Nathaniel's nutmeg (7 page)

Drake and his men were treated to a fabulous display of
Oriental politesse when the King at last visited their ship.
His courtiers, all in white linen, rowed round and round
the vessel and 'as they passed by us, did us a kind of
homage with great solemnity, the greatest personages
beginning first, with reverend countenance and behaviour,
to bow their bodies right to the ground'. The King was
not far behind. 'He also with six grave and ancient fathers
in his canoe approaching, did at once, together with them,
yield us a reverend kind of obeisance, in far more humble
manner than was to be expected.' Drake found him 'of tall
stature, very corpulent and well set together, of a very
princely and gracious countenance; his respect amongst
his own was such that neither his viceroy nor any other
counsellors dared speak to him unless they were upon
their knees'.

The English were at first unsure how to react to the
affected manners of the East but they eventually
commemorated the occasion in time-honoured fashion.
They primed their cannon and listened with delight as 'our
ordinance thundered, which we mixed with great store of
small shot, among which sounding our trumpets and other
instruments of music.' The King was dazzled by the
fireworks and 'so much delighted that, requesting our
music to come unto the boat, he joyned his canoe to the
same, and was towed at least a whole hour together, with
the boat at the stern of our ship'.

After a further blitz of cannon fire the King made his
excuses and left, but not before he had sanctioned the
English to buy whatever spices they needed from his island.
By the time Drake was ready to leave Ternate his ship was
so weighed down with goods - and so low in the water —
that she was 'laid up fast upon a desperate shoal'. To lighten
her, eight of the cannon were cast into the water, followed
by much of the meal and pulse, and finally three tons of the
precious cloves that he had bought. As the tide turned the
ship was slowly lifted off the shoal and started on the long
voyage back to England.

Drake arrived to a hero's welcome. Not only was his
vessel, renamed the
Golden Hind,
laden with fragrant
spices, she was also 'very richly fraught with gold, silver,
pearls and precious stones', most of which had been
pillaged from Spanish and Portuguese vessels. Men and
women turned out in force to watch the arrival of the ship
in Plymouth, and Queen Elizabeth herself came aboard
the vessel at Deptford and conferred a knighthood on her
gallant commander. Within days of his return, songs,
sonnets, odes and poems were being composed in honour
of his historic voyage.

Drake's astonishing feat of seamanship fired the
imagination of Elizabethan England and fuelled the belief
that the East was a land of fabulous potentates. But Drake
had sailed as a freebooter, not a trader, and although he had
successfully bought large quantities of spices in Ternate,
their value was nothing compared to the gold and silver he
had stolen from Spanish galleons. Worse still, he brought
back little practical information about the market-places of
the East. The records of his voyage include no details of
prices, no mention of weights and measures, no clues as to
the goods most sought after for barter. Yet his triumphant
return caused great excitement among the merchants of
London and they began to cast around for a suitable
candidate to open trading links with the East Indies. Drake
himself was the obvious choice but he had set his sights on
some old-fashioned piracy and the merchants were forced
to look elsewhere for a commander. Showing the singular
lack of foresight that they had manifested when choosing
Sir Hugh Willoughby for their Arctic adventure, they now
entrusted command to a Nottinghamshire landowner
called Edward Fenton, a headstrong man with little ex­perience of seamanship.

Fenton came from a prosperous family and, had he so
desired, could have lived a life of ignominious ease. Instead
he chose a different path: eschewing the comforts of his
stately home he sold his patrimony and embarked on a
swashbuckling career as a soldier of fortune, allowing
himself to be carried to wherever there was the chance for
adventure. His first major expedition saw him travelling in
the company of Martin Frobisher in search of the fabled
North-West Passage and it was while on this expedition
that Fenton first learned that orders given in London could
be safely ignored once at sea. Landing on Baffin Island and
finding what appeared to be large deposits of gold ore,
Fenton abandoned his search for the North-West Passage
and set up an impromptu mining venture with the aim of
getting rich quick.

