The Strategy and Tactics of Sir Francis Drake

Considerable confusion marks the thinking of many highly capable officers when the never closely defined and understood terms “strategy” and “tactics” are concerned. Histories, manuals, textbooks and a wide variety of general works give approximations of the two which instantly reveal how widely different even trained minds can be, and in some instances disclose the disquieting fact that the individual author has not thought the matter through in all its connotations and their results.

It is hardly necessary here to do more with these two vital terms than to remark that tactics have always existed in progressively improving effectiveness since warfare began as an organized undertaking, but that strategy is a relatively recent development of historic times in its origin. As we are concerned not with past events but with a highly uncertain future, in which tactics will more than ever before derive from strategy if properly conceived, it may not be amiss to consider the thinking and actions of the great English sailor, Sir Francis Drake, master grand strategist, peerless tactician, father of amphibious warfare with firearms, and ruthless patriot. It must be borne in mind also that, though Drake’s actions are the very marrow of English history, we consider them not from that historical angle at all, but as patterns of thought and action as ageless as mathematics, and therefore as grimly applicable in the future as they were in the past.

To understand the beginnings of Drake’s motivation, it must be remembered that England in the sixteenth century was in the throes of the later Reformation. Ordinarily a controversy between religious sects could mean little or nothing to the national external welfare. In this case, however, as any careful study discloses, it meant an external, undeclared but nevertheless active and fanatically bitter quasi-religious war between newly Protestant England and deeply indoctrinated Catholic Spain, the latter backed up by all the alarmed and angry power of the Roman Church. As was a natural consequence of the intensity of feeling engendered by the decisions and personal policies, first of Henry VIII, then of his son, Edward VI, and finally of his daughter, Elizabeth, attacks upon an enemy who would deny any Protestant a right to heaven and personal salvation were not merely permissible but as desirable as they were praiseworthy. The Huguenots of France quickly perceived the material advantages to be derived from plundering the Catholic Spaniard; the fiercely Lutheran Dutch, already politically embittered by Spanish occupation and dominance, joyously entered the Field of the Golden Loot; and presently the seas were unsafe for everyone, with Spain the principal sufferer in what amounted to wholesale guerre à outrance of the “Lutherans” against the Catholics.

It was history repeating the savage tale of the Crusades after the lapse of three or four centuries, just as we of today are drifting toward a second repetition, with grand strategy—communist dogma in the disguise of a holy war against capitalism—and ruthless political and personal ambition inextricably tangled in a snarl so serious that nothing short of complete surrender by one side or the other will decide the matter, unless both parties fight to stalemate, after which what survives may not be worth saving. It is impossible to evaluate the present menacing situation correctly without a clear perception of what history has left for us. Furthermore, no grand strategy can be planned that might prove adequate without knowing what a man like Drake, who was gifted beyond all his fellows in the larger aspects of national welfare and relations with other nations, perceived as essential.

War, as a social factor in evolution, never occurred until after man had reached the property-owning stage. Before that, hostilities were individual quarrels without significance. But when man had learned to live in groups with a fixed abode, possessed houses and cattle, women and other useful animals capable of reproducing themselves for his benefit, individual rancor and jealousies were swallowed up in group consciousness and rivalry. Mere individual covetousness gave place to group rapacity. From that point onward the development of group, racial and allied ambitions and policies followed the pattern Clausewitz has so clearly defined and crystallized in the dictum that war is merely the employment on a large scale, with the aid of force, of the policy followed by any people during time of peace.

Clausewitz was not to be born for two centuries when Drake was afloat, but the great Englishman understood, perhaps subconsciously, what the later philosopher made concrete. In other words, the sailor of genius fully comprehended that England’s grand strategy during times of relative peace must be such that with but slight modifications it could be extended by force of arms to be the guide during actual war. Henry VIII had foreseen that because of their totally different ideologies Spain and England must eventually come to blows. Being a more than extraordinarily shrewd psychologist, he realized that to have the nation at his back he must devise a peace-time strategy that, when emergency threatened, would prove the real plan for war. Besides that, believing firmly in the divine right of kings and the free exercise of the royal power, he chafed under the domination of Rome. The natural course was to dissolve the ties with the Church, assert boldly the royal supremacy and win his public. Then he could adroitly plan a forward thrust into the lesser known and unknown regions of the world for the nominal purpose of expanding British trade relations, but with the additional vision of crippling Spain at sea and thus removing the menace to Britain the powerful Spanish merchant marine already afforded. Englishmen were forced into the sea for a living by nature: their blood was thoroughly salted. Spain, though surrounded on three sides by water, never was a seafaring nation in the same sense. And she always was poor until the Americas began to fill her coffers and give her hope. By the time Henry had died and Elizabeth had ascended the throne of a troubled heritage, Drake was absorbing both the sea and the national welfare. Centuries before Mahan he had grasped the fundamental importance and influence of real sea power. Neither England nor Spain had a real and separate navy at that time—the Spanish Navy Department was not founded until 28 January, 1717, with Don José Patiño as its Minister*—but he had the vision to see and the courage to lay the sure foundations of England’s vast maritime trade, economic leadership of the world, colonial mastery and supremacy in the naval sense until the political developments following World War II broke up the solid world of tradition. This, of course, is oversimplification, but it serves for the present consideration.

