembering his youth.

Now, this was a question to which I had to have a ready answer. If I said I was born in any town of New Spain, there was sure to be some bystander who knew it and all the few families. So I always replied that I came from Cerceda in Galicia. I had a friend – it was that seaman who brought the files into prison – who did indeed come from Cerceda, and told me that it was so far from the ports and the roads which led to them that few ever came out of it and hardly a stranger visited it.

Thus neither Bernal Diaz nor his friends doubted that I had come over as a boy to seek my fortune. They entertained me excellent well, telling me that I could go no farther than the eastern limits of Nicaragua and that I should then return and settle among them.

I had now travelled eight or nine hundred miles from the City of Mexico and knew that I was safe from the Holy Office. But I was still on the shores of the South Sea from which I could only go home round the world like Francis Drake. So I determined to press on towards the Isthmus of Panama.

For seven days I rode to the east, passing through rich lowlands where the Indians grow cocoa beans, which are ground and made into the drink which they call chocolate. This is so loved by Indians and Spaniards alike that in the markets of the City of Mexico the beans are used as money and given in change as we do farthings.

Thereafter were few plantations, only lake, mountain and forest with never a way to the north. Between the settlements were tracks so seldom used that twice I came upon an empty ox-cart with the bones of the dead oxen lying where they had been unharnessed to die. I travelled on through this wilderness a month and more until I could go no farther, as they had warned me in Guatemala. There were no paths through the swamps and no longer any Indians who understood Nahuatl. When my mare and I were near dead of starvation, I had to turn back.

I came again to the confines of Guatemala and worked for a while as an overseer, for I had spent the better part of my gold and did not wish to unsew from my doublet the little that remained. Nearly a year had passed since my escape, and soon the ships would be sailing to join the fleet. I therefore determined to try once more the journey to Honduras which had cost me so many pains, and asked the Indians if there were any way to the North Sea through the forests of Guatemala. They told me that there was, but that the country was difficult and without inhabitants.

They also told me that my red mare could make the crossing from sea to sea and live, but at first I put no faith in what they said. They still believe that wherever a man on foot can go a horse can also travel. When the Spaniards first landed, the Indians thought that horse and man were one animal like the centaur of the Greeks, as may be seen in their pictures, and even after they knew that the two were separate, they gloried in the killing of either. Bernal Diaz told me that as the Conquerors fought their way into Mexico, they saw the heads of their comrades and the heads of the horses hanging side by side on the skull racks of the temples.

However, the Indians remembered very well that Cortés had taken a force of cavalry through the forests when he discovered Honduras, so there was some reason to believe that I could do the like. They had a strange story of Cortés’ horse, which he much loved. When it fell sick on the journey, he left it at a village, commanding the people to take care of it and honour it as if it were himself. This they did, offering it turkeys and the choicest dishes which their cooks could prepare. When the horse died, as is no wonder, they fashioned a statue of it as large as life, treating it as a god so that Cortés should know, if he ever passed that way again, that it was from no lack of care and respect that his horse had died.

I hired two Indians to be my guides and bought chickens and bread for our journey. They warned me also to carry flint and steel and good dry tinder so as to be sure of our fires at night, since the forest was full of jaguars. So we started north, thereafter losing sight of the sun because the gloom of the vast trees was continually overhead. For all I knew we might have been walking round and round in circles.

During the day they kept good watch under their feet and above the path, for there are venomous serpents on the ground and the jaguars will stretch themselves on the branches of trees to fall upon any meat which passes below them. They would also beat the water before crossing any river to frighten away the monsters which lie in wait beneath the surface.

At night we made two great fires and placed ourselves and my mare between them. Round about us we could see the fires reflected in the eyes of beasts and hear their roaring. Whether they were jaguars or monkeys or great lizards I know not, but there were too many for the liking of me and my mare, who would stay very close to me and move as little as she might.

On the tenth day we began to follow a river and on the twelfth came to the tideway, where the mud beneath the trees recalled to me the St Germans River which I had left so long ago as a foolish boy of thirteen. And there at last was the open sea and the town of Puerto Cavallos.

When I set eyes on Puerto Cavallos, I saw that the advice which Brother Bernardo had given me was very wise. It was a miserable place of straw huts with no guns or fort to defend it, nor soldiers and justices to ask me what my business was. Yet four fine ships were moored in deep water alongside a wooden quay, where they had unloaded barrels of Canary wine and were now taking on their cargo.

I rode into the town with my Indians trotting beside me as if I were a man of some standing. My clothes were torn and filthy and my beard untrimmed. But that was of no consequence since the King of Spain himself would be in the same condition if he chose to travel in Honduras.

There was a tavern on the beach, or so I will call it though it was open to the four winds and had no more than two benches and a table under a thatched roof to keep off the rain. It was full of seamen sitting on barrels or on the sanded floor. When I had stabled and fed my mare, I threw some pesos on the counter and invited anyone to drink with me who would. I soon learned that good fortune had led me to Puerto Cavallos just at the right time. Four ships from Spain called there only once a year, and they would soon sail to join the homeward fleet. One of them, the San Silvestre of one hundred tons, had finished her lading and would depart before the rest. Her Master, they said, came from Granada in Andalusia and was an easy, obliging fellow as are most of the Spaniards of those parts.

After paying my guides and sending them on their way to an Indian village down the coast, I walked out along the quay and saw that the hatches were being fitted to the forehold of the San Silvestre and that only a little cargo remained for the after-hold. So I went up to the poop and was well received by the Master, who was pleased to say that I was the first Christian he had met in Puerto Cavallos, by which he meant a person who was neither Indian nor mestizo.

I gave him my name of Miguel Perez and said that I had been born in Granada but remembered little of it, having been carried to New Spain by my parents when I was a child.

He cried out that then I was a countryman of his and, either out of courtesy or because he did not wish to appear ignorant, said that he knew my family. Since Perez is as common a name in Spain as Philips in England, it is probable that he did.

He told me that, God willing, he would leave the other three ships in this stinking hole of a port and sail for Spain in two days’ time. He had a full cargo of cochineal, indigo, salsaparilla and hides, together with some gold and silver, and would go by way of Havana and wait there for the fleet.

‘Will you give me a passage to Spain?’ I asked.

‘With much pleasure,’ he answered, ‘if it depended on me. But have you the right to leave New Spain?’

I said that I needed none, being my own master, and that I was weary of the heat and fevers of Honduras and could see no chance of becoming rich.

‘Have you no letter from your mayor or regidor?’ he asked, still doubting me. ‘For all I know – if you will pardon me – you may have killed someone or be avoiding your debts, for both are misfortunes which may overtake the most worthy of men.’

I assured him that I was guiltless of any crime. As for letters and safe conducts, I said, where would I get them? And I pointed to the straw huts on the beach and the forests which stretched as far as the eye could see.

He agreed at last to take me to Spain for the sum of sixty pesos. Thereupon I sold my red mare to a mestizo, begging him to take good care of her. And I think indeed she may have had an easier life of it with him than with me, for he only wanted a horse to show his fellows that he had one, and not for any good it would be to him. He made his living by drying meat in the sun and selling it to shipmasters, and travelled from one harbour to another in his own pinnace.

So with the price of the mare and some gold pieces from my doublet I could pay my passage and lay in a store of bread and hens for my provisions. I was heartily sickened of hen after my travelling. But they are the best food a man can buy, since they will stay alive in their coop and give fresh meat in place of salt. And, if they should lay, there is always some chance of gathering an egg before the thieving hands of seamen are attracted by the cackling.

Our voyage to Havana was the pleasantest I ever knew with a fair wind all the way. The company lived better than on an English ship, for the Spaniards continually catch fresh fish, having more practice than we in warm waters, and cook them in a score of different ways, all excellent good. The San Silvestre was very poorly armed and an easy prey for any French or English privateer who might have come up with her. But now I had no wish for a fight, as I had when I sailed from Acapulco, believing myself safely on my way home.

