Caribbean (31 page)

This was a penetrating question which the old warrior had to weigh carefully, but in the end he gave the answer of a very tired man: “If he goes to Ulúa, and with Hawkins present, there would be reason … well, then the job of fighting him is Mexico’s.” He pondered this and added: “Our job—protecting the Caribbean—is demanding enough.”

Spring dragged on, with no substantial news of Drake’s movements, but in mid-April news of an entirely different kind was rushed to Cartagena. It came from San Juan in Puerto Rico and was substantial indeed:

Now came anxious moments for Don Diego. He wanted to rush to Puerto Rico to help defend that great treasure and was inwardly gratified that he had some months ago deduced that Drake would be heading there, but he did not care to make any move until he was certain that Drake’s fleet had actually sailed. In the third week of September word flashed through the islands and the Main: “Drake has sailed!” but shortly thereafter came the perplexing news that Drake and Hawkins had stopped along the way to lay a nonproductive siege at the Grand Canary. “Ah ha!” Don Diego cried when he heard the news. “If he’s come by way of the Canaries, he’s heading for Puerto Rico,” and next day he dispatched the nineteen men of his family to their various posts.

When Don Diego approached San Juan in the
Mariposa
and saw the setting of roadstead and harbor in which he would be fighting what would surely be his last great duel with these two intrepid Englishmen, he was struck by a disarming thought: Good God! We’re all old men, fighting as if we were boys! Drake was fifty-two that summer, Hawkins sixty-three, and himself an ancient sixty-seven: But we’re still the best on the oceans.

As he entered the harbor Don Diego saw that reports about the loss of the
Begoña
had been accurate: demasted in a fierce Caribbean storm, she had no chance of proceeding to Spain, and sailors in the escort boat shouted: “We have her two million deep in the fortress over there. Drake’ll never touch it.” When he landed he found surprises awaiting, for the local commander informed him: “We’ve decided there’s no hope of fighting those two on the open seas. All ships inside the harbor.” Much as he disliked such restriction, he had to obey, so against his better judgment, he berthed his stalwart flagship inside. But when the last of his incoming fleet was safely tucked away, the commander startled him by announcing: “Tomorrow we bottle up the harbor by sinking what’s left of the
Begoña
right in the middle, and four smaller ships on either side,” and although both Ledesma and the captain of the big galleon protested, this was done.

Since Don Diego’s little fleet was now imprisoned so it could not get out, nor Drake get in, he asked the local authorities: “What am I
supposed to do?” and they told him curtly: “Help install the extra shore batteries,” so he and Roque removed all guns from the impounded ships and placed them at strategic points atop hills overlooking the approaches to the harbor.

While the Spaniards worked with belated speed to ready their defenses, they supposed they would be allowed three or four weeks for the task, but that was not to be. However, two items of extraordinary good luck now occurred to give them an advantage. As the English fleet sailed into the Caribbean, two of its ships lagged and alert Spanish frigates captured one of them, learning that Drake and Hawkins would arrive shortly at Puerto Rico. Armed with this precious knowledge, the scouting ships sped to San Juan, shouting the news as they arrived, so that when the English ships appeared every Spanish gun would be ready to fire directly in their teeth.

The other happening was one the Spaniards could not be aware of at the time, but no sooner had this English fleet left Plymouth back in August than its two admirals fell into violent dispute. Hawkins, as the older and more prudent, had wanted to cross the Atlantic at top speed and strike Puerto Rico before its defenses could be strengthened. Drake, however, insisted upon fighting a chain of fruitless battles on the way out, and thus wasted weeks.

Even now, on the eve of battle when every second was going to count, Drake demanded another useless layover in the Virgin Islands, hardly a day’s sail to Puerto Rico. Hawkins protested vehemently, failed once more to convince his impulsive associate, and realizing that their final adventure in the Caribbean was doomed because of Drake’s intransigence, he retired to his cabin, turned his weary body to the wall, and died.