Drake’s essential greatness lay largely in his uncanny ability to mesh his clear genius with the spirit of the times, and to lead in the real sense, not only his queen and her trusted advisers of State, but the men with whom he had to work directly, from Lord Howard to the lowliest fisherman or ex-smuggler. He, more than even the great Burghley, identified himself with the materials of history, knowing himself for one of them. Everything he thought and did was predicated on this.

Extrovert though he was, devoted utterly to swift and powerful action, he nevertheless was so completely unified with unstable Tudor England that he represented its grandeur and its littleness, its heroic struggle for emergence to greatness as well as its vices and petty chicanery far more truly than either titled nobleman or simple commoner could. Though the term had not yet been invented, he was a true complex, a braiding together, of every thread of English life. He had eaten the bread of poverty and knew accurately its value in the scale against royal favor and honors. He had survived the bitter struggle when, as ship’s boy, he had gnawed the hardtack crawling with weevils, drunk the stinking water, shivered, with split open, salt encrusted face and hands in the paralyzing cold of Channel and North Sea—and won a ship by his sturdy intelligence and loyalty. Never did he forget, in even moments of triumph as the fickle Queen’s darling, how the common man felt and thought and acted. Yet at those very moments he also knew, with all the force of superior intellect and vision, when to think and to dare as the supreme leader disdainful of convention and of the ill-based public opinion that would cramp him.

He was not bound by the traditional British conservatism. He saw more clearly than all but a very few of his fellows what Britain’s destiny could be, what Spain meant as a rival, and probably a very actively hostile one, and he cut right to the core of success by his plans for dealing with these complex • elements. Had Queen Elizabeth been more stable in her thinking, less inclined to personal intrigue based upon half- mad schemes instead of on reasoned and logical procedure, and generally wiser in her foreign policy, Drake could have ruined Spain forever, and there would have been no Invincible Armada to frighten most of England with the grimmest menace of her long history.

Today the United States is troubled by much the same economic unrest that worried England in the 1500’s. Politics of the same shifty and irresponsible party type designed to draw votes dominates the scene instead of clearly thought out measures designed for the country’s welfare. We have no stable foreign policy, and not a single truly major figure is on the horizon to lead the people. They themselves, incidentally, have been so tricked with false promises, unreasonable benefits of a thousand Sorts, all unearned, that a genuinely thoughtful expression of the public mind appears impossible.

To the objections that we never make war voluntarily but are always forced into it, and that war must be planned and fought by specialists, none of whom is concerned with ephemeral political or local conditions, there is the overwhelming reply of past events in disproof. We cannot coast along, placidly relying upon our experts only while remaining ignorant and inert ourselves. A successful war can be assured only if the policies we have followed during times of peace can be projected to triumph in the military sense. Grand strategy, therefore, begins long before we permit war to tinge our horizon with doubt. It consists in the development through profound study of plans in every field so wise and so far reaching for the prudent conduct of domestic affairs that mere extension by arms in case of necessity need occasion no serious anxiety.

Drake had no textbooks or previous philosophies to guide him in his sober thinking. Moreover, from the strictly moral standpoint, his initial hatred of Spain was based upon his rebuff by the Spaniards and the losses he suffered as a slaver and freebooter at Rio de la Hacha and San Juan de Ulua. However wrong in motivation his feeling was, it stimulated his mind and opened his eyes. His work differed materially from what other men were doing because he was not satisfied merely to plunder on the high seas and the Spanish Main. Behind all his depredations was a cold, calculated plan: the downfall of Spain and the corresponding safe advancement of England. With that always in mind, his genius expressed itself in every direction in answer to two questions: what would most hurt the one and advantage the other, and how those results could most safely, quickly and easily be secured.