Fenton was a strange choice to lead a voyage to the East
Indies: an incurable romantic, he had only a slim
understanding of the responsibilities that befell a
commander. His eccentricities had raised many an
eyebrow before he even left England and there was con­siderable opposition to his appointment, but as the Earl of
Leicester's preferred man he was duly entrusted with the
post. When the merchants came to choose Fenton's
second-in-command they plumped for a solidly depend­able captain named William Hawkins, a relative of his
more famous namesake, who had served in Drake's voyage
to the South Seas. But they continued to harbour doubts
about the whimsical Fenton and set down in great detail
their plans for the voyage, including the exact route that he
was to follow. 'You shall go on your course by the Cape of
Good Hope,' they wrote, 'not passing the Strait of
Magellan either going or returning
...
you shall not pass
to the north-eastward of the 40 degree of latitude at the
most, but shall take your right course to the Isles of
Moluccas.'

Such instructions fell on deaf ears for hardly had Fenton
set sail than he cooled on the idea of sailing to the East
Indies, a hazardous and tiresome voyage that would profit
the merchants far more than him. As his ship plied its way
southwards down the Atlantic, the 'gentelman' commander
spent the long hours at the helm indulging his dream of a
nobler and more glorious profession. It is unfortunate that
the records of the expedition fall silent just at the point
when it slides into farce. The most interesting account of
the voyage — the journal belonging to William Hawkins —
was partially destroyed by fire in the last century. But its
disintegrating pages are sufficiently legible to allow for a
reconstruction of the tumultuous events on board the
Bear.
Fenton, it seems, had long realised that the quickest way to
riches was to plunder and ransack the Portuguese carracks
that made their way up and down the African coastline. But
as his ship drifted listlessly in the mid-Atlantic he was
struck by an altogether more fantastic idea. On 25
September 1582, he summoned his lieutenants to a meet­ing in his cabin and told them of his plan to seize the island
of St Helena 'and theire to be proclaimed kyng'.

They could scarcely believe their ears. They were only
too aware of Fenton's propensity for disregarding orders but
this was an entirely unforeseen turn of events. Attempting to
talk him out of this lunatic scheme only fuelled his desire
and when the practical Hawkins became too vociferous in
his arguments against the plan Fenton promised him 10,000
pounds of silver if he would change his mind, as well as
great riches to 'all the well willers.'When news reached the
on-board preacher he was horrified and 'fell down upon his
knees and besought [Hawkins] that for God's sake he would
not give his consent to this determination'. The crew had a
similar reaction; they had no wish to spend the rest of their
lives on the remote Atlantic islet that, two centuries later,
would prove such an effective prison for Napoleon. Several
pointed out the impracticalities of Fenton's plan, arguing
that it would be almost impossible for them to defend the
island against foreign vessels. Without mastery of the sea,
King Edward of St Helena would be deposed before the
year was out.

Hawkins agreed and, deciding to 'tell [Fenton] my
mind', stormed back to the commander's cabin.
Unfortunately the next few lines of his journal are illegible
but he must have eloquently argued his case for Fenton
abandoned his mad scheme with as much haste as it had
originally been conceived. Perhaps he realised that without
Hawkins's help, he would not even have been able to locate
the island. His romantic dream in tatters, Fenton locked
himself in his cabin in a mood of black despair. 'He saide
then he would go back agayne to the islands of Cape de
Verde to fetch some wine,' which, noted Hawkins, 'was
only a desire to pick and steale'.

As his ship headed back towards England, Fenton
awoke to the fact that he had done little to endear himself
to London's merchants. He tried to silence Hawkins by
clapping him in irons and threatening to kill him if he
breathed a word about the more ludicrous episodes of the
voyage. In the event, Hawkins survived but this final act
completed Fenton's fall from grace and his name was
conspicuously absent from any future expedition to the
East. The detailed plans and orders laid down by the
expedition's financiers proved to be entirely in vain: the
1582 expedition to the Spice Islands never even left the
Atlantic.

The merchants of London now realised that the best
way forward was for one of their own — a sober and hard-
nosed businessman — to travel east to investigate the
practicalities of trade. The man they chose to conduct this
research was Ralph Fitch, a practically minded merchant of
the Levant Company who left London in 1583
accompanied by four partners. The journal he compiled
while travelling was filled with facts and figures about the
ports and cities of the Indies and although it is not the most
exciting of reads, its importance lies in the fact that it
marked England's entry as a serious player in the spice race.