I had thought there was no good port but Cartagena in the North Sea, so I marvelled to find Havana fit for an empire as great as King Philip’s. The entrance to the harbour is very narrow and within may lie a thousand ships, sheltered from all winds and protected by the fort.

It was now towards the end of May when the homeward bound fleet assembles in Havana, coming from the Main and the Islands, from New Spain with the gold and silver of the mines and from the Isthmus of Panama with all the treasure of Peru. There were also four great ships in the port newly arrived from Spain, carrying soldiers and heavy cannon for Campeche, Florida and San Juan de Ulua. It was said that King Philip had now at last charged his generals to see to the defence of the Indies.

The bay was so gallant with masts and banners that one could hardly tell sea from shore. Flags were flying from the tower of the fort showing that more ships were in sight. The watchmen there hoist a flag for every sail that comes over the horizon so that the Captain of the Port may know what to expect.

I was right glad to find myself in a town with such a throng of fair women, merchants and seamen. So I walked about freely thinking no harm could come to me. But would to God I had stayed on board the San Silvestre, content to catch fish, save my money and mind my business!

It happened that one evening I was drinking with a master gunner who had been ordered to New Spain much against his will, and had come out in one of the four ships. I told him that at San Juan he would find great cannon taken from the Jesus of Lubeck and that some of the English guns had been dragged three hundred miles over the mountains to the South Sea. Then he began to curse the English, whom he claimed to know very well, saying that they cared nothing for the laws of sea or land, and that since they became heretics they would as soon eat their babies as baptise them.

I could not rid myself of the man. He came with me to the water steps shouting so loud at being shipped abroad from house and home that an officer of the Admiral’s guard made up to us to see who the mutinous fellow was. Having ordered him to keep a civil tongue and sent him to his quarters, the officer, who was accompanied by two corporals splendidly armed and apparelled, put me in fear by asking what I did and whether I was seaman or merchant. I replied that I was but a poor man on his way home from Honduras to Spain.

‘Well, I will see you to your ship,’ he said, ‘and speak with the Master.’

He had a boat and rowers at hand. When I hesitated, his corporals made as if they would force me into it. So we went on board the San Silvestre and up to the great cabin where he questioned the Master, asking if I held any position of authority. The Master, who was now as weak as he had been formerly obliging, said that I was only a passenger and that he hoped he had done no wrong in accepting me.

‘That is as may be,’ said the officer. ‘But if he is poor, I doubt not he will be glad to serve King Philip and be paid for his trouble.’

Then he took my hand in his and claimed me for a soldier, saying that I must therefore provide myself with sword, arquebus powder and shot, and that the Master must return me as much of my passage money as would serve to pay for them.

This he was compelled to do there and then, and two days later I was taken on board the San Felipe which was the Admiral’s galleon of the Indian Guard, and found myself answering the drums as a soldier of Spain at eighteen pesos a month.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Now, the reason they were arming every man they could lay their hands on was this: Don Antonio, who was the pretender to the throne of Portugal usurped by King Philip, was said to be lying in wait for the Treasure Fleet off the Azores with a powerful force, among them many English ships. Except for the two galleons of the Guard, our fleet was all of deeply-laden merchantmen which could neither fight nor flee. So they put some soldiers into every one, who at least could repel boarders.

We sailed on June the Fourth, the whole fleet of thirty-seven ships keeping station well and as gallant a sight as any man could wish to see. On the San Felipe we were well provided for the voyage, having all we could need of rice, beans, bread and wine with the sun-dried meat which they call boucanned. This is far better than the salt beef and pork which the English use, for half of our casks are full of nothing but fat and bone to fill the pockets of the chandlers, and the other half is rancid and rotten.

In a few days I could take my place in the files and handle my weapons near as well as my comrades. This was natural enough, since every day for over a year I had watched the soldiers at work in the waist of the Jesus of Lubeck, having much good will towards them because my father had been a man-at-arms on the ships of Harry the Eighth.

So I was fool enough not to show myself clumsy at my work, and the old soldiers were contented with their recruit. They asked me where and when I had learned the trade of war, knowing that in New Spain men had little practice. Remembering Don Robles Alcalde de Corte and his famous battle, I said that I had made a campaign against the Indians.

My service was made easy for me by a common soldier whose name was Rafael Camacho, a native of Toledo. He had so great a sense of honour that I saw why the Spanish infantry is invincible on land, and I thought it well for England that we must fight at sea.

Rafael possessed nothing but his arms, his breeches and an old buff coat. But he held himself so proudly and showed such spirit that when he was sashed, helmeted and fully accoutred you would have taken his buff coat for a prince’s armour. He had been a soldier on the galleys in the Mediterranean and fought against the French and the Turks. He would follow no calling but that of arms, and hoped that one day he might receive some reward either for his bravery or by way of loot.

‘But how few are those who gain anything, Miguel,’ he said to me sadly, ‘compared to the number who perish!’

One morning when we were both sitting in the bows, watching the flying fish and cleaning the specks of rust from our swords, he told me how the galleys fought, charging upon each other while the rowers, poor wretches, quickened the stroke till the oldest of them dropped dead upon the benches. Meanwhile the most fearless of the soldiers – of whom I am sure that he was one – stood upon a board, not more than two feet wide, above the beak or ram of the galley, ready to leap aboard the enemy and facing the mouths of his cannon only a pike’s length away.

Then said I, ‘But why does not the enemy stand off and pour his shot into the oars and the hull?’

He shrugged his shoulders, saying that it was a question for the admirals and not for him, but that he thought it dishonourable that two ships should not try to grapple together and fight it out.

So I warned him what he might expect to see if the English came up with us off the Azores.

‘When the Master of the San Felipe tries to lay alongside, they will run and then luff up and give us a broadside, aiming at the rudder, the foot of the mainmast and the planks which lift from the sea on the roll, until the San Felipe is only a hulk on the water.’

‘Well, they have still to board us,’ said Rafael, ‘and you and I will make brave work of them.’

‘They will not board,’ I answered. ‘They will then turn on the merchantmen, leaving our ship to sink or swim if she will not strike her colours.’

‘Which God forbid!’ he roared. ‘But this is not war. There is no honour in it!’

I was about to tell him that there was honour aplenty for the skilled seamen and the gunners, but I noticed a certain Manuel García lying in the shade of the fore castle and listening to us. He was not such an honest, simple fellow as Rafael, so I thought it best not to show too much knowledge of the English, and set to polishing the plates of my arquebus and changing the charge of powder.

This Manuel García was a Cuban who, like myself, had intended to return to Spain as a passenger and been impressed to serve as a soldier for the voyage. Now, among Cubans you will find one in every four who has come from Galicia, where in the town of Cerceda I claimed to have been born.

Soon afterwards he came up to me speaking in some outlandish tongue of which I could make but little.

‘Why, Miguel!’ said he. ‘You were a boy in Cerceda and do not know a word of Gallego?’

This Gallego of theirs is the speech of the province of Galicia and sounds like Portuguese, but even a man of Portugal cannot easily understand it.

I answered that I had left my native land too early.

‘But you would have spoken it at your mother’s knee,’ he said, ‘before you knew Spanish at all.’

‘Well, but my mother came from Castile.’

‘And your father too?’

I swore that the two always spoke Spanish together, but I could see that I had not persuaded him. And indeed it was unlikely that a boy would not know whatever barbarous speech was used in the streets of his town, even if his parents did not speak it.

Thereafter this Manuel García was always forcing his company on me. Rafael, who distrusted him and was sure that he would hide in the hold at our first battle, kept an eye on his comings and goings and learned that Manuel had secretly sent word to the Master that he had something to tell him.