After the burial of Hawkins in the sea on whose glorious surfaces he had gained renown, Drake arrived tardily at San Juan, where the stout land defenses organized by the Spanish generals easily repulsed him. Never did he get close to forcing his way into San Juan harbor, nor did he ever learn where the
Begoña
’s two million pesos were hidden, let alone capture the treasure.

Infuriated by the Spaniards’ refusal to fight in the open sea, he tried to force a landing party ashore, but succeeded only in losing many men. Lashing about like a wounded animal, Drake behaved exactly as Don Diego had predicted: in blind fury he roared south across the Caribbean to vent his rage on the undefended town of Río Hacha, where he captured not one gold piece but did waste nineteen
futile days, at the end of which in almost diabolical fury he burned everything in revenge for those slaves stolen from him nearly thirty years before. From there he stormed on to Santa Marta, another defenseless town, where again he found no treasure, and again wrecked the place.

Ledesma, learning upon his own return to Cartagena of Drake’s irrational behavior, paused only long enough to gather about the
Mariposa
a small, tight fleet with which he was determined to harry Drake to his death, and on the night before he sailed for the showdown at Nombre de Dios, he walked the battlements with his still-beautiful white-haired Leonora, and told her: “In a way, I pity him. Raging about like a wounded bull, attacking anything that moves, whether it’s part of his design or not.”

“Take care,” his wife warned. “A wounded bull is the most dangerous,” but he told her as they went up to bed: “Drake’s always dangerous, wounded or not, and now we have him.”

In the morning Ledesma weighed anchor and led his family forces on their final chase. As he had predicted, Drake did not bother with Cartagena this time, so with a sense of relief Don Diego and Roque trailed him at a respectful distance as he headed yet again for that little town which held such a stranglehold on his imagination, Nombre de Dios, where he found literally nothing but a collection of rotting houses, most of them long since abandoned: the terminus of the treasure trains from Panamá had been moved a short eighteen miles westward to a more favorable anchorage at a site called Porto Bello. Enraged at finding no treasure in Nombre de Dios, he burned the ruins. The vice-regent said as his soldiers watched from a safe lookout, “It’s not our town he’s burning. It’s his.”

Enmeshed in an increasing fury, Drake sailed the few miles to unfamiliar Porto Bello, found no treasure there, and burned that town too, as if personally insulted that it should have presumed to supplant his Nombre de Dios. Then, in an act of shocking irresponsibility, he dispatched a small body of heavily armed foot soldiers onto that dreadful footpath through the jungle to loot Panamá and perhaps destroy it—sixty against six thousand—but after the English soldiers had struggled hopelessly against the swamps, the mosquitoes and the repeated roadblocks erected by Diego’s other sons-in-law, where Indians lurked with poisoned arrows, the men sensibly revolted, shouted at their officers: “We’ll tolerate no more of this,” and trailed back empty-handed to their ships.

Now Drake, disheartened by this unbroken chain of disasters, conceived the insane idea of invading the rich cities that were supposed to rest on the highlands of Nicaragua, but when a Spaniard he captured from a small coasting vessel convinced him that there were no such golden cities and that the little ones which did exist had not a spare coin among them, he abandoned that diversion. Instead, he sailed back to Nombre de Dios as if lured there by the same mysterious challenge that had attracted him years before. In his despair, with Don Diego’s hounding ships lurking on the horizon like vultures, he took counsel with himself as to what grandiose action he might accomplish to humiliate King Philip—I’ll capture some vast treasure as I did at Valparaíso. I’ll destroy Havana the way I did San Domingo—but all he actually did was lash out halfheartedly against Don Diego’s fleet, like a great whale tormented by a host of worrisome foes he could not reach.

He was ending his days as Don Diego had foreseen “thrashing around but accomplishing nothing,” and when the dreadful fevers of Nombre de Dios assailed his ship, causing the deaths of many of his stout English sailors without their having struck one meaningful blow against Philip, he railed against the unlucky fate which had overtaken him. And then one evening the fever which had always lurked in these fetid areas, killing with a grand impartiality both the Spaniards who lugged silver across the isthmus and the Englishmen who tried to wrest it from them, struck Drake with malignant fury. When he looked up helplessly at his companions they saw terror in his eyes. “Is it to end like this?” he asked feebly, and in the morning he was dead.

