Caribbean: a novel Part 10

'We never saw Drake, nor Hawkins either. They darted in and out among us like falling stars at night.'

'They were there,' Ortega said. 'We could tell by the way the English fought, but we never saw them.'

'But your fleet did escape?' a local leader asked, and Ledesma nodded: 'We lost a few ships, but most escaped,' and Ortega said: 'Our admiral here received honors for what he accomplished. He started the invasion in command of twenty-three cargo ships and brought twenty of them safely through battles and attacks of fire and the heaviest gunfire Drake and the others could throw against us. Cartagena can be proud of its governor.'

'But the horses?' asked a man who had a country estate outside the walls. 'What did you do with the horses?' and Ledesma turned away and refused to say it, indicating with his left hand that Ortega should: 'When we couldn't find the cavalry that was supposed to get them, we thought we would carry them back to their farms in Spain, but the order came: "As we start on our long sail around Ireland, all ships must be lightened." '

'And the horses?'

'We threw them overboard. In the middle of the Channel.'

'Were they able to swim to sh.o.r.e?' the countryman asked, and Ledesma had to say: 'No one knows.'

At this point the listeners shifted in their chairs, obviously eager to hear more details about the fighting, and one asked: 'But if you escaped up the Channel, and fled around Scotland and Ireland, most of your ships must have made it back to Spain. So the defeat couldn't have been as bad as you made it sound at first,' and Doa Leonora, who had been listening intently to this broken narrative, saw her husband's shoulders sag and his face pale.

'Too much for one day, my dear friends. We're home and six of the other ships from Cartagena will be coming in too, I trust. We'll talk later,' and without further amenities he left them with Ortega, who continued the dismal story, except that he also avoided any discussion of the pa.s.sage of the ships back to Spain.

When Doa Leonora led her husband to bed she saw how exhausted he was, not from the sea voyage home, for he loved his old Mariposa as one of the st.u.r.diest ships in the ocean, but from the anguish of being forced to report on the humiliations and disasters that had overtaken the little fleet he had taken from Cartagena. As soon as she observed his response to her first questions she knew she must stop and allow him to sleep. She asked: 'Did your other ships carry horses too?' and he groaned. Then she asked: 'If you saved twenty of your ships in the battle, how many did you get back home to Spain?' and he turned his face to the wall, indicating that he could accept no further conversation. He was one more valiant warrior, the same in all centuries, who had come home from battle unable to explain to his wife what had happened.

Next day, however, when he again met with the elders of his city he was prepared, with Ortega's help, to speak frankly about the catastrophes in which he had partic.i.p.ated: 'We were led by a complete ninny, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, a man who hated the sea, who got violently sick when a ship rolled, and who had warned the king: "Since I do not know how to fight ships, I will do poorly," and he did. The English outsmarted him at every turning of the tide.'

'Was he a coward?'

'Spaniards are never cowards ... but they can be stupid.'

But the men kept asking: 'You sailed that great fleet to England and never fought a battle?' and Ledesma said: 'Not in the old style, no. Great ships lunging at each other? No. More like trained dogs worrying a bull till he staggers.'

'And you never saw Drake or his ship?'

Very slowly Ledesma said: 'I never ... saw ... Drake,' but Ortega voiced what he had intimated the day before: 'But we knew he was out there,' and when someone asked how, he said: 'By the results.'

'Now tell us ... what happened to the fleet as it pa.s.sed Ireland?' and bracing his shoulders, Ledesma turned to his captain: 'Ortega, what happened to our sanity at Ireland? Why did we Spaniards throw the whole thing away?'

The question was one that would haunt naval historians for the next half-millennium, and even then no sensible answers would be produced. However, Ortega, as one of the few captains who had brought his ship safely through the disaster, did know certain basic facts: 'We had no proper charts. They failed to show how far Ireland jutted out into the Atlantic. When our ships turned south prematurely they ran into headlands that shouldn't have been there, and driven by the gale blowing so strong from the west, they couldn't tack to escape those terrible rocks.'