‘What could he want with the Master?’ I exclaimed. ‘Does García think he would be safer as a seaman taking in the topsails in a storm?’

‘I suspect that it concerns you,’ said Rafael, ‘and is some lie which he dare not whisper to the sergeant.’

Bad soldiers, he said, would often try to curry favour with an officer by tale-bearing against any comrade who, they feared, might be promoted over them.

‘Now, today is my turn to be sentinel on the poop,’ he went on, ‘where, as you know, a man may stand to his arms as still as a statue and listen to what is being said in the cabin. I will ask the sergeant if you can take my place, and then you will be forewarned if García has any private matter against you.’

This we did, and I heard every word that this cursed Cuban said. First, he told the Master that though I was already a boy when I left Cerceda I could not speak Gallego. Second, that I lied when I claimed to have learned my drill in fighting Indians, for a rising is put down by horsemen in cotton armour, not by infantry attacking shoulder to shoulder as in the days of Cortés.

‘Also this man, Miguel Perez, knows far too much of the way the English fight at sea,’ he said, ‘and I myself believe him to be an Englishman who is either a spy or an escaped prisoner.’

The Master replied that he had not marked me well, but thought I was as good a Spaniard as himself. However, he thanked García and said that he would have me questioned by the authorities at Seville, who would soon get at the truth.

When I came off duty, I told Rafael that he was mistaken and that the fellow only wished to know if he might have better quarters for money, not being content to lie with the rest of us on the deck. I dared not show my alarm and could only hope that the Master would forget me in the bustle of disembarking. So I continued to be as merry and pleasant as I could lest anyone should suspect I had something on my conscience.

From then on I longed to see the banners of England and Portugal, for I would rather risk the fiercest battle than the rack and prisons of the Holy Office. But the Admiral took his course far to the north, and we saw no land until on the Tenth of September we came up with shoals at the mouth of the Guadalquivir and anchored off San Lucar.

The merchantmen waited in the channel for the tide to carry them up to the town or on up river to Seville. They were surrounded by boats which had put out from San Lucar at the first sight of the fleet, some with wives and parents, some full of priests and friars carrying the images of saints in order that they might see us more clearly than they could do from heaven.

The great San Felipe was moored to the Customs House jetty which ran out into the stream, her stern held steady by two long cables, one to a buoy and one to the shore. Our fore castle overhung the jetty and a way was made for the Admiral and his officers to go ashore, which they did with much crossing of themselves and saluting of the ship. As soon as they had reached their coaches and their baggage was clear of the jetty, we ourselves were given leave to land.

There was then a rush for the rope ladders, and I pushed my way among the first. But the Master, his mate and the bosun were on the fore castle to ensure good order and, it may be, to see that we had not helped ourselves to the ship’s stores and cargo. When I came abreast of them, the Master called me to him.

I touched my cap and answered that I was at his service for what he might command. He looked at me closely and said, ‘You will stay aboard, Perez, and go up to Seville with me by water.’

I knew well enough what he meant and that he would have no mercy. But I pretended innocence and replied gaily that I would be glad to stay by the ship, for it would save me the walk to Seville.

After the soldiers and many of the seamen had gone, the San Felipe was very silent in the dusk. On the fore castle was an armed guard, and I could see another at the shore end of the jetty, so there was no escape for me by way of the ladders. The seamen who remained were gathered in the waist looking at the lights of San Lucar to larboard. No lanterns had been lit in the great cabin, and the windows of the after castle were mostly dark.

Now, I knew the Master would have gone to rest. He had been on his feet all night and all day making his landfall and leading the fleet to its anchorage in the river. I knew also – since I had never met with any ill looks from his officers – that he had kept to himself what García told him, perhaps wishing to have the favour of the Holy Office by bringing in himself a Lutheran heretic to be burned.

So I moved silently along the starboard side of the deck and climbed the steps to the after castle, ready to say, if I were halted, that the Master had asked me to see to the covering of the guns. But cabin servants and all were asleep, and I had the poop to myself.

One of the ship’s boats was alongside under the larboard quarter. I let myself down by the shrouds of the main mast and dropped into it, hiding under the thwarts until I was sure that no one had heard me. Then I cut the painter, and without sound or splash hauled the boat along by the stern cable until it touched the sand. I jumped ashore, letting the boat drift where it would, and ran through the reeds and bushes until I reached the road to Seville by which I had watched my comrades march away singing.

My arms had been left on the San Felipe and my doublet was long since empty of gold, so I had nothing in the world but my liberty. I reckoned, however, that once through San Lucar I should be safe, for there was plenty of traffic on the Seville road going to and from the fleet, and nothing to distinguish me from any other seaman tramping through the dark.

I tried to pass by back streets, avoiding the revelry in the centre of the town; but, as bad luck would have it, I met with two seamen from our ship who were very pressing that I should drink with them. When I said that I had no money, they answered, ‘Why, nor have we! But we will pledge King Philip’s credit.’

For all I knew of Spain – in which country I had been but ten minutes – the seamen of the fleet might indeed be allowed credit until they could draw their pay from the Navy Office in Seville. So, rather than have them running after me in the street and calling my name, I accompanied them to a tavern where they clamoured for wine. The landlord, suspecting them, asked to see their money first, whereupon they struck him down and took what they wanted. And this they called pledging King Philip’s credit.

At the screams of his wife, four armed men in black came to the rescue. My companions shouted that it was the cuadrilla and ran for their lives, I with them. I supposed these sturdy fellows to be the watch, but the seamen let me know we were in much greater danger. The cuadrilla were constables of the Holy Brotherhood, who were employed to search out evildoers. They are no more holy than the Familiars of the Inquisition, but the Spaniards cannot so much as arrest a pickpocket without calling on the Church to help.

We might have escaped them if they had not had their agents everywhere amongst the people, who flew into the street and surrounded us before we had gone far. Since I appeared to be the most desperate, the head man or officer chose me as his special prize and marched me off with his pistol stuck in my back. The two seamen followed, crying mercy every time they were pricked by the swords of the constables, and behind them came the crowd of onlookers.

Now, though common men will be more afraid of a pistol than a sword, we soldiers had little regard for so poor a weapon. I had practised with pistols as a boy on the Jesus of Lubeck and again with Rafael on the San Felipe. I knew that the powder does not catch from the pan as surely as in an arquebus, and that even when the pistol fires it gives such a jerk to the wrist that a man will miss his mark. So I commended myself to God, ducked my head and took to my heels. And sure enough there were but a flash in the pan and a good round oath from the head man.

When I was clear of San Lucar I walked at my best pace all that night and then hid myself in a thicket by the river. In the evening I ate some wild green figs and set out again, arriving at Seville in the early morning. The town was full of strangers from the fleet, which made it the safer for me so long as I did not meet some former comrade. I soon found the street where the weavers had their houses and looked for a shop which dealt in silks and fine taffetas. The first master-weaver with whom I spoke had no need of workmen or indeed of any man who looked so much like a beggar as I did; but the second received me kindly and put me to work on a loom to see what I could do. When he perceived that I knew some parts of the craft as well as he did himself, he agreed to take me on, offering me food and living space and a fair wage.

He said that he hoped to have a good trade in his stuffs now that the fleet was in, and you may be sure I did not tell him I had arrived with it. I gave my name as Alonso Hernandez and claimed to have learned my trade in Madrid. My doleful story was that I had come south to visit my family in the Sierra Morena and been robbed on the road. So rather than beg my way to Madrid I thought I would try my luck in Seville, staying close to my work until my fortunes were restored.

He was only too glad that I should not stir from the looms, for I was too ragged to be seen in the shop. So I laboured away and aroused no suspicion among my fellow workmen who understood very well that there was nothing to be gained by going out into the town when a man had no money in his pocket and could have no pride in himself and his appearance. Since our master laid out for us good food and drink they did not think it strange that I should stay indoors until I could call for my wages.