To protect his body from the stalking Spaniards who might, his men feared, defile it in their hatred, they wrapped his corpse in canvas, weighted his shoulders and legs with lead, and pitched him into the waters of the Caribbean, which would forever carry echoes of his greatness.

Don Diego, whose persistence had hounded both Hawkins and Drake to their deaths, was not allowed to relish his victory for long, because when he returned to Cartagena to reassemble his scattered family he found a small flotilla in the spacious anchorage, and he feared for a moment that some contingent of Drake’s forces had slipped away to torment his walled city once again. But as he drew
closer he saw that the ships were Spanish, and when he reached his house he learned that it was indeed men who had come to torment him as he had tormented Drake, but they were from Spain, not England.

They were a three-man audiencia sent by King Philip to assess the numerous accusations that had been accumulating against him, thirty-one charges in number, ranging from gross theft of the king’s funds to suspected heresy in that someone had heard him say after a battle: “Let Drake worship in his way, I’ll worship in mine.” One of the most telling charges against him was that “he placed some nineteen of his family in positions from which they could steal vast sums belonging to the king, his most arrogant act being that of persuading a fine Cádiz ship captain, one Roque Ortega, to be rebaptized as Roque Ledesma y Ledesma in order to gain additional distinction for the family name.”

In the four months following Drake’s death, when the Ledesmas should have been celebrating with all other Spaniards in the Caribbean, the leader of their family sat at his desk trying to respond to these accusations, some so grave as to warrant the death sentence if proved, most so trivial that a magistrate would have dismissed them before lunch. But in the end the severe unblinking master of the commission persuaded his two associates to join him in finding Don Diego indictable on all counts, whereupon the savior of Cartagena was clapped into irons, hand and foot, and ordered back to Spain for trial in one of King Philip’s courts not famous for finding accused colonial officials innocent.

On his last night ashore, he begged his captors to allow him to walk once more on the battlements overlooking the Spanish Lake he had defended with such valor, but they would not permit this, afraid lest citizens rally to the defense of their hero and steal him from them. Instead, he sat bound in the noble hall in which he had met with the rulers of New Spain, with admirals returning from victories, with that wonderfully garrulous woman who had told of El Draque’s “heroic exploits in Chile and Peru”—yes, and with Drake himself when they wrestled for the salvation of the city.

When his wife, so loyal through the decades, came to sit with him and slipped cool rags between the fetters and his skin to ease the pain, he said: “Perhaps it is God reminding me: ‘You and Hawkins and Drake were brothers-in-arms. It’s time you rejoined them.’ I’m ready.”

In his extremity Don Diego found one saving grace: he could look at his extensive family and know that they were in place; they possessed the positions, the power and the treasure which would enable them to control Cartagena and its environs long after he was gone. As a man of honor he had fulfilled his duty to his God, his king and his family, and clothed in that assurance he should have felt no shame in returning to Spain in shackles. But he did have a moment of burning resentment when, for his trip home, he was dragged aboard his own ship, the
Mariposa
, and thrown in chains into her hold: I fought this ship, captured her, led her against the
Jesus of Lübeck
and resisted Drake in the Armada. He raised his manacled hands to cover his face and the degradation he felt.

But he did not reach Spain, for as the
Mariposa
approached the famous Windward Passage between Cuba and Española, a vast storm blew up, and when disaster seemed imminent he called up from the hold: “Run to the captain. Tell him I know how to handle this ship in a storm,” but after some tempestuous tossing about, a voice shouted down: “He says you’re to stay in chains, king’s orders.” And so Don Diego lay in the hold, feeling his beloved ship being driven into one fatal mistake after another, until at last she plunged in agony to the bottom of the Caribbean.