The tale having been properly launched, Ledesma, always willing as the commander of an operation to a.s.sume his share of the blame when things went wrong, said quietly: 'We should have had a safe run home to our Spanish ports. No English ships were hara.s.sing us. But we lost twenty-six of our largest Armada vessels ... an entire navy ... not one ship down as a result of enemy action. In the wild storms of the North Atlantic, sheathing came apart. In mournful darkness they collided and sank. But most of them, running before the fierce winds of approaching winter, crashed head-on into those dreadful headlands of western Ireland, drowning half the crew, depositing the others near naked on the inhospitable sh.o.r.e ...'

Shaking his head at the magnitude of the disaster he had escaped because of his own superior seamanship, he indicated that Ortega should continue: 'Tell them of what happened when our shipwrecked men were lucky enough to make it to land,' and the captain revealed an incredible tale: 'By the time we left Spain for here, all we had were rumors, but I questioned three of our sailors who escaped the terrors of Ireland, and they told a story of such horror that it flashed through the fleet. It seems that whenever a Spanish crew reached sh.o.r.e, one of three things happened. Some were stripped naked by the wild Irish peasants and most killed on the spot. Those who survived fell into the hands of Irish landlords who sought favor with the English and were either slaughtered or turned over to them. And those who surrendered honorably to English officials were murdered one by one, and in public, to teach them a lesson.'

Later, when rumor could be hardened into demonstrable fact, it would be determined that six thousand of Spain's finest sons landed on Irish beaches after their ships sank, and all but seven hundred were murdered.

Ledesma, looking at his fellow Cartagenians, said: 'The brave young men who sailed with me from this city ... so valiant ... so indestructible. We brought them through a h.e.l.l that few men ever know, and we held them together ...' He clenched his hands and pounded at air: 'We brought them through everything Drake could throw at us. And then to lose them to English murderers in Ireland. Oh my G.o.d ... my G.o.d.'

The listeners could see his fists tighten and the muscles in his neck stand out: 'Yes, the English murdered our men, shamelessly, but we'll be avenged. I'm certain that before I die, El Draque will return to these waters. He must ... And when he comes, if G.o.d allows me strength, I shall do battle with him once more, and I shall hound him to his grave.' And from that moment Ledesma manifested the kind of blood hatred of the Englishmen who had murdered his sailors that Francis Drake had always had for Spaniards who had burned his sailors. On neither side would the pa.s.sionate enmity be allowed to wane.

The tragedy that overtook Admiral Ledesma in his futile confrontation in Europe was so harrowing that in an effort to forget it, he turned his remaining energy to more humane concerns, and day after day he roamed his city, identifying projects that must now go forward: 'I want to finish the battlements to enclose the entire city. We need better wells ... a fort to protect Boca Chica ...' And once when he was inspecting a section of wall he stopped suddenly and turned to face Ortega: 'I've watched you carefully, Roque.' This was the first time in this chaotic year that he had ever called his kinsman anything but Captain. 'And I've seen that you're a man of honor. We'd not have brought the Mariposa back with any lesser captain.' Ortega saluted. 'And I'm growing old, sixty-one this year, very old I find, and have no son to carry on my name. Why don't you become Roque Ledesma, and plan to take my place when I'm gone?' And Ortega saluted again, speechless.

Then a happy idea struck: 'Look, you're already ent.i.tled to the name Ortega y Ledesma. Change it to Roque Ledesma y Ledesma and let people guess if it represents some kind of incest.' He laughed at his joke, but still Ortega did not speak, so the admiral left his suggestion hanging.

He soon learned that his widowed captain was attending to a very serious matter pushed upon him by Doa Leonora, who had resumed her determined campaign to find a proper husband for Seorita Beatrix, her niece from Espaola. 'I want you to give Captain Ortega a week of rest, Diego,' she said, and during those relaxing days she kept Beatrix constantly before Ortega, and whereas in the first two days he was still preoccupied with Spanish defeats, on the third he began to notice how charming Beatrix was, but the girl remained too shy to press her attention upon him. So Doa Leonora knew it was inc.u.mbent upon her to intervene. 'Captain Ortega,' she said boldly, 'surely you've noticed that Beatrix is quite taken with you ... your manly ways and all.' He coughed modestly.