Meanwhile search was being made for me in Seville. Four days after my arrival, the workmen said that an Englishman had come home with the fleet disguised as a soldier and that he was in such close league with the devil that he could make a pistol misfire.

‘Would to God that I knew his face,’ I cried, ‘and that I could hand over such a heretic to the Holy Office!’

But they never dreamed that I could be the man, for the Spaniards believe that no foreigner can speak their language as they themselves, though it is as easy as can be. And who would think that such a fire-eater could be a quiet weaver in a back room?

I had always to keep a watch on my tongue. All I knew of Spain was what I had heard from others, and of New Spain I dared say nothing. This was often hard for me when my master asked where I had won my knowledge of dyes and how I could weave strange patterns which sold very well. He thought that the designs were ferns and sprigs of flowers while what I had in mind was the featherwork of the Indians. Though New Spain had proved so dangerous to me, I continually remembered the kindness of the friars and of the men of every race who had received me as a friend. Yet I was very content that I had not married and settled like Paul Horsewell and the rest, and that I had learned this trade by which I could keep myself.

After three months I reckoned that there would no longer be any hue and cry after me, so I called for my wages and went out to buy new clothes, all of them befitting a sober craftsman and as different as they could be from those of seamen and soldiers. I was very careful not to show myself in public places in case some former comrade such as Rafael should link his arm in mine and hail me as Miguel Perez.

One day I heard to my great joy that there were English ships in San Lucar. They came but seldom. Although there was still no open war between Her Majesty and King Philip, trade was unprofitable. A shipmaster could never be sure that he would not be captured on the high seas or detained in a Spanish port because some Spanish shipmaster was detained in England. Indeed all were little better than pirates, though with some semblance of legality.

Yet the Spaniards needed to sell the silver, spices, dyes and a hundred other products of the Indies, and therefore licensed foreign ships, whether manned by heretics or not, to trade in their ports. In Seville were several English merchants, all good Catholics who had married Spanish wives and had nothing to fear from the Holy Office. Among them was one Hugh Tipton who, it was said, had done business with William and John Hawkins and had saved the lives of the hostages whom we gave before the battle of San Juan de Ulua, seeing them safely back to England.

My case was very different, and I did not dare to approach Mr Tipton. I was no gentleman hostage whom King Philip had to release or lose his honour. I was but a cabin boy who had escaped from the Holy Office, which in itself was a crime worthy of the galleys. And, worse still, they had chosen to believe that after being converted I had returned to the Protestant faith, for which there was no other penalty but burning.

Therefore I decided that I would secretly talk with one of the English shipmasters, letting no one else know my business. I hired a boat to take me down to San Lucar on the pretence of finding out if the English needed our taffetas. Sure enough there were three ships alongside the quay, and my heart leaped when I beheld the Cross of St George flying from the mizzen, a sight which I had not seen for fourteen years and more.

In the town I heard English spoken again and could hardly keep myself from answering. Victuallers who sold stores to the ships told me that only one, Rose of Bristol, was commanded by a Lutheran. The masters of the other two, both Hugh Tipton’s ships, were Catholics: one an Irishman and the other a Portuguese in English service.

I went on board Rose of Bristol and found the Master ready enough to talk of taffetas in his bad Spanish. When we had spoken of his hardships, his family and so forth, I asked him if he knew anything of the Minion and whether she had returned safely to England.

‘She came home close to the New Year of 1569,’ he answered, ‘with only fifteen survivors. Many more were alive, so it is said, when Mr Hawkins put in to the port of Vigo to buy fresh provisions for his starving men. But they ate so greedily that scores of them died before the Minion reached Plymouth.’

‘And did you ever hear that a hundred were set on shore in New Spain after the battle of San Juan de Ulua?’

‘Aye, and all but two or three never heard of since.’

‘I am one of them,’ I said, now at last speaking to him in English. ‘My true name is Miles Philips. I escaped from New Spain and the Holy Office and I am now a weaver in Seville. Will you carry me home to England?’

‘Willingly,’ he answered, ‘if my factor in the port tells me it is safe to do so.’

I warned him that I was in great danger and that if he opened his mouth to the factor it could be the end of me.

‘It could be the end of me, too,’ he said, ‘if I am caught shipping prisoners out of Spain.’

‘But who would know?’

‘I cannot be certain. Trade is trade, Master Philips, and a poor shipmaster must do what he can. If it were discovered that I had given you a passage, the dons would have an excuse to hold me in San Lucar for a year while the ambassadors and secretaries used up more ink about me than my cargo is worth. Look you, I dare not take you on board now and I cannot send messengers after you to Seville when we are ready to sail.’

‘But I could hide myself near by until I see you cast off,’ I said.

‘No, it will not do, Master Philips, it will not do. The dons know more than we think. I tell you that neither I nor my men can go ashore without looking over our shoulders and talking in whispers.’

I begged and begged, but all the help I could get from the man was to tell me to speak Spanish in case I were overheard by a secretary of the Customs who had come on deck. And so I left him and returned to my boat with my eyes full of tears, hardly able to believe than an English seaman would treat me so.

CHAPTER NINE

This sight of English ships in the Guadalquivir recalled it to my mind that they sailed also to Italy and the Levant and wherever there was trade; and I saw that instead of waiting for a chance encounter I must go in search of them. I could think of no better way of setting out again on my travels than to enlist as a ship’s soldier.

A week later I told the master-weaver that I had a longing to return to Madrid. Though he pleaded with me to stay and swore that in a few years I might become his partner, I played the obstinate fool who did not wish to settle. So I put the little I possessed on my back and took the road to the east with the good wishes of my fellow workmen, some of whom accompanied me as far as the city gate.

As soon as they had turned back and were out of sight, I made my way round the city into the high road for Cadiz, which is the strongest port and arsenal which the Spaniards have on that coast. It took me three days to walk there, and my journey at first seemed vain, for when I talked to the seamen of the port I learned that if I shipped as a soldier I might be sent across the Ocean and be in a worse plight than ever.

While I was watching the ships in the harbour, which is as fine as Havana but difficult to leave unless the wind is southerly, I saw a great, low ship, like a golden water beetle, come skimming across the harbour and take in tow a ship of war as high as the Jesus of Lubeck which was ready to sail.

I said to the seaman who was with me that her men were lucky not to have to sweat at the oars to get her out to sea, and that I had never set eyes on so grand a tugboat.

‘That is one of the King’s galleys from Puerto Santa Maria,’ he told me. ‘When they are in port, they sometimes practise the rowers by towing out the great galleons.’

Then I remembered that Rafael, who had done the better part of his service in the galleys, told me that they only voyaged in the calm waters of the Mediterranean.

So I walked around Cadiz Bay to Puerto Santa Maria. I gave my name of Alonso Hernandez to the Navy Office and said that I desired to volunteer for the galleys, being a native of Havana who had often served on His Majesty’s ships between that port and the Isthmus of Panama. They asked me only if I were trained in the use of the pike, to which I answered that I was not – wondering to myself what good a twenty-foot pike could be on shipboard – but that I could give a good account of myself with all fire-arms and had also served as a gunner. With that they were satisfied and posted me as a soldier to the galley Corona de Castilla.

She was near one hundred and fifty feet long and low in the water. On each side were twenty-six oars with four men to the oar. At the stern was a castle, splendidly carved and shining with gold, in the upper part of which lived the Master and his officers, and in the lower part we soldiers. At the bows she had a great beak for ramming the enemy, with a fighting platform over it just as Rafael had described. Below the platform was a long cannonperier throwing a shot of twenty-four pounds, with an eight-pound demi-culverin on each side of it, all trained forward.