England in his day was self-contained except for the edge of France, but Spain was little more than the nerve ganglion controlling a vast, sprawling and expanding empire whose affiliations threatened every country not in close spiritual and political accord with Madrid. Spain’s parallel then with the United States of today should cause the most careless to think soberly as to our destiny. We, like the sixteenth century Spaniards, are spread out perilously thin. Obviously the surest means of crippling the brain and motive power of such an impossible congeries is to cut off the blood that feeds it, the limbs that support it. North Africa and the Italian holdings of the Emperor presented Drake no temptations. But across the rough and menacing Atlantic shimmered the incalculable wealth of the Indies and the Americas. To cut that off would be not merely to inflict heavy damage by wholesale plundering. It would deprive Spain of the best of her huge fleet, of the treasure that kept her financially alive, of her ablest and bravest fighting men. The inevitable result would be rapid decline, and the taking of her place on the seas, in the world’s markets and as the maker of world polity, by England.

Besides these ordinary considerations, Drake was not slow to seize upon the convenient religious angle. Briton and Spaniard did not differ materially in their view of Christianity: the polity was the same. The policy, however, was very different, and from beginning as a quasi-religious struggle, with contempt on one side facing an equal scorn on the other, disagreement rapidly developed into fanatic bitterness on both sides, and savage, unrestrained cruelties on the part of Spain, when captured “Lutherans” were turned over to the gentle ministrations of the Inquisition.

Drake was a pirate. There is no gainsaying that, for at least a good part of his career. If at times he acted with the approval and tacit authority of the Queen, he never displayed documentary evidence of it publicly. So he could never afford to lose in whatever action. His results must invariably prove his justification. Generally they did. But his mind was firmly set upon far more than capturing treasure ships or sinking a few armed cruisers or trading vessels. The production centers and shipping points of the wealth of the Indies and of the Americas were his primary objective. His secondary was the eventual control of such wealth and its diversion to English ownership and benefit.

He did not underestimate the difficulties of his task, which were enormous. His first care, after gathering personally every possible scrap of information to be found in Portuguese, Spanish and other charts, maps and navigational aids, was to develop with astonishing skill and plant firmly a widespread intelligence system which eventually proved the despair of every Spanish official in the New World. His spies and informers were a handful of long established English traders highly regarded by their Spanish neighbors of the colonies, a number of Portuguese (who had no reason to love Spain), no one knows how many native Indians, freed negroes, slaves and “wild men,” and even a Spaniard or two. Planted at every strategic point, they evidently reported regularly through channels unsuspected by the Spaniards to the very end. Our main reason for being sure of this is that repeatedly Drake talked and acted in such a manner that it proved he knew much more of what was going on in the Spanish colonial world than the topmost officials knew. Never once did he let slip a word regarding these invaluable allies. He never admitted the charge, either, that he himself lived under an assumed name and personality in Panama for two whole years, learning the native dialects as well as perfecting his Spanish, mapping the vital Isthmus, charting the harbor and its outlying islands and noting the regularity of the treasure ships coming from Perú and Colombia to discharge their precious cargoes for the land journey across to Nombre de Dios and transatlantic reshipment to Spain. He wisely made friends of the Indians, and always treated them fairly. In return, in all but a very few instances, they served him loyally when he needed them, for they were instant in recognizing the difference between Drake’s attitude and that of the Spaniards whose arrogance, cruelty and forced labor, if not actual slavery, they hated and feared.

Bit by bit over the years Drake built up his own comprehensive knowledge of the entire American scene, including the West Indies, acquired charts and navigational notes, land maps, saw and studied harbors, ports, anchorages, often made soundings and recorded tides, winds, weather, etc. Everything, in a word, that an expert seaman and navigator could do to- increase his mastery and to give sound basis for his future planning, he worked out in detail. In proof of this the Spanish accounts of his capture successively of the two greatest cities in the New World, Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, and Cartagena, metropolis of Nueva Granada, show clearly how accurate was his knowledge of both before attacking. The one thing he did not fully realize was the gross negligence and inefficiency of the officials and citizens, the lamentable deficiencies of the defense of both cities, and the fact that the Spanish defenders always feared treachery on the part of their negro and Indian slaves and allies. He did, however, count upon the terror his mere name inspired in every Spaniard. Again and again he is reported as demanding of captured Spaniards, with a grim humor that added to the menace of his inquiry: “Is it true that men say of me that I am the devil?” In his estimate of any situation he certainly calculated the effect of his subtle and continuous undermining of enemy morale. So adroit was his cold psychological warfare that for a quarter of a century he kept all the Spanish dominions in a ferment of mingled apprehension and cowardly readiness to flee whenever rumor proclaimed his threatening approach.

It may be objected today, now that we know all the facts, that Drake’s capture of the two vital Spanish outposts was the knocking down of straw men. It must not be forgotten, nevertheless, that he had no accurate knowledge of their weakness. He was willing to accept the calculated risks after close analysis, and the tactics he devised in each instance laid the solid foundations of today’s methods of waging amphibious warfare with firearms. We think merely in terms of greater ranges and more fire power, but we have not yet developed—except for air attack—tactical approaches very far beyond his, unless we use the atomic novelty and the principle of annihilation.