'She's a dear girl, really she is. While you were away at war I had a chance to see what a splendid wife she'd make.' When Ortega hesitated, she added: 'You're not getting any younger, Roque ...' and with her unprecedented use of his first name he recalled that the admiral had done the same when speaking to him about the name change, and all of a sudden he could see the shattered fragments of his life-his impoverished mother, the loss of his wife, the defeat in England, the uncertainty in the New World-mending themselves in a grand coalescence with the Ledesmas of Cartagena. He would marry their niece, adopt their name, and enter the grand alliance they were building for themselves in this rich and famous city.

In a low voice he asked: 'Doa Leonora, would I have your permission to ask your husband for Seorita Beatrix's hand in marriage?' and she reacted with opened mouth and arched eyebrows as if the idea were his alone and somewhat startling: 'I think he would listen,' and she left with the satisfaction of knowing that she had solved the problems of yet another of her numerous relatives.

But when the vice-regent, now a senior official, heard of the proposal to give Ortega a new name, he lodged serious objections: 'Don Diego, where is your sanity? People are already whispering: "This town isn't Cartagena, it's Carta-Ledesma." If you make this name change, you'll be throwing your nepotism in their faces.'

Don Diego promised that he would think about the danger, but that night as he strolled upon his battlements he thought: The most permanent goal a man can achieve is to use members of his family to weave a network of influence and stability. Look at Drake. In shadows, for fame is transient. Look at what happened to Cortes. The favor of a king is a fragile reed to lean upon. But to have your daughters' husbands in positions of power, to see your sister's sons with good salaries, that's permanent. That you can depend on. What did Drake say that last night? He grieved that he had no sons? Well, I too have none, but I'm going to get one, Roque Ledesma y Ledesma, fine name, and those who don't like it can go to h.e.l.l! So the name change took place.

The seven years following the disaster of the Armada produced little excitement in the Caribbean, primarily because Drake left it alone, and without him to duel, the place seemed unimportant. Mule trains crossed the isthmus from Panama to Nombre de Dios and off-loaded their treasure onto ships which Cartagena's flotilla escorted to Havana, where bullion fleets were organized for the pa.s.sage home to Sevilla, and in these years not a ship was lost.

Word did filter through that Drake had taken as his second wife an heiress of good family and had been elected as the Plymouth Member of Parliament, where he occasionally spoke on naval and military matters. Lured out of retirement to command an attack on the northwest coast of Spain and Portugal, he made a hash of the effort and was rebuked by being forced into what everyone supposed was a permanent retirement. After that the Caribbean heard nothing of him and people began to suppose that both he and his older companion, Hawkins, now Sir John, were dead.

And then, in late February 1596, came the revitalizing news that Don Diego had been awaiting for so many years. It came not from King Philip in the Escorial but from one of his ministers in Madrid: Our trusted spies inform us that on 25 January of this year that infamous heretic, Elizabeth of England, commissioned her two knights, Drake and Hawkins, to lead a fleet of 27 war vessels to a.s.sault our cities in the West Indies. King Philip is old and ailing. Give him the heads of these two pirates before he dies.

The average Spanish governor experienced a moment of dizziness when he learned that both Drake and Hawkins were coming to a.s.sail him, but not Don Diego, who reveled in the realization that both his mortal enemies would be coming into his predilected waters at the same time. 'G.o.d is being good to me,' he told the men of his family, and they rea.s.sembled their team to frustrate this final challenge of the English sea dogs.

With maps spread on tables, the Ledesmas concerted their strategies, guided always by Don Diego, who had a sixth sense as to what Queen Elizabeth would instruct her admirals to do and what precise steps they would take to do it. In their planning, the men referred invariably to Drake first and Hawkins second, it having been agreed in all European fleets that now the old uncle took orders from the younger and bolder nephew. Don Diego, in framing his strategies, thought only of Drake, and directed the vice-regent: 'Since you beat him back at Nombre de Dios that other time, go back and do it again.' When the young man demurred: 'I doubt Drake will bother with so small a town,' Don Diego snapped: 'He's Drake. He'll be drawn to that spot the way a shark is drawn to the smell of a wounded body. He seeks revenge.'