The rowers were convicted felons who in our country would have been hanged. The Spaniards are more merciful or less wasteful than ourselves. Yet it was a living death to which they were condemned. They were chained four to an oar and given a daily ration of water and two pounds of biscuit. How they found strength to pull an oar day after day with such wretched food in their bellies I could not understand, though myself knowing more than most of hardship and hunger. They were given more food – and more lashes with it – when there was some great effort to be made, as if they were brute beasts. Indeed they were worse treated, and more like to the sails of a windmill than flesh and blood.

When they were not rowing, they had the appearance of so many friars, wearing hooded gowns to protect them from the weather. For the rest, each man had a shirt, a pair of coarse canvas breeches and a red cloth coat. Every month their heads and beards were shaved, but they were still faceless men, seldom raising their eyes from the oars.

We soldiers, lying in idleness below the after castle, came to know the sixteen men who pulled the first four oars and we were not prevented from showing them Christian charity and giving them a piece of meat or a taste of wine when the drum was silent. This drum which beat the stroke hour after hour was hard to bear until I grew accustomed to the sound and noticed it no longer.

One of the faces above the stroke oar to starboard seemed familiar to me. The man was called Job which was very fitting, since Job’s sufferings were little worse than his. For the most part the rowers went under nicknames such as One-eyed, Beauty, The Priest, The Gallant and so forth.

One evening when it was the turn of his oar to sleep I stopped near him. Cutting a good piece from my sausage I gave it to him and asked whether he had robbed a bishop or merely killed a man, for they all loved to boast of their crimes, having nothing else on which to pride themselves.

‘No, soldier,’ he replied. ‘I was condemned as a heretic.’

‘And were you one?’

‘Neither more nor less than my countrymen. I was English.’

I looked at him closely and was hard put to it not to weep and embrace him, for this was Job Hartop who had taught me to load and fire a gun on the Jesus of Lubeck when I was thirteen years old.

Then I knew what my comrades suffered who had been sentenced to the galleys. I asked him whether there were many Englishmen in such misery and he answered that, for all he knew, he was the last left alive. He did not recognise me, for he had last seen me as a child and now I was bearded and moustachioed with helmet on my head, sword at my side and King Philip’s arms embroidered on my doublet.

All I could do for him without being myself suspected was to talk to him from time to time and give him a swig from my jug. When my comrades laughed at me for the favour I showed him, I would say that an honest soldier should be allowed to go to hell if he so wished without being tortured in this life as well. To this they heartily agreed.

We coasted along the shores of Africa, looking for pirates from Algiers; but they were too careful to put to sea against so fast and powerful a vessel. And of this I was very glad, having no wish to stand on the platform above the beak with the Turks and Moors aiming at me. Then we sailed north and put into Cartagena where we soldiers received some pay and were allowed to make merry ashore.

After that we rowed across to the port of Palma in the island of Majorca, arriving there on the Twelfth Day of Christmas. The Corona de Castilla glided to her berth beneath the shadow of the cathedral. The drum stopped and the chains of the rowers clanked as they dropped their heads on the oars and slept, huddled in their gowns.

I went ashore with the other soldiers and we swaggered along the waterfront looking at the plain, working ships from Valencia and Barcelona and the ports of Italy and France, which had not the splendour of our golden galley. I pretended not to take notice of two English ships from the West Country, one of Poole and one of Topsham. Their hatches were on, their seamen all on deck, and they were ready to sail at the first change of wind.

There was no time to be lost. When night fell I separated myself from my companions and bought a short gown such as students wear, paying with some pieces of silver which I had won at dice. Then I went down to the port, hid my belt and sword in one pile of fish nets and my helmet in another, and put on the gown which covered my doublet.

Of the two ships I liked best the Landret of Poole, for she seemed to me a handy craft of about one hundred and fifty tons and a fast sailer. So I strolled up to her, whistling as if I had not a care in the world, and shouted in English, ‘Ahoy there, Landret!’

A seaman leaned over the bulwarks and, thinking I had come to sell them stores, told me they wanted for nothing.

I said that I had come to buy, not sell, and asked if the Master were on board.

‘And where else would he be when, God willing, we sail before dawn?’

‘Then I would have a word with him,’ I answered boldly.

Master Fothergill was a good old seaman of Poole. At first I found it hard to understand him, having lost the habitude of English for so long.

‘You be from Devon?’ he asked as soon as I opened my mouth.

I had forgotten that the only English I spoke was Devon as broad as his Dorset, though my Spanish was pure enough for any bishop.

‘Aye, from Plymouth.’

‘And what do you among the dons who have no good will to Plymouth men?’

‘Why, Master,’ I answered, ‘a student is a student all the world over, and I have been two years in Spain to learn their language and whatever else they can teach me.’

He then asked me if I were a Catholic, and I could tell by his voice that he was not.

‘When in Spain I do as the Spaniards do, Master Fothergill,’ I replied.

‘And so do all my company, or I’ll know the reason why! And now what can I do for you?’

With my heart in my mouth I told him that I wanted a passage because I had no more money and no means of getting any from home.

‘But can you pay?’ he asked. ‘I have met with students before, and not a one of them ever had a penny to his name.’

‘If you will take a fine Toledo sword instead of money, I will gladly give it to you,’ I said. ‘And you may not find me as useless a shipmate as you think.’

‘Stolen it, have you?’

‘By the Lord, I bought it at Cadiz and have never dishonoured it!’ I cried.

I would not leave the ship, fearing that he might change his mind and sail without me, so Master Fothergill sent a seaman to fetch my sword and belt from the nets where I said it was. I drew it and showed him the mark of Toledo.

‘You did not draw that like a student,’ he said, ‘and you wear the baggy breeches of a soldier below your gown. If I mistake not, Master Philips of Plymouth, you would be happier below decks until we sail.’

He led me down to the after hold and told me to stay among the barrels till the Landret sailed. I did not sleep, you may be sure, but listened to every sound on deck until at last I heard the mooring ropes splash into the water and the creaking of the rudder as the foresail hauled her bows off the quay, and then the feet of the seamen as they loosed the mainsails. When the Landret leaned over with the dawn wind steady on the beam and the bit between her teeth I came on deck.

I found her of a new style which Master Fothergill told me the shipwrights of Poole learned from the Sea Rovers out of the Low Countries. Her main mast carried a sprit sail, rigged fore and aft as they call it, and on the mizzen was a lug sail. Only the fore mast carried mainsail and topsail that were square. This newfangled rig of hers was not so good as the old in light airs, but allowed her to sail much closer to the wind than any vessel I ever saw. She was not deep laden, having little heavy cargo but Italian wines. The rest of her burden was of currants, dried fruits, worked leather and Valencia silks.

Now that we were safely at sea I told my story to Master Fothergill and his mate, who blessed themselves and damned their eyes at every second word of it and swore that I should reach Poole in good heart. They made known to me that John Hawkins was now Treasurer of Her Majesty’s Navy and a great man at court. It was said that he grieved for his lost men and that he had lists of all those sentenced by the Holy Office and had visited Spain on their behalf, but without avail. Master Fothergill pressed me to go to London and see him, and assured me that I should not have to wait in his anteroom, for he would run and embrace me as soon as he heard my name.

I was well able to fulfil my promise that I could be of some use on the voyage. The Landret was poorly armed, with only twelve guns which the crew had seldom fired. She could escape from any privateer who had a mind to her cargo by sailing close to the wind.

The guns were short, old-fashioned cannon of little range but throwing a twenty-pound ball, and I made it my business to see to the training of the seamen who thought it enough if they could loose off a shot without killing themselves. The powder and ball, rods, sponges and lashings sufficed for a merchantman but never would have satisfied a master gunner on the Jesus of Lubeck or the San Felipe.

We met strong westerly winds which prevented us closing with the coast of Spain. So Master Fothergill ran to the southward, intending to put about before there was any danger of Moorish pirates sighting us. But off Algiers the wind dropped, and we found ourselves just in sight of the hills above the town.