A review of the assaults and captures in each case discloses the skill and daring of his planning. We must remember also that before he planned to take these two main emporia he had had the advantage of his previous successful amphibious maneuvers on a smaller scale at Nombre de Dios and Puerto Bello in 1572. These minor affairs developed his technique, showed him the efficacy of feinting in force, flank attacks, ambush where practicable, terrific noise and display, direct bombardment from the sea— in a word, all the essential details for carrying out major operations of the same type.

Knighted in 1581 for his achievement as the first British circumnavigator of the world, late in 1585 he sailed with a fleet and the Queen’s authorization to hurt Spain in any way he could in her overseas dominions. A point worth noticing here is that while Spain regarded him as a pirate even then, he was really a privateer, since he carried the royal warrant and the Crown participated by furnishing money and armed ships. That is hardly piracy as we understand it.

Once at sea, Drake’s first objective was the interception of the fabled treasure fleet deep laden with gold and silver and, as always, inadequately handled and guarded. Proceeding to the northwest corner of Spain, in about 45° North latitude, he hove to and waited in a spreading crescent for the lumbering galleons to arrive. As he knew from the Spanish sailing directions the exact route the ships would follow, his plan was logical. Unfortunately for its fulfillment, when the galleons were almost in sight from his topmasts, a sudden violent storm drove them southward out of their regular course but allowed them to harbor safely at San Lúcar de Barrameda. It was always referred to after that by the relieved Spaniards as the “miracle fleet” because of its escape.* When he was sure the treasure ships had escaped him, Drake set his course for Hispaniola and fabulous Santo Domingo. He arrived there 10 January, 1586, took the city on the 11th, and occupied it until its ransom was paid. He left its wreck 20 February for Cartagena, his ships deep with loot, his officers and men alike burning with eagerness for another similar conquest and profit.

None of the Spanish accounts, and there are many of them, agree in details. Drake was solemnly asserted in sworn testimony before the authorities to have had anywhere from fifteen to forty-five galleons, ranging up to 700 tons burden, all heavily armed, and upwards of 4,000 men. The apparently most reliable testimony is to the effect that he landed between six and eight hundred men near Haina, close to the eastern tip of the island, and marched them toward the city, covered by part of his ships just off shore. The remainder of the fleet he took up the river Osama to threaten the city directly from the front, the infantry coming around to attack simultaneously in the rear. By the time these maneuvers were reported to the authorities, the city went into a craven panic and indescribable confusion resulted, much of it because of the psychotic terror inspired by “the dragon,” “the demon,” the “monster of the sea.”

A little feeble reconnoitering was done by Captain Melchor de Ochoa de Villanueva with eighty foot soldiers and Don Juan de Villandrando with twenty horsemen. But, as Drake had foreseen, there was no unity of command, no sound directing force, and no coordinated plan for defense. Everybody gave orders and nobody obeyed. Of the president of the Audiencia, who should have directed the defense, one of the documents declares, “We know nothing except that he took no part in the two encounters we had with the English; and we understand that he is alive, but have no news of him.”* In a word, he ran away to personal safety in the interior.

Some 1,500 men had been hastily gathered and sent to advanced positions to defend the approaches to the city, but during the night most of them decamped silently, so that at sunrise next morning only 110 remained, undisciplined, jittery, badly armed, unfed, and shivering with fear.* As the roaring, disciplined English appeared, firing their muskets to add to the terror their shouting created, the mixed rabble of Spaniards, negroes and Indians promptly retreated without firing an effective shot. Then the city saw one of Drake’s most masterful tactical moves. The ships he had brought up the river had been run close to shore with their main batteries exactly opposite the openings of the main streets, which they swept from end to end. The only casualty among the citizens was the bachelor Tostado who ventured into a street at just the wrong moment. Howling, firing, and with braying trumpets, the infantry poured furiously in on the rear, divided into two parties going in different directions, rushed the handfuls who dared oppose them, and met within half an hour in the Cathedral Plaza. The total resistance amounted to nothing, and the city was in their hands except for the citadel, which they did not bother to storm, and which in turn dared not provoke them.

