The Second Book of General Ignorance (37 page)

It wasn’t Sir Francis Drake – he was only second-in-command. The top man was Lord Howard of Effingham, who later led the peace talks with Spain.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was the major engagement in the nine-year war between Protestant England and Catholic Spain that had begun in 1585. The Armada (Spanish for ‘fleet’ or ‘navy’) was the largest naval force ever assembled in Europe, with 151 ships, 8,000 sailors and 15,000 soldiers. It sailed from Lisbon in May 1588, with the intention of invading England.

Bizarrely, only thirty years before, Philip II of Spain had been King of England. He had co-ruled the country with his Catholic wife Mary I until her death in 1558. When Mary’s younger Protestant sister, Elizabeth, succeeded her, Philip saw
her as a heretic and unfit to rule. At first he tried to unseat her by guile, but his best hope ended when Elizabeth executed Mary, Queen of Scots (a Catholic, and the next in line to the throne) in 1587. His patience exhausted, Philip decided to resort to violence. He asked Pope Sixtus V to bless a crusade against the English so he could reclaim the benighted realm for the true faith.

Although it’s often described as the greatest English victory since Agincourt, a full-blown battle never really took place. Instead, over several days there was a series of inconclusive skirmishes, in which no ship on either side was sunk by direct enemy action, although five Spanish ships ran aground in August at the minor battle of Gravelines, off what is now northern France. Drake’s famous fire ships failed to ignite a single Spanish vessel – although they caused enough panic to break up the Armada’s disciplined formation, allowing the smaller and nimbler English ships to get in and scatter them.

Eventually, both sides ran out of ammunition but Effingham had just enough shot left to harry the invaders northwards up the eastern coast of Britain. As the Spanish fleet, thirsty and exhausted, rounded Scotland and sailed down the west coast of Ireland going the long way home, many of their huge ships succumbed to unseasonably fierce storms. Only half of the ‘invincible’ Armada (and fewer than a quarter of the men) made it back. Although the English lost only a hundred men during the fighting, an estimated 6,000 English troops died in the months afterwards, from typhus and dysentery contracted while on board.

Drake may not have been commander on the day but, to the English, he was already the foremost hero of the age. In 1581, he became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, returning with enough plundered Spanish gold and treasure to double the Queen’s annual income. King Philip, of course,
regarded him as no more than a common pirate and set a price of 20,000 ducats on his head (£4 million in today’s money). The Spanish called the despised Drake by his Latin name ‘Franciscus Draco’ – ‘Francis the Dragon’.

Did Drake really finish his leisurely game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe as the Spanish sailed into the Channel? We’ll never know. The story is first mentioned in a pamphlet of 1624, which merely said that various ‘commanders and captaines’ had been playing; but such was Drake’s mythic status that, by the 1730s, the story was told exclusively about him.

They stole things that were washed up on beaches. There’s no evidence to suggest that any Cornish wrecker ever actually caused a shipwreck.

The traditional picture of swarthy Cornish brigands on cliff tops, luring ships to their doom by waving lanterns or lighting signal fires, was invented in the mid-nineteenth century. It seems to have originated with Methodist preachers and then to have been fleshed out in graphic detail by Daphne du Maurier’s romantic novel
Jamaica Inn
(1936).

During the great Methodist revival in Victorian times, clergymen used reformed ‘wreckers’ as living examples of the miraculous transformations that their brand of Christianity could effect; even the most debased sinners could be saved from their criminal pasts and go on to lead decent lives.

But such dramatic propaganda only worked inland. Coastal dwellers knew exactly what the ancient practice of ‘wrecking’ involved. It meant going down to the site of a wreck and
scrounging anything you could get your hands on. It wasn’t legal, but it was hardly murderous barbarism either.

Although an Act was passed in 1753 explicitly outlawing the setting out of ‘any false light or lights, with intention to bring any ship or vessel into danger’, no Cornishman was ever charged with the crime, and no authentic mention of the alleged practice has ever been found in contemporary Cornish documents.