We soon picked up a fresh breeze from the north-east which promised an easy run to the Straits of Gibraltar. When the coast of Africa was below the horizon, the look-out at the masthead cried out that he saw a woundy great rowing boat coming after us. I ran up the shrouds to see what it was, and sure enough it was a Moorish galley, not so long as the Corona de Castilla but big enough to have a plain merchantman for breakfast.

‘Well, Miles, I fear you will see the inside of a Moorish prison and like it no better than a Spanish,’ said Master Fothergill.

Indeed I had little hope, for the galley must catch us unless the sea grew too rough for her; and our crew had no more than cutlasses and some old rusty cross-bows to repel the boarders when they swarmed on to us.

Master Fothergill asked if there were any way to keep her off or escape pursuit, since I must know more than he of a galley master’s seamanship.

I advised him first to put the helm down a little so as to bring the short seas directly on to our beam. When a galley is driving into the sea, her bow guns can be held steady on the mark, so that a good gunner can score a hit with every two shots; but when she is rolling in a beam sea the gun sights move across the target, and it is much harder for the gunner to judge the moment to fire. Also, I said the galley is slower in pursuit when the oars are biting deep on one side and may be skimming the water on the other.

The galley turned to follow us, and I could see the white spray which the oars threw up as she rolled. But in spite of her wallowing in the short seas she came up with us fast until I could hear the beat of the drum across the water.

The Moors tried two shots with the bow chaser, but both plunged into the sea to starboard. The Landret handled like a pinnace, and Master Fothergill at the helm kept her zigzagging so that the galley had to veer continually to bring her guns to bear.

Then, with the Master’s leave, I called the gun crews together in the waist and told them what they should do.

‘When these heathen Turks come abreast of us,’ I said, ‘do not waste your fire on the banks of oars! We shall never make our escape that way. With only half its oars, the galley could still catch us. Fire at the after castle whenever it comes into your sights! The timbers are light, and you may well hit the turban of her infidel master which will do no good to his head. When you have fired, load with grape and wait for orders!’

We could now plainly see the beak of the galley, which was in the shape of a unicorn with a red, open mouth, from which their bow chasers fired at us. Over the beak were Moors in good, bright armour and pointed helmets. On the after castle were some in white robes tucked up to their knees for the fight, and others in Turkish trousers naked to the waist. All carried about their bodies enough swords, spears and pistols to arm two squadrons of Her Majesty’s horse.

She could now have disabled us whatever tricks Master Fothergill played with the wind. But the Moorish pirates like to take ship and cargo with the least damage possible, and would rather have the seamen alive than dead. They hold them for ransom and use them as slaves meanwhile. And if there is no ransom – as how should there be for most of the poor fellows? – then they are slaves till they die.

When the beak of the galley nearly overlapped our stern, Master Fothergill bore away and she shot past us. The after castle came into the sights of our starboard broadside, and the six guns fired in succession, not one of them missing at so close a range.

They were all at sixes and sevens in the galley, for we had killed both master and mate, as we afterwards learned. So the Landret had time to put about and fire the larboard broadside. That left the castle with the sea breeze blowing through it and the poop deck aslant on the stanchions.

The Moors were angry, for they had never expected such resistance. So they no longer cared what damage they did to their prize and fought to impale the Landret on the ram. The galley swung round in a circle. The beat of the drum quickened and their horns sounded. Then she came at us, storming through the water like a great swordfish with the unicorn aimed at our larboard quarter so that our broadside could not be brought to bear on her.

Master Fothergill luffed up into the wind, hoping to avoid the charge. But that did no good since the coxswain of the galley had only to touch the tiller to keep the beak aiming at us. Meanwhile the Landret was in stays, barely moving through the water with her sails flapping.

We gave ourselves up for lost. But there was Master Fothergill at the helm talking to the Landret as if she were his sweetheart, as indeed she was.

‘Come round, my little beauty!’ he entreated her through his teeth. ‘Pay off, my darling!’

And suddenly the great spritsail on the main flopped over, and she answered the helm and began to thump her bows into the seas.

Now, the coxswain of the galley must have thought that we were helpless, being accustomed to deep-laden, square-rigged caravels. As soon as he saw that we had the wind in our sails again, he altered course to ram us by the stern. The three balls from the bow guns crashed into our timbers above the waterline, but the beak missed us by a bare fathom. The bank of oars did not, splintering against the Landret’s stern and rudder. The soldiers in her bows tried to catch us with their grappling irons and board, but were thrown off their feet by the shock. So there she was at our mercy so long as we kept clear of her bow guns.

Our starboard cannon were now reloaded, using canisters of grapeshot as I had ordered. We came up under the galley’s stern and tore the rest of the castle to pieces, wiping the poop so clean of men that I could see the blood running down the ladders and out of the scuppers. Ourselves we had suffered no loss, since the Landret’s bulwarks were stout and sheltered us from the hand-guns of the soldiers. So we sheered off and resumed our course.

But then there came from the galley a great cry in Spanish:

‘Englishmen, do not leave us! For the love of God, do not leave us!’

And I, understanding that the galley slaves were Spaniards taken in battle or kidnapped from lonely villages along the coast, begged Master Fothergill to put back and rescue them. But he would not, saying that we had tempted fortune enough already.

‘Then give me my sword back!’ I said.

‘I never meant to keep it,’ he answered. ‘Why would you have it now?’

‘Because I will swim there sword in hand rather than leave them chained,’ I cried, for the time more a Castilian than an Englishman. ‘They have hunted me like a beast and would burn me if they caught me. But what have those men to do with the Holy Office? They are my neighbours and I love them. And now that I am free and they in chains, I will not suffer it!’

‘Well, the less dons the better, say I,’ answered Master Fothergill. ‘But we could do with the galley’s guns.’

So he put the Landret about. As we came down on them, we saw the overseer running up between the rowers and lashing them so that he was more like to have killed them than to encourage them to more speed. Then Master Fothergill gave the helm to his mate and picked up an old-fashioned long bow which he kept by him, always swearing that if it was good enough for his grandfather, it was good enough for him. And, notching an arrow to it, he nicely judged the pitch of the ship and shot the overseer clean through the body.

Then the galley slaves all rattled their chains, refusing to row and shouting, ‘Long live the Englishmen! What a shot!’

There were still scores of Moorish pirates crouching in the bows beneath the shelter of the platform. We passed across the galley’s stern and fired a broadside of grape into them over the heads of the rowers. They then bowed themselves, throwing down their arms and stretching out their hands, and an old white-robed scoundrel with a long beard struck their green flag with Turkish writing on it.

We came alongside and boarded her. The Landret’s armourer and his mate struck the chains off the galley slaves. There were no Englishmen amongst them, only Spaniards and Italians, some of whom had been slaves for ten years and more.

We had no use for our prize since we could neither tow her nor row her back to England. So we lifted the two smaller guns out of her and ransacked the cabin and our Moorish prisoners for all the gold and valuables they had. Then we tied them up and cleared away the wreckage and broken oars, telling the Spaniards to row for themselves as they had for their masters. We stood by them until they were on a safe course for Cartagena and then wished them God-speed.

The wind freshened and steadied, so that next day both watches could gather by the mainmast, leaving a single man at the helm. Then I saw how the honest men of Poole divided the spoil between themselves. Honest, I say. But most of them had raided up and down Channel on board the ships of the Sea Rovers – who are Protestants driven from their homes in France and the Low Countries – seizing prizes from all nations but the English, whose harbours they used.

The loot which each man took from the galley had been put into a common store. Master Fothergill now brought the locked chest from the great cabin and emptied it on to the deck. There was money of all sorts, together with rings, buckles and necklaces of silver and gold. These the Master weighed, writing down the value in a book. When all was totted up, the booty was divided two-thirds to the officers and one-third to the crew.

