OUR DEBT TO DRAKE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 260, 2 November 1935, Page 7 (Supplement)

OUR DEBT TO DRAKE.

GAVE US THE OCEANS. PIRATE •AND' QUEEN'S MAN. HARD-HEADED MTRACLE MAKER. Drake and Nelson, Mr. Douglas Bell tells us, were the two founders of the English Navy. For Sir Francis was not only "El Draque," the pirate, the terror of the South Seas. He was also the Queen's man, and he had and enforced a very strong idea of integrity and order in the Queen's service. He was not entirely a public servant, but he was much more of one in the modern sense of the phrase than any other seaman of his time. He was, in fact, the maker of the weapon of which Nelson was the last great wielder. The edifice of Nelson's supremacy was built on his unerring sense for what makes success at sea. Hatred of the Spaniards. Drake was not, by the standard of his age, a very romantic character. He made gestures, but his contemporaries made many that were far more flamboyant. He was a hard-headed organising sailor and a hard-headed man of business. I am willing to wager that he got no more satisfaction out of the capture of a platcship than out of the transaction by which, when he was Mayor of Plymouth, lie brought water to town and made a good thing out of it for himself. Mr. Bell derives his sacred fury against the Spaniards from an event of his early life: — Of Drake's first voyage westwards, as lieutenant to a Captain Lovell, we know almost nothing, save the important fact that at Rio de la Hacha on the Main something happened, probably the confiscation of a cargo, which he never f orgqt nor forgave. Indeed, a chaplain whom he consulted on the point assured him that according to the Bible he was justified in "spoiling the Egyptians" to reimburse himself. Trouble with Doughty. The temper of his mind is best to be found in his handling of the troublesome and tragic affair of Thomas Doughty. Doughty was clearly a man of charm and a gentleman in a way which Drake was not. Drake was glad to have him on the great circumnavigation. When Doughty began to step outside his piace, the "Captain General" of the expedition was unfailingly patient and unfailingly careful. He kept on giving fresh chances to his restless, undisciplinable companion, but he never allowed the mutinous spirit to get out of control.

As soon as it was obvious that patience would never -mend matters, he put Doughty on trial, swore in a jury of 40 and, at the end of the proceedings, said: "They that think this man worthy of death let them with me hold up theirhands." The jury was unanimous. Drake and Doughty then took Communion together and dined together, and Doughty's head was struck off. Drake's business was to carry his enterprise to a successful end; it would have run counter to his sense of efficiency as well a!) to his sense of duty to allow an unjustifiable liability to imperil it.

He was, as I figure him, mutatis mutandis, a man very much of the type of Cecil Rhodes. He very much wanted his country to prosper, and he decided, in his hard-headed way, that he would be in the best possible position to help Tnt to do so if he were prosperous himself. The logic, in fact, was -jri)- 1 . Every ounce of bullion that he took from the Spaniards was not merely one oursce the more for Francis' Drake and his associates in the venture: it was also one ounce tile less for the King o* Spain.

This union of commercialism and imperialism lays itself open to misunderstanding. Drake was misunderstood, and some of his fellows watched him with jealous eyes. Frobisher accused him of turning aside from the main battle of the Armada for a little private looting. The spot of mud thus thrown has stuck almost to our tlm«s. It has been wiped away (though Mr. Bell does not mention this fact) by the publication of the Fugger Letters, which perfectly confirm Drake's explanation of his action.

Drake's achievement was, of course, much greater than that of Rhodes, who at most gave the Empire a foothold on half of a single continent. Drake gave the ocean to the English. We had started well behind Spain and Portugal in the huge oceanic adventure —so far behind that it must have seemed that nothing but a miracle could even enable us to catch up. Drake was the constructive part of that miracle. We look on his circumnavigation of the world as the earliest great triumph of English seamanship. Defeated Before it Sailed. But, from the point of view of im mediate politics, the most important part of his feat was accomplished when "El Draque" came looting up the Pacific Coast of South America. The moral effect of that immense surprise was to deal the Spanish command of the sea a blow from which it never recovered. It was not very fanciful to say that the Armada was defeated 10 years before it sailed, when Drake captured the galleon, Grand Captain of the South, in the harbour of Valparaiso. Magellan had found his way into the Pacific in a ship built in Europe. But that had been an isolated feat. The Spanish shipping in the South Seas was all built on the spot, and there was no traffic with Spain save by the land routes of the Isthmus. Now an enemy had cavalierly done the all but impossible for the sake of plunder—what sort of enemy must it be? It was the sort of enemy well typified by Drake. He had ample reserves of confidence in his own abilities, but never enough confidence to take unnecessary lisks. He calculated his materials with the care of an engineer, and, where his materials were incalculably human, he did his best to ensure that they should act in accordance with his calculations. It would be absurd to suggest that he envisaged the twin instruments of national power which came later —the British Navy and the British Mercantile Marine. But he was the man who laid down the lines on which they were to develop.—Edward Shanks, in "John O' London's Weekly."