Drake’s amphibious tactics had been so successful that he lost only two or three men in the skirmishes. But now his grand strategy of the attempted ruin of Spain’s queen colonial city could be only partly effected because he was not able, for lack of sufficient explosives, to carry out the destruction he had intended. Santo Domingo was built solidly, most of the edifices constructed of stone, at least in the lower story. Systematically he set demolition parties to work after he had selected the Calle de las Damas for his headquarters and barracks for the landing party.† Not another street escaped the unwelcome attentions of the English, and before they had finished their difficult task, burning, tearing down, purposely defiling and otherwise rendering useless the best structures in the city, from a third to one-half of all the buildings were ruined. So sudden had been the assault that except for what the terror-stricken citizens could carry on their backs, every house was fully furnished, every store and office abandoned with everything in place. To show the Catholic Spaniards his hatred as a heretic and a “Lutheran” for everything they revered, he turned the Cathedral, a stately and handsome edifice, into a jail and a slaughterhouse, where the cattle his men consumed for food were butchered. Men and women, often up to their knees in the sticky mud of the country back roads, struggled away from the doomed capital wailing in abject fright, dragging or carrying children.

Behind, in the city, Drake’s orders were clear. The looting was orderly and the destruction calculated. He wished to leave a scar upon the soul of colonial Spain that could not be forgotten, and he did. None of the accounts show anything to indicate that at any time the English got out of hand, or that at any moment Drake was anything but their complete master. All, however, lament the extent of the destruction, and the rapacity of the “Lutheran pirates.” Vicious as this sort of warfare was, and bad as its permanent effects were to prove, there emerges from the welter of sordidness one striking instance of the need always of a leader in offensive war who can accept the risk of decisive action and carry it through unhesitatingly to a decisive conclusion.

During the negotiations for the ransom of the city, Drake sent a faithful Indian lad with a message to the Spaniards who were timidly bargaining from a distance. There is a little doubt as to exactly what happened, for the stories are a mesh of contradictions and partial statements. It seems as though the haughty Spaniard to whom the boy went was- offended at being approached by an inferior instead of by a white Englishman, drew his sword and ran the boy through. The lad managed to make his way back to the city, told Drake what had happened, and died. In a fury, Drake decided instantly that the Spaniards must be taught so crushing a lesson that so brutal and senseless an assault would never be permitted to occur again. He promptly ordered two-friars who had been captured in one of the monasteries taken to the spot where the boy had been attacked, and hanged in full view of their Spanish fellows. Then the word was sent that Drake expected the murderer to be brought to the same place and hanged. Two more monks would be hanged every day until justice was accomplished. The outcry that was raised echoed fiercely in Madrid later, but the offender was promptly dispatched and no more innocent friars had to swing from the gallows.

Meantime, as the ransom of 100,000 ducats was refused as being impossible to raise, the destruction went on. Vast columns of smoke rose from the burning of edifices which had first been thoroughly plundered. Again Drake was systematically adding to the terror his mere name carried. The English soldiery, “enemy Lutherans of our holy Catholic Faith, of [your Majesty’s], Crown and of ourselves . . . with the bowels of demons burned, smashed and destroyed the images, retablos, rejas [choir screens], pillars, choir, books, organs and everything else that seemed to them dedicated to the divine cult, even carrying away the lamps, organs and bells [of the Cathedral and churches].”* On and on went the reasoned demolitions and burnings. At last the Spaniards sent word that 25,000 ducats was the utmost they could raise, and that that amount would have to be made up by figuring the value of the Cathedral treasures, the Archbishop’s plate and money, the jewelry of the women, and such pearls as were available. Already many private citizens had been encouraged to ransom their homes secretly, so Drake accepted the offer, the emissaries met, the ransom was produced 19 February, 1586, and the next day the English sailed away, leaving behind a community despoiled of most of its wealth, in a city almost half of which lay in smoldering débris. Besides the bitterness arising from destruction and pillage, the taunts of the victorious English and the realization of their own helplessness, the colonists seethed with savage resentment against their officials, and charges of poltroonery and the rankest cowardice were freely bandied about. Disorganization was complete, the monks of the religious Orders were sunk in despair, the Cathedral Chapter bewailed its desecrated and despoiled edifice, and the complaints to Spain were frantic appeals to which little attention was paid.

Drake, meantime, was quite generally thought to have made one serious blunder, partly due to overconfidence. At the height of his triumph he had boasted that the next stronghold he would take and sack was Cartagena, principal city and seaport of the kingdom of New Granada. Warnings were immediately sent to the authorities of the doomed port, and as Drake’s ships were foul and he was in no particular hurry anyway, the news reached Cartagena before him. The result was almost the same as that at Santo Domingo: complete disorganization, lack of proper preparation, desertion of the defenders, cowardice on the part of many, and a mass escape and disturbance by the galley slaves. Words flew, orders multiplied, and nothing was done that remotely approached skilled military defense. Cartagena fell.

