Martin Stephen: The galleon's grave

'Are you strong enough to support me?' asked her mother, breathless now. Anna smiled up at the person she loved most in the world.

"Me? Of course!! have millions of energies!'

The mistake brought a smile to the tired face of her mother. Anna flushed. She was not willing to appear weak in front of anyone, even her mother. You will need those energies, my dearest girl, her mother thought. You will need them more than ever. And how I wish you could give some of them to me, to fight a battle I know I am losing.

It was the masts that first struck him. Taller than trees, they festooned the sky, scoring it with the dark lines of their rigging. The waterfront at Plymouth was chaotic, the Elizabeth Bonaventure an asylum gone mad. Hordes of sweating men were heaving barrels of biscuit, beer and gunpowder off the waiting carts in a haphazard manner and bundling them on board the ships drawn up by the quay. Untidy masses of stores were swinging aboard wildly in nets, threatening to smack indiscriminately into masts and men. To wild shouts one such load, the net bulging under the weight of a pallet of cannonballs, swung against rigging and wrapped itself round the arm-thick ropes tensioning the main mast. A succession of boats were scudding across the waves like so many beetles, taking yet more stores to the other great ships anchored out in the sound. Cordage littered the quayside and a spare foresail that had somehow broken free of its binding ropes was flapping forlornly on the cobbles, like a lobster kicking out the last moments of its life on the fish-seller's stall. Like all waterfronts, it stank of the sea, the rotting smell of fish and seaweed, the tang of salt and the earthy, dark smells of rope, tar and canvas.

'Damn them and their cowardice!' ranted Sir Francis Drake, appearing on the side of his flagship with a voice that could cut through a gale rising above even the clamour on the dockside.*Who do these scum think they are, deserting their country and their captain in their hour of need! More lackeys in the pay of Spain!'

Drake was a short man, barrel-chested and round-faced, brown bearded, with ruddy cheeks like the babies Devon farmers' wives brought with them to market. He was extraordinarily expensively dressed, the ruff as proud as a peacock's tail, his doublet all of slashed silk in a deep, dark green and ostentatious gold buckles on his fine leather shoes. In total contrast, Drake's Secretary was a thin, lugubrious figure with a balding pate, white face and an expression of very long suffering. His clothing looked as if someone had taken a used sail, dyed it black and turned it into an ill-fitting cloak for human nakedness. His scarecrow figure held a strange dignity. He had a slate in his hand, with a piece of chalk, like a rather tired schoolmaster.

'The sailors have run off,' the Secretary intoned in a voice one might otherwise have expected to find coming from the pulpit at evensong in a tiny, freezing village church, 'because they thought they were going off to rob Spanish treasure ships. Now they hear they're going off to attack the Spaniards in their home ports. This is much more dangerous and far less remunerative. It is-'

'Fuck what it is!' roared Drake, his colour now the highest red and his face looking set to explode. 'Fuck what they are! Fuck what you are! Fuck all cowards and traitors!'

The Secretary showed no sign of wishing to fuck anyone as he stood by his master's side impassively. His eyes were perhaps looking rather more towards Heaven than might be deemed customary, but whatever he was saying was being kept private between him and his God.

It had not been a good day for Henry Gresham. Nor a good week. The doubts about this mission had grown and buzzed in his head like flies. Why should he risk his life to tell Walsingham how many barrel staves were being landed in Cadiz? The weather had been foul when they set out from London, and now he was soaked to the skin. His great riding cloak was wet, weighing five times its normal weight, and had the dank stink of damp wool. Uncontrollable shivers passed through him without warning. Yet it was more than his shivering cold that bothered him. A deep dread had settled over Gresham at the prospect of taking to sea. Seafaring was something about which he knew nothing. He hated being an innocent abroad, hated his own ignorance, sensed that his carefully cultivated front of superiority and control would be smashed. He had been made to look the fool often enough as a child. An aching heart and a nagging headache told him that he was on course for neither Lisbon nor Cadiz, but rather on course for humiliation. Or a lonely, wet death beneath the greasy rolling waves of the Atlantic.

Gresham also hated the filth of seafaring. He was obsessive about cleanliness, and his usual daily routine was to stand in the iron bath, scrubbing his skin with the cold water as if it would cleanse him of all sin as well as of dirt. At sea, the fine velvet and silk-covered bodies stank more with each day that passed. No soap would work up a lather in sea water, which left salt stains on any flesh and cloth it touched, as well as something of the stink of the sea. That strange odour, of sharp salt water tainted by an unidentifiable corruption just beneath the surface.

Therank smell and clutter of the quayside did nothing to reassure him. Even Mannion's usual banter had deserted him and he had descended into an unprecedented black mood of his own from the moment they left London. For years Gresham had often prayed for Mannion to shut up. Now he found himself praying that he would speak. And to cap it all, if this ranting maniac before him was indeed Sir Francis Drake, it would not be a good time for Henry Gresham to introduce himself. Drake saved him the bother. Drake caught sight of the young man and his servant on the quayside.

'You need not mention your miserable name. I know it,' said Drake with extreme rudeness. Gresham's hand itched to clutch his sword. 'It was a condition of the voyage that I take you on board. It is not a condition that I otherwise acknowledge your existence.'

Gresham bowed his head respectfully. It seemed the only thing to do. Clearly Drake did not like spies.

‘Are we loaded? Are we prepared for our voyage? Is there any meaning in this chaos?' Drake was roaring again.

'If you keep distracting me every other minute with requests for information that I cannot supply, my admittedly feeble attempts to keep track of what is being loaded aboard the Elizabeth Bonaventure will die in tatters.' The Secretary placed his slate on a nearby barrel. Clearly, he alone on the waterfront had no fear of Drake. The barrel was almost immediately grabbed by two burly seamen, and the Secretary grabbed his slate back just in time. 'To be frank, Sir Francis,' said the Secretary, ‘I do not know if twenty tons of gunpowder has just been taken ort board, or twenty tons of dried peas.'

Drake looked at his Secretary, with that same speculative glance. Then he rounded, without warning, on the sailors and workmen filling the slippery quayside. 'To Spain! To death and to glory!'

The men on the waterfront heard his words, stopped their work and started to cheer. The sailors caught the mood. Suddenly the whole quay was a feast of cheering. Drake opened his arms, welcoming the cheers. He turned and set off through yelling crowds, mounting the gangplank. Once aboard the Bonaventure he vanished below decks.

‘Now that one,' said Mannion glumly, following Drake up the gangplank, 'he's a real bastard.'

There was a clatter of hoofs behind them, yells and curses and the noise of a pile of barrels being knocked over. Several sailors and half the women waiting to say farewell to their menfolk had run for their lives as the heavy barrels rolled down the quayside.

'Sorry! Sorry!' a booming voice called out. 'Any damage paid for, of course. Truly sorry!' George Willoughby had arrived, plastered with the rain and looking like a drenched mammoth.