Convinced that Drake would make another attempt to sack Panama, Don Diego a.s.signed his two other sons-in-law to build a dozen barricades along the jungle trail the Englishmen would be attempting to follow, and to poison all available springs. Then he looked at his most recent bright hope, Roque Ledesma, and with that good sailor he pored over the charts of the Caribbean and decided: 'He will not come to Espaola, for he destroyed it last time. Where will he come?' After considerable speculation the two plotters decided that Drake would invade Puerto Rico, where the rich capital of San Juan would offer the kind of treasure he had taken last time at Santo Domingo: 'You and I will go there, Roque, to make his life miserable.'

'You never take Hawkins into your calculations,' one of his nephews pointed out, and Don Diego explained: 'Hawkins is like me, predictable. We fight him as we find him. But with Drake, you have to be guessing all the time, for his brain is like a hummingbird. His wings never rest.'

In conclusion, he made an arbitrary a.s.signment. To the Amadr brothers, his loyal supporters for decades, he said: 'Go back to Ro Hacha. He's sure to strike there at some point in this rampage,' and when the brothers argued truthfully that Ro was now a desolate place with very little to attract the avarice of a pirate, Don Diego replied: 'His memories are there because it was there he suffered his first defeat. He'll be back.'

But then Roque voiced the greatest objection of all to this dispersal of the Ledesma forces: 'You're leaving Cartagena unprotected,' and Don Diego said: 'He'll not come here again. Because he conquered this city once, no need to repeat. Puerto Rico's a new target. All the others are defeats that have to be avenged.'

'Then why won't he go back to San Juan de Ula? His greatest defeat of all?'

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 Ula, 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: On 9 April there limped into the harbor of this city the king's great galleon Begoa, flagship of the treasure fleet. Demasted in a violent storm and carrying 300 souls and more than 2,000,000 pesos in gold and silver, it had no possibility of resuming its homeward journey and is now safe in our sanctuary. Its cargo of bullion has been hidden properly ash.o.r.e where it will be retained until we learn of Sir Francis Drake's plans. In the meantime, other cities should rush all spare force to Puerto Rico to protect this great treasure so badly needed by the king for his ventures.

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 G.o.d! 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 Begoa 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 Begoa 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 sh.o.r.e 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 a.s.sociate, 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 Begoa'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 ash.o.r.e, 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 Ro 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 Panama 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 Panama 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 Valparaso. 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 a.s.sailed 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 rea.s.semble his scattered family he found a small flotilla in the s.p.a.cious 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 a.s.sess the numerous accusations that had been acc.u.mulating 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 Cadiz 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 a.s.sociates 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 ash.o.r.e, 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, his king and his family, and clothed in that a.s.surance 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 Lbeck 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 Pa.s.sage between Cuba and Espaola, 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.

Traveler, you who sail into the Caribbean in silvered yacht or gilded cruise ship, pause as you enter these waters to remember that deep below rest three men of honor who helped determine the history of this onetime Spanish Lake: Sir John Hawkins, builder of the English navy; Sir Francis Drake, conqueror of all known seas; and Admiral Ledesma, stubborn enhancer of his king's prerogatives and the interests of his own strong family.

* s.h.i.tfire.

A ducat was worth five shillings sixpence, so Drake was asking for 275,000, which in today's values would be not less than $13,000,000.

BECAUSE THE ISLAND of Barbados, a place of heavenly beauty, lay so far to the east of that chain of islands which mark the boundary of the Caribbean, and so far south of the ocean currents that ships naturally followed when setting out from Europe and Africa, Columbus did not discover the island on any of his voyages in 14921502, and it remained unknown for decades. A few Arawak Indians reached there, finding refuge when the terrible Caribs ravaged the other islands, but long before the white man arrived, they appear to have died out.

It was not till very late, 1625, that the waiting island, unpopulated but extremely rich in soil, was seriously taken note of by a chance English trader, and two more years pa.s.sed before an orderly settlement began. Because this paradise waited so long for the white man to arrive, many believed that the best of the Caribbean had been saved till last. Although lying some hundred miles to the east and not actually a part of that magical sea, it was, nevertheless, widely regarded as one of the loveliest of the Caribbean sisterhood.