Perhaps, and there is some reason to believe so, Drake was not foolish or boastful when he gave warning of the attack. He may have been, as I believe, counting heavily on psychological effect. As subsequent events proved the weight of that, it cannot be eliminated as a part of his secondary strategy and tactical efficiency. Documents just received from the American Embassy at Bogotá, which procured copies for me from the Colombian government, bear this out.† Clearly they tell of the hysteria and confusion resulting from the news of Drake’s approach. Governor and Captain General of the Province of Cartagena, Don Pedro de Lodeña pleaded in his letter to the Audiencia of Santafé, that the authorities of the kingdom of Nueva Granada send him immediately 200 soldiers because “the risk and the danger are so notorious.” The Audiencia acted promptly, commissioned Don Antonio de Hoyos as captain, and authorized the soldiers, their equipment, pay and provisioning. Another document is thrilling. Shortly after the men arrived the despairing Governor notified the Audiencia that most of the soldiers had deserted and were supposed to be hiding in the interior, where he begged the authorities to hunt them down and send them back. Next is the statement of Don Bernardino de Albornoz, the Fiscal or public prosecutor. He tells the facts all over again, reports that Captain de Hoyos, with his Ensign and Sergeant, had been hunting the deserters and asked for help, which he emphasized was vital and must be immediate if Cartagena was to be saved, as Drake was expected at any moment.

One of the Bogotá documents is especially valuable because it confirms references in several other sources to the rising and escape of the galley slaves who served at the oar in the two royal galleys posted as station ships for the defense of the city. In the wild confusion attending Drake’s attack, or perhaps after he first struck, these “forced men” managed to get ashore and immediately, whether or not, as alleged, they had any real part in the fighting around the town, ran off into the country and hid on various estates. The Fiscal in a letter to the Governor recounts the escape and asks that everything be granted that was requested by Don Pedro de Salazar, who was charged by the Governor of Santa Marta Province with finding and bringing them back. Salazar also asked that the landed proprietors and judges who had hidden the ex-convicts be subjected to “grave penalties,” which the authorities approved.* Drake’s terror had carried far, and the galley slaves took full advantage of it to make their escape.

In his tactical maneuvers for the assault Drake followed the same general plan he had proved so efficacious at Santo Domingo on a grand scale. The plan was simplicity itself— on paper: the fleet divided, one part feinting at the main seafront of the city, the other, as will be seen by reference to the contemporary accounts, partly in reserve, partly active; the soldiers and sailors landed to one side, approaching the city at its least defensible point and partially, at least, covered from the fire of the forts as they marched.

Study of the location shows an apparently curious disregard of the much broader approach to the north and west. To understand the reasons it must be recalled that, as various Spanish chroniclers have recorded, the land there was hilly, swampy in places and almost entirely covered with poisonous thorn bushes or shrubs which made approach in mass impossible. The beach was therefore the sole means of flanking the town with any assurance of success. The story is as brief as it was lurid. The one really sharp clash between attackers and garrison lasted only a few minutes. Spanish morale was gravely depressed by horror of Drake and his treatment of Santo Domingo; yet that horror and fear were not powerful enough to make the garrison and citizens fight with desperation, as such a challenge would have influenced their conquering predecessors of half a century previous. Drake knew the current Spanish inefficiency, the infiltration into both army and citizenry of weak and greedy unscrupulous men, and took full advantage of both. The same things were also well recognized in Spain, and when the Governor of the city reached the Peninsula he was promptly clapped into jail and never was heard of again. Meantime, the total amount of loot and damage inflicted by Drake before he sailed away ran into figures that broke the existing records. The city ransom was 107,000 ducats. Several smaller private ransoms, one of 5,000 ducats, private and public stores of gold, coins, jewels, bronze cannon, powder, shot, oil, wine, foodstuffs and general stores totalled something like 300,000 ducats more. In addition to this, before his terms were met Drake burned and destroyed almost half the city. So ponderous was the Spanish machine that the vessels of war sent to aid the threatened city did not arrive until 18 July, almost three full months after Drake had sailed away from the blackened ruins and desolated populace.†

