LITMIR.BIZ

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west country. For many years no small part of the duty of every Spanish ambassador consisted in making unavailing protests against the outrageous piracy of the queen's subjects. In this school were trained the men who manned the ships of Hawkins and Drake.

      At the same time, another influence was at work to turn the energy of Englishmen to the sea. Until the death of Mary Tudor put an end to the Burgundian alliance, that is, the close community of interests which had for long united England with the House of Hapsburg, there had been few signs of distant commercial enterprise in England. The trade to the Levant had indeed been extended, and attempts had been made to open a route by the north-east to the Spice Islands, but England seemed to be reluctant to break in upon the Portuguese monopoly of the route by the Cape and the Spanish tenure of the route by the West, until she had clearly learned by experiment that there was no third way of access she could acquire for herself. France, which was at open war with the sovereign of Spain and the Low Countries, had sent out swarms of adventurers to attack the Spaniards in the New World, but we had, when Elizabeth ascended the throne, taken no part in this warfare. No sooner was Elizabeth well settled on the throne than a great change took place.

      The persecutions of Mary's reign, if they had not made England Protestant, had at least made it bitterly anti-Roman Catholic; and this, at a time when the King of Spain was the recognised protector of the Pope, meant anti-Spanish. This served to remove any disinclination to attack our old ally. At the same time, Englishmen began to be much more effectively desirous of sharing in the wealth to be obtained by trade with the New World They were impatient at the thought that they were to be for ever shut out from the commerce of the East and the West Indies by a decision of a Pope of the previous century, who had given the Spaniards everything to the west of the famous line drawn from north to south, a hundred leagues to the west of the Azores, and had left the Portuguese the exclusive right to everything in the East. We did not recognise the Pope's right to dispose of what did not belong to him, and were minded to have our share of the good things lying beyond the line. The Spaniards would hear of no such pretension, and, though they were ready enough to trade with us in Europe, insisted upon treating all seamen of other nations whom they found in America as pirates. According even to the principles of some of their own thinkers, this refusal to trade was a fair justification for a war. Elizabeth was, however, by no means prepared for open hostilities with Spain. All she would do was to refuse to recognise the right of the Spaniards to exclude her subjects from trading with the Indians. Therefore they were free in her opinion to go to the New World, and if the Spaniards refused to recognise their trade as legitimate, Elizabeth for her part was not inclined to forbid her subjects to defend themselves against what she considered unfair interference. The causes of dispute between the queen and King Philip, apart from this, were many and various. Thus it got to be known among enterprising Englishmen that if they could make their hand keep their head from the blow of the Spaniard, they had nothing to fear from the queen when they came home from poaching expeditions on his preserves. For men who had, or who only affected to have, religious motives, and who had the most genuine desire to gain riches, this hint was enough, and so the third year of the queen's reign saw the first voyage of Hawkins to the West Indies.