Like the Arawaks before them on Dominica, the English settlers shied away from the violent waves and storms of the windward, or Atlantic, side, clinging by preference to the warm and congenial western side facing the glorious sunsets. There, along the sh.o.r.es of a small and not too well protected bay, a collection of rude houses took shape, eventually to be called Bridgetown, soon to be famed for having one of the most civilized sites in the Caribbean: a curving beach marked by swaying palms, tidy little streets lined with low white houses built in the Dutch style, an industrious population, a small church topped by a tiny steeple, and in the background, a rise of low hills, brilliantly green after a rain. It was even in those early years a village that made the heart expand with a warm a.s.surance when one saw it for the first time from the sea: 'Here's a town in which a family can be happy.'

In the early 1630s a small group of hardy emigrants from England toiled in the fields back of town to raise enough crops to feed themselves yet be able to ship an excess back to England in exchange for the goods they needed: cloth, medicines, books, and such. The cultivation of the three crops that were wanted by traders in England-cotton, tobacco and indigo for the dyeing of cloth-involved such brutal work that the early colonists quickly devised a plan whereby they could supervise their plantations with some ease while others did the work. They imported penniless young men, often from southwest England or Scotland, to serve as bondsmen for five years, after which the young fellows would be given a small amount of cash plus t.i.tle to whichever five acres of unoccupied land caught their fancy.

In the first group of indentured laborers, as they were legally termed, appeared a surly young chap from the north of England, John Tatum by name, whose pa.s.sage from Bristol had been paid, as was the custom, by the wealthiest of the Barbados tobacco planters, Thomas Oldmixon. The relationship between the two was never a happy one. Oldmixon was a rotund, hearty man, with a booming voice, red face and the habit of clapping his equals on the back and regaling them with stories that he considered rib-tickling but whose point his listeners usually failed to catch; with his inferiors, and he had so categorized his indentured servant Tatum, he could be brusque and even insulting.

During the five years that Tatum was required to serve-no pay, a dank room, miserable food and not even the work clothes that other masters provided their servants-Oldmixon was vigorously engaged in acquiring additional fields, which meant that Tatum had to fell trees, pull stumps, and till new fields for planting. It was such harsh work for no visible return that he generated a bitter hatred of Oldmixon, and one Englishman in Bridgetown, who treated his indentured men more humanely, predicted: 'Before Tatum finishes his stint, we could see a murder at Oldmixon's.'

But the next year, when Tatum's servitude ended and he had selected a choice five acres east of Bridgetown, one of those trivial accidents occurred which alter the history of islands. An English ship on the way to Barbados with a fresh supply of white indentured laborers came upon a Portuguese vessel whose crew was engaged in selling Negro slaves from island to island, in the same way that farmers' wives in Europe peddled their husbands' vegetables in town from one dwelling to the next.

The Englishmen, always looking for a chance to earn an honest shilling, attacked the Portuguese slaver, won the sea battle, and found themselves with a cargo of slaves that had to be disposed of. The first available port was Bridgetown in Barbados, and there they off-loaded not only the indentured workers intended for the island, but also eight black Africans. An auction was held on the steps of the church in the town square, with Thomas Oldmixon purchasing three of the slaves, and his recently freed bondsman, John Tatum, spending the first money he ever had in Barbados to acquire one for himself. Each of these canny men realized at the first sight of these powerful black men that money could be made from their services. Thus did slavery begin on this exquisite island.

In these years Bridgetown was becoming an increasingly delightful place in which to live: the white Dutch houses now had roofs of red tile surrept.i.tiously imported from Spain; new streets were being opened, some with s.p.a.cious parks set among the houses; mahogany benches had been installed in the church; and even a small shop had been opened by a widow who sold goods 'imported' from all parts of Europe. The Dutch architecture and the smuggling were easily explained, and appreciated by everyone in Bridgetown: the settlers had turned to the Dutch when avaricious English traders, hungry for every shilling they could squeeze from their colonies, persuaded their Parliament to pa.s.s laws obligating the settlers to trade only with English firms and at whatever prices those firms decided to establish. Those same preposterous mercantile laws were already beginning to rouse protests in other colonies like Ma.s.sachusetts and Virginia. Lucrative trade with suppliers in France, Holland, Italy and Spain was forbidden as was trade among the different colonies themselves; a would-be merchant on Barbados was not allowed to deal directly with a manufacturer in Ma.s.sachusetts, much to the disgust of established men like Oldmixon or those just starting out like Tatum. To aggravate matters further, the English firms frequently failed to deliver their expensive goods, thus leaving the settlers doubly frustrated.