To sum up Drake’s superb vision and power is relatively simple today, when we can weigh most of the evidence objectively and calmly. Quite as if he had had a modern War College training, plus intensive instruction in history and political economy, Drake first thoroughly perfected and visualized his grand strategy, which was the severe crippling, if not the actual ruin, of Spain and her replacement as the foremost world power by England. To accomplish this tremendous task, England must be free (a) to build a vast colonial empire, (b) to create the powerful armed mercantile marine necessary to serve it and the mother country adequately, (c) to lay the foundations of a genuinely professional navy such as no other country had at the time, and (d) to develop home industries and manufactures, demands and markets both at home and abroad for a commerce that should be world wide. Better than any other man of his era he grasped the fundamentals of the role sea power must play. He understood clearly the meaning of England’s geographical position and limitations, and the interdependence and natural sequence of sea control with adequate bases, industry and combined sales outlets and representation overseas, a powerful merchant fleet backed up by a regular navy strong, concentrated, and intelligent enough to guarantee commerce. His vision did not stop there. There can scarcely be any doubt that his experienced eye did not perceive the vulnerability of his enemy at her weakest point, the Isthmus of Darien (Panama), through which passed the most important and the richest commerce between Spain and the colonies.* If proof of this be needed as further evidence of his foresight we have only to consider the establishment soon after Drake’s time of the Scottish colony at Caledonia Bay on the Atlantic coast of the Isthmus, as England’s first aspiring endeavor to lay the base for future permanent control of the region. He saw, as did some of the queen’s ministers, that Britain’s rising population with its limited opportunities had to be supported from without, or in other words, that Englishmen were being forced into the sea to live, and that it was their business to control that sea, not as a private enterprise but as the great international highway which all must use without let or hindrance. In that and his corollary thinking Drake was the clear precursor of the modern geopoliticians such as Mahan, Haushofer, Sir Halford MacKinder and their followers. Unlike some of them, however, Drake was not incendiary in his planning, with the single exception of his determination to destroy Spain, which until his time had effectively blocked all efforts toward the realization of any such conception.

With his goal in full view and his vision of his problem clarified, Drake began his life work by qualifying himself first of all to deal intelligently and actively with all its ramifications. To do this he familiarized himself in detail with Spanish general life, habits of thought, political and commercial systems and doctrines of royal and ecclesiastical absolutism, state aims and finances, and the reasons why, though she possessed a vast fleet, Spain was not a true sea power. Exactly how he acquired this amazing fund of knowledge we may never know, for the records give us no dependable information in detail.* Gradually, and by arduous personal efforts, he learned in minute detail, partly on the spot, all about Spain’s vast colonial system, her slow and perilous means of communication with its different sectors, and the incredible flow of wealth it provided. He learned something else, also, for we may judge by many of his letters and reports, he understood that this wealth from the Ultramar was not only the lifeblood of the Peninsula, but the deadly cancer gnawing steadily closer to its heart. Part of his information came from his never fully revealed two voyages to and residence in the Spanish colonies, and in part from his wisely chosen and efficient intelligence network.

While all this was slowly building up his capacity for his triumphs of the destruction of Santo Domingo and Cartagena, and his amazing voyage around the world, he assiduously cultivated a duplex reputation which gave him a tremendous weapon he employed in every possible way on every occasion: the terror of his mere name as a “Lutheran pirate” who plundered at will, and as a foe generous and affable, scrupulously fair to the vanquished and no molester of the weak, aged or infirm. Examination of the voluminous Spanish records throughout the colonial world discloses the enormous effect this had all through the West Indias, in Panamá, Perú, México, the whole of Central America, all along both coasts of South America, and in the Far East. Everywhere the mention of his name or a hint as to his possible approach was enough to produce something close akin to unreasoning dismay, and no estimate of Spain’s difficulties can afford to discount it in the least. “Drake” was the magic word releasing the djinn from the bottle to produce chaos and panic.

With all this elaborately prepared background of the most practical sort of knowledge so patiently acquired, there went hand in hand Drake’s development of his own superb seamanship and experience in handling both ships and men in normal conditions and in storms, in peace, and in combat that recognized only one outcome: the complete mastery or destruction of the enemy. Unlike weaker men, Drake never made the fundamental blunder of mistaking words for things. That was a sin which can never be charged against him. Thought and word alike for him had substance only when translated into positive and final action of a constructive nature. The men who flocked eagerly to join him whenever he called knew they could trust him because he thought clearly, saw his objective clearly and carried his vision and thinking into action whose meaning was crystal clear alike to clod and noble. As he knew accurately through demonstration what both his ships and his men could do in any circumstances, and gave orders accordingly, he succeeded where other equally daring men would have failed because they lacked his genius for the one right thing at the opportune moment. And he always led.

It was this combination of psychological awareness and daring but fundamentally sound tactical reasoning and action that made him what Queen Elizabeth’s prime minister Burghley called a “fearful man to loose upon the King of Spaine.” Hand in hand with it went the building up of his own tactical development. Whether he was the first sponsor or inventor of the separate topmast, we do not know. Charnock quotes a remark of Sir Walter Ralegh as stating that “It is not long since the striking of the topmasts, a wonderful ease to great ships, both at sea and in the harbour, hath been devised, together with the chain-pump, which taketh up twice as much water as the ordinary one did. We have lately added the bonnet, and the drabbler, to the courses: we have added studding-sails—the weighing of anchors by the capstern,”* and more, all details in rig and equipment which added notably to tactical ease and efficiency in handling, at a time when other navies were blundering along in the old ways and jeopardizing the lives of their people by holding to designs and methods which made almost every vessel unsafe under the best of conditions.