Then said Master Fothergill, ‘Lads, what shall be the share of our passenger, Master Miles Philips, whose name of Alonso Hernandez better suits him?’

With that they all started to throw pieces of money into an empty powder keg, but I would not accept it, thinking their share very small for the dangers they had run. I declared that I owed to them all my life and liberty and had no need of any other gifts.

‘Well, if you will not,’ Master Fothergill said, ‘then as I am Master of the Landret and under God may do what I please, I appoint you to the command of all soldiers on board. And it makes no odds that you are the only one, for you are now an officer and must share our part.’

He would not take no for an answer, and all were so pleased with the jest that it would have been churlish to refuse. So I found myself with a bag of ducats, thalers, angels and sequins to the value of one hundred and fifty pounds sterling.

We passed the Straits of Gibraltar, and our voyage home was fair and fast with half a gale behind us which would have caused us to sweat at the pumps in the Jesus of Lubeck but carried the Landret safe and sound into the chops of the Channel. I saw no land but a glimpse of the Scillies when the rain lifted until we were roaring past Old Harry with the white cliffs of the Isle of Wight to starboard. There we tacked to and fro to wait for the tide, and at nightfall of the Fifteenth of February 1582 the Landret anchored in the fairway of Poole Harbour with the old buildings on the quay dark shadows against the moon and the church bells ringing to greet us. Through the Providence of Almighty God I was home again in my native country of England after fifteen years.

Extract of a letter of the year 1603 from Mr Miles Philips, Merchant Venturer of Plymouth in the County of Devon, to his sons, John and Bernardo.

… and when you were little more than babes you were wont to ask me why I, who was in some degree a seaman and soldier, never fought against the Spanish Armada of 1588, and I answered you always that then I was a peaceful trader.

But now that you are nine and ten years old and have more understanding of Kingdoms and of War, I would have you learn the truth and know that your father spoke with Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth in order that you may tell it in turn to your children. So I will take up my story from that happy night of 1582 when the Landret anchored in Poole Harbour.

Having stayed a few nights beneath the roof of Master Fothergill, I bought a horse – a sorry creature which would have drawn a cart in Spain or the Indies – and rode to London. The day after my arrival I called upon Mr John Hawkins at his residence upon Tower Hill, hard by the Navy Office. I had no sooner sent in my name to him, saying that I was that same Miles Philips who had served in the pantry upon the Jesus of Lubeck, than he came running out, thrusting the porter aside, and embraced me as if I had been his son.

He was that day bound down river to Chatham and took me with him in his barge so that we had many hours together in the little cabin at the stern. I told him of his nephew, Paul Horsewell, and he was more displeased that Paul should be a Catholic than that he should have made his home in New Spain. Also I told him what I knew of the fate of the others who had been set on shore from the Minion and of my meeting with poor Job Hartop, who, as you know, returned to England in the year 1590 and wrote his story for Master Hakluyt as I had done myself.

I found Mr Hawkins greatly changed, splendid as ever in dress and bearing, but gone grey with the cares of the dockyard and the Court. He spoke more godly than he used to, and was now filled with hatred of the Spaniards and their popery, as he called it.

He said to me that I had become a fine gentleman and more of a damned don than an Englishman, to which I answered that time would remedy it and that I desired nevermore to leave my country. Further, I asked him to recommend me to some merchant trading in the cochineal and dyes and spices of the Indies who might take me as a partner for the sake of my knowledge and my little money.

This made him very thoughtful, and I feared that I had been too bold.

‘We will speak of that later, lad,’ he said. ‘You shall stay with me in Chatham and see our new ship Revenge and the old Victory which I have now stripped of all fal-lals as we did the Jesus of Lubeck off the coast of Florida.’

When we returned to London, my nostrils were full of the scent of oak and my ears still rang with the picking of the ship-Wrights’ adzes and the rattle of the capstans as the great cannon were hauled up from dockside to deck. Mr Hawkins engaged a lodging for me and told me to provide myself with clothes at his expense, saying that I might find myself in the company of greater men than he.

‘Then, sir, I will choose the blue which was the colour of your service on the Jesus of Lubeck,’ I replied, wishing him to know that I felt myself his to command.

‘Nay, Miles, you must be more soberly dressed now that you are a man,’ he said. ‘I would have you all in fine black velvet like a don, wearing a gold chain which I will give you, and your sword at your side.’

A week later he summoned me to meet him at eleven of the forenoon in the great court of Whitehall. When he saw me, he laughed and swore that with my bronzed skin and curled beard – which was then as black as night – I looked like the Governor of Cartagena. So he led me up back stairs, telling me that we were going to speak privately with Lord Burghley.

At that I held back, pleading that I would rather enter the den of some monstrous spider in Honduras.

Mr Hawkins owned that indeed no man knew where his web began or ended, but said that I should find the spider himself old and kindly. Moreover, I was to speak out boldly before him, remembering that he was Her Majesty’s chief Secretary of State and that the two held between them the fate of England in those perilous years.

We passed straight into Lord Burghley’s room by an inner door and found him standing by the fire, for it was bitter cold outside. He had a huge beard parted in the middle and such eyes as I never saw in any other man, for they were piercing and jovial, yet revealed nothing of his thought.

‘This is Master Miles Philips, my gracious lord, of whom we spoke at length some days past,’ said Mr Hawkins.

I could not make out why I should have been the subject of their talk and supposed they wished to know more of the defences of Havana or of what value the Indians could be as allies, Mr Hawkins having questioned me closely on both points. But it seemed to be Spain, not New Spain, which was of interest to Lord Burghley for he made me talk of my daily life as weaver and soldier.

Then he spoke to me very eloquently of how King Philip was collecting a fleet in his ports in order to depose Her Majesty and bring the Holy Office into England, and that if ever he could set his army on shore our levies would not stand against soldiers so trained and hardened to battle as the Spaniards.

‘Therefore,’ said he, ‘we may fare very ill unless John Hawkins and Drake and the rest of them can catch the dons at sea. Now, what have you to say to that, Master Philips?’

‘Why, my lord, that one of our ships is worth ten of theirs,’ I answered. ‘But first we must know whether their fleet is bound for Ireland or Plymouth or the Low Countries.’

Mr Hawkins appeared much pleased, and cried out, ‘There, my lord!’

‘That indeed is what I must know, Master Philips,’ Lord Burghley said gravely. ‘But who will tell me?’

‘They say that gold will bring an answer to most questions, my gracious lord.’

‘It will indeed, but love of country will bring a better,’ he said. ‘Now, such a man as you who can pass as friar, weaver, soldier or merchant from the Indies could serve Her Majesty very well in the ports of Lisbon or Corunna.’

I was blunter with him than I intended, being only a simple Devon man in spite of my fine clothes.

‘I have escaped once from the rack, the galleys and the burning, and once is enough,’ I said.

Mr Hawkins pressed me very hard, swearing that they would have all shipshape when they put me on shore so that neither don nor devil nor the cuadrillas could ever suspect me. But I would not. I told them that they must depend for their news upon the English merchants of the northern ports of Seville, who served as agents for both sides.

‘Well, Miles, you may leave us now,’ Mr Hawkins said. ‘But dine with me on Tower Hill next Tuesday noon and we will make merry as two Devon men together and forget all this.’

When we met he was as good as his word, and said nothing of Spanish ports and friars, so I thought it was all done with and that he would leave me in peace to buy and sell my cochineal. But as I left his house with a bellyfull of his best Canary wine, he slapped his thigh and declared that he had failed to give me some good news.

‘Her Majesty, being a woman – as indeed none of her servants may ever forget – is curious, Miles, and would see one who has so strange a story.’

‘She will not speak to me?’ I cried, half dreading it and half dreaming that she might.

‘As to that, I do not know,’ Mr Hawkins answered. ‘But you shall see her, and she you.’