      In 1562, Hawkins, who was the son of a prosperous Plymouth merchant and shipowner, and had been bred to the sea in his father's ships in voyages to the Canaries, made the first recorded slaving venture carried through by an Englishman. He had learned enough in the Canaries to know that slaves were valuable in the West Indies, and that the Spanish planters, who were very ill supplied under the system of monopoly which prevailed in Spain, would be ready to buy negroes smuggled among them by an English trader. With the help of his father-in-law Gonson, Sir William Duckett, Sir Thomas Lodge, and Sir William Winter, all merchants and seafaring men, and some of them very directly connected with the queen's Government, he fitted out three little vessels and made a most profitable all-round voyage. First he went to the coast of Africa, where he kidnapped slaves, then he went to the Antilles and smuggled them. The second voyage, carried out in the last months of 1563 and the first of 1564, was a repetition of this on a much larger scale. Hawkins had now done so well that every confidence was felt in his capacity. Lord Robert Dudley, better known as the Earl of Leicester, became his patron. He was allowed to hire a queen's ship, the Jesus of Lubeck, an old vessel built in Germany. With a larger force Hawkins visited the coasts of Africa once more, after touching at Teneriffe, probably to make arrangements with the Spaniards associated with him in his smuggling speculations. On the coast of Senegambia he plundered Portuguese slavers who had already secured a full cargo, and then he burned, murdered, and kidnapped among the native villages until his hold was full of what in the cant of later times was called "ebony." With this cargo he made his way to the mainland of South America, after a trying voyage, in which both the kidnapped blacks and their captors suffered severely. Hawkins was borne up by a conviction that the "Lord would not suffer His elect to perish." At Borburata and Rio de la Hacha he sold the greater part of his cargo, partly by the help of the planters, who were glad enough to get the slaves, and partly by threatening to do them a displeasure if his trade was forbidden. From Rio de la Hacha, Hawkins sailed northward across the Caribbean Sea. The force of the westerly current, which is permanent in those waters, was not then known, and the smugglers were carried to the westward of the island of San Domingo. Owing to the mistake of a Spaniard whom they had among them, either as a prisoner, or, as is at least equally probable, as the agent of their associates among the Spanish planters, they fell to leeward, which in the West Indies means to westward both of San Domingo and of Jamaica. As the season was far advanced, and his vessels foul from being long at sea, Hawkins decided to make no further attempt to touch at the Spanish Antilles, which he could only have reached by beating to windward against the trade winds. He returned home by the Straits of Florida and the Banks of Newfoundland. On his way he relieved the French colony established in Florida by Ribault. It is one of the best-known events in the history of the time that this colony was not long afterwards exterminated by the Spaniard Pedro Menendes de Aviles, by methods which have, in the opinion of Protestant writers, covered his name with the infamy of extreme cruelty.

      Although there had been no actual fighting in Hawkins's two expeditions, they were considered by the Spaniards as hostile. That they should have taken this view is not unreasonable, for the English rover had undoubtedly forced an entrance into their ports by threats. He himself must undoubtedly have been aware that his occupation was illegal, for on his own showing he excused his presence in Spanish ports by a tissue of lies. It was his regular practice to assert that he was sailing with a squadron of the queen's ships, and had been driven into harbour by bad weather or the want of stores. It is easy to understand that the manifest falsity of this excuse was not so obvious to the Spanish Government as it is to us. King Philip would not unnaturally believe that although the queen disavowed the actions of Hawkins publicly, she was encouraging him in private. In a sense this was true; for if the queen did not actually send Hawkins to the West Indies, she not only refused to punish him for going there, but allowed him to enjoy the fruits of his voyage, and shared in them largely herself as owner of the Jesus of Lubeck. If the sovereigns had been disposed to go to war, the excuse for hostilities was ready to their hands. But Philip was entangled in heavy expenses by the revolt in the Netherlands and his wars with the Turks, who were then at the height of their power. So he preferred to remain patient under the provocations inflicted on him by Elizabeth; and she, who had abundant troubles of her own, was equally little disposed to incur a war if it could be avoided. The struggle was left to be carried on by the subjects of both rulers in unavowed warfare, and from the nature of the case very soon took the form of piracy on one side and of savage repression on the other. Hawkins had been exasperated on his return from his second voyage by what he considered a private wrong. Ships which he had sent to Spain from the West Indies laden with colonial produce had been confiscated by the Spanish Government. At a later period he succeeded in getting back a part at least of the value of his forfeited goods by pretending to betray the queen. But between 1564 and 1567, when he sailed on his third voyage, he had other schemes for righting himself. He would have sailed sooner than he did if the queen, who was in danger from the intrigues of Mary Stuart, had not had particular reason to refrain from offending Philip too far. But in 1567 Mary had ruined her own cause by the murder of her husband, and her marriage with his murderer. The need for Philip's neutrality was not what it had been, and so Hawkins was allowed to sail, and was again permitted to hire the queen's ships. That his expedition was of the nature of an act

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