The solution was simple. Dutch trading ships, captained by men of extreme daring and commercial competence, ignored the English laws, sailed where they pleased, became remarkably skilled in evading English patrol ships, and conducted their smuggling operations on a vast scale. Barbados survived for two reasons: sensible English government abetted by capable Dutch semipirates. Whenever the settlers in Bridgetown saw the Dutch ship Stadhouder edge surrept.i.tiously into port under the expert guidance of Captain Piet Brongersma, smuggler extraordinary, they knew that goods they needed would now become available, and they applauded his coming, even going so far as to post sentries on the headlands to alert him in case a British warship approached unexpectedly. Then all the Dutchmen on Brongersma's ship would leap into action, weighing anchor and hoisting sail, and sometimes within minutes the speedy Stadhouder would be safely out to sea before the English warship arrived.

In this easy manner, without any shots being fired, honest men thrown into jail, or bitterness engendered, life proceeded: Thomas Oldmixon gathered new fields year after year; to his five acres John Tatum brought a st.u.r.dy English la.s.s, who gave him a daughter, Nell, and two fine sons, a very sober-sided Isaac and a rambunctious Will; governors came from England, some sagacious, some pathetic, as in all colonies; and the slave population increased because numerous babies were born to those already on the island, and Dutch smugglers kept slipping in more slaves from Africa.

There were two developments which worried thoughtful men in both Barbados and England: with the slow depletion of the soil, it became more difficult each year to grow the basic crops, tobacco being especially destructive. In London traders affiliated with Barbados saw with dismay that year by year tobacco from the island was becoming inferior to that grown in competing colonies like Virginia and Carolina, while Barbados cotton simply could not compare with that grown in the more easily cultivated fields of Georgia. In 1645, when Oldmixon saw how little his factors in London had remitted from the sale of his tobacco and cotton, he told his fellow planters: 'We're sliding downward. Worse every year. We must find some new crop, or we sink beneath the waves.'

All agreed that Barbados would find a new crop to prolong its prosperity. This general optimism was well voiced by Oldmixon one day when he went to the harbor to greet a new settler who had come from Sir Francis Drake's old bowling ground, Devon. As he walked the newcomer through the clean streets of Bridgetown, pointing out the red-roofed Dutch houses, he recited a litany: 'Have you seen a better island than ours? A finer town? Here you can feel the peace and ease. You'll see the little churches that mark our crossroads. My friend, this is Little England, and some of us believe it's better than the big one.'

This phrase was remembered, and in time it became the accepted description of Barbados: 'Little England, forever loyal to the homeland.'

There had been one ugly moment in 1636 when the authorities clarified a matter which had been causing some concern. At that time the nature of slavery had not been clearly defined: neither the slave nor the master knew for sure how long the term of servitude was intended to last, and a few generous-hearted Englishmen argued that it was for a limited period only and some went so far as to claim that any child born to slaves on the island should be free from birth.

Authorities put a quick halt to that heresy: they pa.s.sed an ordinance stating that slaves, whether local Indian or African, served for life, as did their offspring. Only a few slaves were aware that the new law had been pa.s.sed, household servants mostly, so it did not occasion any island-wide protest, but those who did understand chafed under the realization that their servitude would never end.

Gradually, these few dissidents began to infect many of the island blacks, and by 1649, a vague subterranean sense of unease had spread through the entire community without the white masters being aware of the change. The racial composition of the island had altered radically in recent years, for when the law of 1636 was pa.s.sed, Barbados had few slaves and mostly white indentured workers in a total population of only six thousand. But by 1649, there were thirty thousand slaves on the island as against almost the same number of whites, so that the slaves judged they had a chance for victory.