So there came a day when we rode most gallantly to Hampton Court, and I heard the people saying as we passed through the streets of London, ‘There goes John Hawkins! How many ships hast built today, John?’

And some asked who was that riding with him, to which others answered that it must be some Spanish captain whom the old fox was cozening.

We were led to the small state-room, since Her Majesty had no public business that night. My eyes were dazzled by the hundreds of wax candles, the blazing of the fire in the mighty great chimney and the clothes and jewels of the gentlemen who strolled about jesting one with another. I remember Sir Christopher Hatton in crimson and white and Sir Walter Raleigh in plum taffeta and Lord Burghley, who clapped me on the shoulder, in a long, furred gown of sad olive green.

Then a chamberlain entered and knocked with his staff upon the floor, when the gentlemen formed themselves into two lines, and Mr Hawkins and I stood behind the men-at-arms.

Through the door came Her Majesty with her ladies-in-waiting who, I suppose, were fair enough, but I had no eye for them. She was stiff with gold brocade embroidered with pearls and wore on her hair, which was the colour of new-mined copper, a little cap, with diamonds and fine veiling round it. She moved so graciously that she seemed to me like a ship with golden sails and the first breath of wind in them.

She sat down, and her ladies and gentlemen gathered round her easily and lovingly while the music played. Though they might laugh at her in private and curse and swear because she was too careful a housekeeper for England, I could see that they worshipped her. She was all woman from top to toe, but her eyes were frank and merry as those of a gallant captain.

When all were at their ease, she beckoned to Mr Hawkins to bring me to her, and I fell on one knee before her not daring to lift my eyes or open my mouth, more than to whisper to myself ‘Gloriana’ which I think she may have heard.

‘Poor Miles has lost his English,’ she said. ‘But let me hear something in the Indian language!’

Then I took courage, and it came into my mind to greet her as the goddess Xochiquetzal, of whom I had heard much from Xolotl.

‘And what does that mean?’ she asked.

‘Flower Feather, Goddess of Flowers, Guide of the hand of the craftsman,’ I murmured.

‘Flower Feather,’ she repeated, much pleased. ‘A pretty conceit! But my poets and craftsmen must guide themselves, for the most I can do is to keep an England fit for their magnificence, whether they serve Gloriana with sonnets, swords or hands or … their wits, Miles. Is it true what they say: that you wore King Philip’s crown on your doublet?’

‘Yes, Madam.’ I answered. ‘God forgive me!’

‘Then wear mine in your heart, my Spanish soldier, my Indian,’ she said, gently pulling my ear as I knelt before her, ‘and let no one ever know that it is there!’

Nor did I, my beloved sons, until after the Armada was scattered and John Hawkins knighted on the deck of the Lord Admiral’s flagship. Then I came home a second time from Spain in the year 1592, bringing with me Paquita, your dear mother, whom you must ever honour because for love of me she took to herself my country and my faith.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Miles Philips was a real person. His story is in Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation published in 1589 by Richard Hakluyt. Hakluyt has been called the most influential writer of the Age of Shakespeare, since it was he who opened the eyes of the Elizabethans to the romance of the whole world, tropical or arctic, beyond their island, as well as the boundless opportunities for profit.

For us it is as if a first-class newspaperman had been alive at the time. He was on the spot to ask questions of the merchants, shipmasters and seamen, to prod them into putting something on paper and to edit the result. Without Hakluyt few of them would ever have described their trading voyages and adventures, and we should be left to extract mere tantalising bits of information from archives, log books and customs records.

Usually he preserved their own words. The great captains like Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh and Frobisher write in their individual styles. Smaller fry with a good story to tell, like Miles Philips, Job Hartop and the many merchants who were English by birth and Spanish by residence, are edited with extraordinary skill – for they cannot all have been such born writers as they seem – so that their characters, sympathies and personal interests are clear and sharp.

I have naturally given Miles Philips a style simpler than his own, rather as if he had lived a hundred years later than he did. I have followed his movements exactly, merely filling in the details. His narrative covers fifteen years of boyhood and youth very quickly and somewhere he has missed a year in his dates; so he must have had many adventures which he never mentions. I have felt free to invent them as well as some additional characters.

But I have invented nothing else, and tried to give a true picture of Spanish–American society in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The Empire of the Aztecs had been conquered by Hernando Cortés in 1521 at the head of his Indian allies and his heroic band of 928 Spaniards – the figure given by Bernal Diaz who fought throughout the terrible campaign and wrote the story of it when he was in his eighties. Explorers then discovered Florida, the Mississippi and the southern seaboard of the United States. Cortés himself and his captains opened up the whole of Central America.

The immense kingdom which this handful of incredible men added to the Spanish Crown was ruled by a Viceroy under the Council of the Indies and known as New Spain. The name of Mexico was then only applied to the capital and its valley. The country was sparsely settled: a few adventurous spirits in the vast spaces of the north, plenty of great estancias and small, fairly primitive towns in the rich tropical lands between Mexico and Costa Rica. Miles Philips says that when Drake was on the coast the Viceroy reckoned the population of whites and mestizos as 30,000. He was probably not far out. The Indian population of at least four million far outnumbered them, yet New Spain was a paradise of plenty and utter peace.

Both Miles Philips and his contemporaries – some of them also in Hakluyt – acclaim the wonders of the valley and city of Mexico. Little remained of the Aztec capital. Tlatelolco, the northern half was destroyed in the last, desperate assault. The long battle through the streets reduced Tenochtitlan, the southern half, to ashes and rubble.

But the imagination of the Spaniards had been caught by this shining city on the lake, its perfect climate and the splendour of its avenues, canals, bridges and palaces. Four years after the conquest rebuilding was well under way. Christian churches took the place of the stepped pyramids on which had stood the Indian temples, black with the blood of human sacrifices. The main avenues were lined by monasteries, public buildings and the private houses of the rich.

It was so noble a city that travellers compared it to Venice. After a month or two to get over the strangeness, any of us today could have lived there in comfort, attended its theatre, been educated at its university, sailed on its lake and eaten the superb Aztec cooking which aroused the enthusiasm of every European, whereas in the London and Paris of the time we should have been sickened by the stenches and the squalor.

In Philips’ day the whole continent was Spanish from Texas to Patagonia, with the exception of the Portuguese settlements on the coast of Brazil. Foreigners, if not heretics, were allowed to immigrate, and foreign goods might be imported. But no foreign ships were allowed to trade.

Hawkins’ voyages were therefore illegal under Spanish law, though permitted by international law to which the statesmen of the day gave surprising respect. But inevitably the old alliance between England and Spain faded away as privateering in the Channel and the Caribbean became more persistent. The position during the twenty years before the Armada is familiar to us. It was cold war. When it flared up into a shooting war, as at San Juan de Ulua, both sides did their best to ignore incidents and confine themselves to diplomatic protests.

Yet the difficulties of trade were not alone enough to account for the blazing hatred of Spain which began to grow among Elizabeth’s captains and seamen. They feared and resented the Holy Inquisition as we today detest any form of secret police.

It was not because of the cruelty of the punishments. Sentences of horrible savagery upon traitors and criminals were then accepted as a matter of course. What appalled Miles Philips and his fellows was that these punishments were inflicted in the name of religion and upon captured seamen, for the early years of Elizabeth were a time of religious tolerance in England.

Miles himself was undoubtedly a Protestant but far from a Puritan. His admiration of the friars in New Spain stands out clearly from his story. In fact he dearly loved everything Spanish except the Inquisition, and, though he never lost his determination to escape, he was more at home in New Spain than any of his companions. Because he had completely acquired the Spanish culture and language, he was able to risk his secret, reckless journey across the Atlantic to Spain and home.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1967 by Geoffrey Household

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

978-1-4804-1108-1

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

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