Drake’s tactical handling of his ships and men makes an illuminating study of amphibious as well as of marine surface warfare so accurate in its original estimates of every given situation, so highly skilled in its planning and so fierce and determined in its execution in whatever circumstances, that consciously or not modern operations have followed largely along the line of his thinking, with allowance, of course, for the addition today of air and submarine forces. His first sharp lesson in battle and combined land and water operations came with the disastrous affair† at San Juan de Ulúa 16 September, 1568, when the furious struggle, though more of a general brawl than an ordered engagement, illustrated graphically what land forces can do to aid a fleet. It also gave him first hand experience of Spanish treachery, the vital importance of good gunnery and the heaviest practical guns in either board-to-board slugging or long range fighting, and the clear advantage of vessels small, swift and able enough to maneuver easily under trying conditions.

Scarcely four years later he was able to give a practical demonstration of what he had learned. He sailed 24 May, 1572, from Plymouth, and 20 July sailed from a secret rendezvous for Nombre de Dios, where he arrived two days later. As his real objective was the capture of the Spanish treasure sent by pack trains from Panama for transshipment to Spain, he had to capture the town. It was his first full scale attempt at amphibious war, and he conducted it in masterly fashion. His ships did not approach directly at first, but anchored some two or three miles below the town. There he put his storming party ashore. Indian guides led the men through the bush to the objective, which was caught unprepared from two sides, and taken after a sharp skirmish, in which Drake himself was severely wounded in the thigh. When he collapsed from loss of blood, though seventy tons or more of the treasure was stored there, his men for once disobeyed and thought of nothing but getting their beloved commander to safety despite his weak but angry protests.

A year later, completely recovered from his wound, he led his men again with the help of his faithful Indians through the bush, planted them across the Panama trail near Nombre de Dios, captured the treasure mule- train, and reached Plymouth in safety 9 August, 1573, almost awash with loot, and wiser for his experiences. Later that same year he engaged in the Irish expedition, of which we know little more than the brief references that tell us of valiant conduct and successful actions everywhere. His growing contacts and experience bore fruit four years later when, in December, 1577, he sailed on his search for a possible northwest passage, and ended by circumnavigating the world in the face of both Papal and Spanish disapproval and the knowledge that if he were captured alive he would have short shrift before the Spanish authorities.

It was on this epoch-making voyage that his broadened viewpoint and stern resolution manifested itself in the trial and execution of Thomas Doughty on the same spot where half a century before Magellan had had to go through the same unhappy performance with two of his officers. Doughty was a gentleman adventurer who, from the evidence before us, was one of those despicable sea lawyers we seem to be always cursed with afloat. Whether he was completely guilty as charged of attempting to stir up mutiny and gain personal control of the expedition, or whether he had been sent aboard the fleet by jealous courtiers or enemies of Drake to sabotage the whole affair does not matter greatly. The commander, after being very patient and tolerant of what he must have realized from the first was treacherous conduct, finally brought Doughty to trial before his peers, and weighed the evidence. After delivering a charge to the jury of forty officers, seamen and gentlemen which left no doubt in any mind of the verdict expected, he called for a vote. Before sentence was pronounced, Doughty was given his free choice of two alternatives: of beheading on the spot, or of being sent to England for trial there. The presumptive evidence that the condemned man knew his sentence was on the whole just lies in his calm acceptance of execution. There could be but one commander of such an expedition, everyone realized it sharply in the circumstances, and execution of the grim penalty stopped any further trifling, exactly as it had done in Magellan’s case.

It is quite within the possibilities that Drake held no dry legal power to order the execution, and it required a man of not only the most fearless initiative but of complete resolution and personal courage to carry it out. The fate of Britain as a great maritime power of the future may well have depended upon Drake’s action. Had he temporized or shown the slightest sign of weakness instead of furious indignation and the sternest determination, the expedition undoubtedly would have failed, Drake himself might easily have disappeared at sea on the way home, and there would have been no genius the country could throw across the path of the Invincible Armada twelve year's later. Lord Howard, Hawkins, Frobisher, Knollys and their fellows were all stout fighting men, but not one of them possessed the divine spark that animated this fiery son of Devon.

To paraphrase Count Cavour’s remark about Italy, if Drake had done the things he did entirely for his own enrichment, he would have been considered one of the world’s greatest rascals, which was the Spanish view of him. But he was acting much more for England than for himself, and his greatest results benefited not only his own country but the entire Protestant world, so enhancing his already towering fame that when in 1588 the so-called invincible fleet came heavily north to wipe England out as a separate power, it was largely to his genius, ripened by years of endeavor, that England’s salvation was due.