The only such case ever to reach the courts involved the wreck of the
Charming Jenny
on the coast of Anglesey in 1773. Captain Chilcote, the sole survivor, claimed his ship had been lured to shore by false lights, after which three men had stripped his dead wife naked on the beach, and stolen the silver buckles from his shoes as he lay exhausted. One of the men was hanged and another condemned to death, his sentence later commuted to transportation.

The reason why this is the one known example of the crime in English history is because it doesn’t make any sense for communities making a living from the sea – including working as pilots, helping ships reach shore safely – to set out to create shipwrecks. They could never be sure that vessels approaching on stormy nights were crewed by outsiders, rather than by sons or neighbours.

The belief that wreckers used false lights (sometimes allegedly tied to the tails of donkeys or cows) probably arose because smugglers used cliff-top lights to signal to their comrades offshore when it was safe to land. Luring fellow mariners to a watery end is no more authentic than the ‘traditional Cornish wreckers prayer’:
‘Oh please Lord, let us pray for all on the
sea. But if there’s got to be wrecks, please send them to we.’
In fact, these words are part of an original song lyric written by London musician Andy Roberts in 2003.

Today, those who harvest the fruits of the sea in Cornish wrecker style can even avoid breaking the law entirely, provided
they report their finds to the Office of the Receiver of Wrecks in Southampton.

Not by declaring war on Germany, as many people think. The
Lusitania
was sunk in May 1915. America didn’t enter the First World War until April 1917.

From the summer of 1914 most of Europe was at war. Germany routinely attacked merchant shipping en route to Britain in an attempt to starve the country into surrender, but the US was determined to remain neutral.

At first, German submarines followed the so-called ‘Cruiser Rules’ laid down at the 1907 Hague Convention, by which civilian ships could only be sunk after all those aboard had been given an opportunity to evacuate. But when the British started disguising naval vessels as merchantmen and using merchant ships to transport arms, Germany adopted a ‘sink on sight’ policy. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, actually welcomed this, hoping that the Germans would sink a neutral ship, dragging America into the war. In a now infamous memo to the President of the Board of Trade, he wrote: ‘We want the traffic – the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.’

The
Lusitania
was a magnificent luxury liner, the jewel of the Cunard line. (She wasn’t, as a common misconception has it, the sister ship of the
Titanic,
which was owned by the White Star Line.) As the
Lusitania
prepared to set off from New York to Liverpool, Germany placed adverts in US papers warning that passengers sailing through a war zone did so ‘at their own
risk’. Captain Turner of the
Lusitania
described this as ‘the best joke I’ve heard in many days,’ and reassured his passengers that with a top speed of 26 knots (nearly 50 kilometres per hour or 30 miles per hour) she was too fast for any German U-boat.

Just one torpedo was all that was needed to sink the ship, 13 kilometres (8 miles) off the coast of Ireland, on 7 May 1915. She went down in eighteen minutes with the loss of 1,198 lives – including over a hundred children, many of them babies. One survivor recalled swimming through crowds of dead children ‘like lily-pads on a pond’.

On being rescued from the wreck, the hapless Captain Turner remarked, ‘What bad luck – what have I done to deserve this?’ Only 239 bodies were recovered, a third of whom were never identified. Among the dead were 128 Americans.

The British, and the pro-war faction in America, were delighted by the effect that this proof of Germany’s ‘frightfulness’ had on US public opinion. The Germans, under the pressure of international outrage, promptly abandoned their ‘sink on sight’ strategy. (It wasn’t re-adopted until January 1917, by which time Germany knew that war with the US was inevitable.)

Though President Woodrow Wilson’s government refused to be swept into the war by popular anger, the military significance of the atrocity is not in doubt.

Some historians even argue that, by forcing Germany to suspend ‘sink on sight’ at a crucial stage of the conflict, the sinking of the
Lusitania
gave the Allies a strategic advantage that determined the outcome of the whole war.

When America did finally declare war in 1917, the US army recruited under the slogan ‘Remember the
Lusitania
!’