Among them was one of the Tatum slaves, a clever Yoruba named in his homeland Naxee and by his cla.s.sically trained Barbadian owner, Hamilcar. In both Africa and Barbados he had shown a marked capacity for leadership, and had he been a white man emigrating from Europe to a colony like Ma.s.sachusetts, he would surely have played a significant role in the political development of his colony. On Barbados, because he was black, he had no opportunity to contribute his skills, so in despair he began secretly to organize a rebellion against the irrational deprivations he suffered.

He was a tall, robust man with sparkling eyes and commanding voice, and so persuasive that he quickly enlisted a dozen supporters, each of whom enrolled four or five others who could be trusted, and the night came when he revealed his gruesome plan.

Obviously, the fifty-odd blacks never convened as a group, for from the earliest days of slavery, island rules had forbidden meetings of slaves from different plantations; there was to be no midnight plotting in Barbados. The message was spread in the English of the slave fields, since his followers had come from widely varied parts of Africa with different languages: 'Three nights from now, sun goes down, wait two hours, then each man kills all the white men in three different houses close by. Then we spread out, all the island.' It was not a tidy plan, but if the slaves could immobilize the princ.i.p.al white families of Bridgetown, they would stand a good chance of taking over the island. And because of the subtle skill with which Hamilcar had maneuvered the exchange of information and strategies, three nights from the terrible rebellion no white men were aware of the danger.

On the first night after having set the timetable, Hamilcar could not sleep, for he could visualize a wide scatter of things that might go wrong, but on the second night, tired from hurried meetings with his major lieutenants, he slept easily, a.s.sured that his plan would work, and next morning he rose prepared to execute the ma.s.sacre.

On the eastern edge of Bridgetown, well in from the sea, stood a small cottage occupied by the two sons of Thomas Oldmixon's former servant, John Tatum. The father had died young, having worked himself to death clearing Oldmixon's many fields, and then his own, but he did leave his widow this cottage and ten acres-five he had been given as his right at the end of his indenture, and five on which he had spent his first savings, for he loved land and taught his sons to do the same. His widow had died soon thereafter, and so the boys, cautious Isaac and free-spirited Will, inherited the small holding. The former had a wife who reminded him repeatedly: 'This cottage is too small for three. Your brother should find work elsewhere,' but Will showed no sign of wanting to leave.

Their plantation was small, big enough to provide work for only three slaves, but Isaac was so furiously ambitious that he did not propose to remain a minor planter long. 'Soon,' Isaac told his wife, Clarissa, and his brother, 'the Tatum name will be of some importance on this island,' and he confided that the only route to the eminence for which he thirsted was 'more land each year, more slaves each half-year, and this family will scrimp and save until those goals are reached.'

Will was an undisciplined lad of fourteen, whose nature was already unpredictable and whose ready, beguiling smile betrayed the fact that he could well develop into a scoundrel. The two Tatums differed greatly in appearance. Isaac was almost unnaturally short, a disability he tried to overcome with manly posturing, wedges in his shoes and a cultivated rumble to make his voice deeper. He had pale, sandy hair and shifty eyes, as if always calculating the main chance, and to spur himself into manhood as quickly as possible he had married early, locating a young woman two years older than himself and twice as ambitious. As a pair, he and Clarissa were formidable.

The two brothers, so different in appearance and character, worked well together, with Will aiding his brother's ambitions in an original way: he treated the three Tatum slaves so generously that they did the work of six. When there was a muddy task to be completed in a hurry, he leaped in beside them and helped, something his more austere brother would never do. 'Gentlemen have their place,' Isaac pontificated, 'slaves theirs, and the distances must be preserved.'

The two black men worked in the fields, while the woman, Naomi, served as maid and general household a.s.sistant to Clarissa. When she was growing up along the Volta River of the Gold Coast, Naomi had enjoyed a carefree existence before her capture by Portuguese slavers; she had rebelled furiously when first dumped onto the sh.o.r.e of Barbados, and was so cruelly abused by her first master, she had come close to killing herself in despair. Sold off, she fell into the hands of the Tatums, who treated her justly. She had adopted the younger brother as her own, giving him kitchen lectures on how to behave as a young man should and receiving from him instruction in the alphabet, which may have been contributory to the tragedy about to engulf Barbados.