Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

Sylvie felt sorry for her. But she had married a sailor. They led dangerous lives.

‘I’ll take both ships,’ Barney went on. He now had two, the Alice and the Bella . ‘Who’s in charge?’

‘Sir Francis Drake,’ Ned told him.

Alfo said enthusiastically: ‘He’s the man for it!’ Drake was a hero to young Englishmen: he had circumnavigated the Earth, only the second captain to do so in the history of the human race. It was just the daring kind of exploit to capture youthful imaginations, Sylvie thought. ‘You’ll be all right if Drake is with you,’ Alfo said.

‘Perhaps,’ said Sylvie, ‘but I’m going to pray that God goes with you too.’

‘Amen,’ said Helga.

No one should love the sea, but Barney did. He was exhilarated by the sensation of sailing, the wind snapping the canvas and the waves glittering in the sunshine.

There was something mad about this feeling. The sea was dangerous. Although the English fleet had not yet sighted the enemy, they had already lost one ship, the Marengo , during a violent storm in the Bay of Biscay. Even in good weather there was constant risk of attack by vessels of unfriendly countries — or even by pirates pretending, until the last minute, to be friendly. Few sailors lived to be old.

Barney’s son had wanted to come on this voyage. Alfo wanted to be in the front line, defending his country. He loved England and especially Kingsbridge. But Barney had firmly refused. Alfo’s real passion was commerce. In that he was different to his father, who had always hated ledgers. Besides, it was one thing for Barney to risk his own life; quite another to endanger his beloved child.

The treacherous Atlantic seas had become calmer as the fleet drew nearer to the warm Mediterranean. By Barney’s reckoning the fleet was about ten miles from Cádiz, near Gibraltar on the south-western tip of Spain, when a signal gun was fired, and a conference pennant was raised on the flagship Elizabeth Bonaventure , summoning all captains to a council of war with vice-admiral Sir Francis Drake.

It was four o’clock on a fine afternoon, Wednesday 29 April 1587, and a good south-westerly breeze was blowing the twenty-six ships directly towards their destination at a brisk five knots. With reluctance Barney dropped the sails of the Alice and the ship slowed until it was becalmed, rising and falling on the swell in the way that made landlubbers feel so ill.

Only six in the convoy were fighting ships belonging to the queen. The other twenty, including Barney’s two, were armed trading vessels. No doubt King Felipe would accuse them of being little better than pirates, and, Barney thought, he had a point. But Elizabeth, unlike Felipe, did not have the bottomless silver mines of New Spain to finance her navy, and this was the only way she could muster an attacking fleet.

Barney ordered his crew to lower a boat and row him across to the Elizabeth Bonaventure . He could see the other captains doing the same. A few minutes later, the boat bumped the side of the flagship and Barney climbed the rope ladder to the deck.

It was a big ship, a hundred feet long with massive armament — forty-seven guns, including two full-size cannons firing sixty-pound balls — but there was no stateroom anywhere near large enough to hold all the captains. They stood on deck, around a single carved chair that no one dared sit on.

Some of the fleet were straggling a mile or more behind, and not all the captains had arrived when the impatient Drake appeared.

He was a heavy-set man in his forties with curly red hair, green eyes and the pink-and-white complexion people sometimes called ‘fresh’. His head seemed small for his body.

Barney took off his hat, and the other captains followed suit. Drake was famously proud, perhaps because he had risen to great heights from a humble farm in Devon. But the captains’ respect for him was heartfelt. They all knew every detail of his three-year voyage around the world.

He sat on the carved chair, glanced up at the sky, and said: ‘We could be in Cádiz before sunset.’

Cádiz was his target, rather than Lisbon where the Spanish fleet was gathering. Drake was like Barney’s late mother in his obsession with news, and he had questioned the captains of two Dutch merchant ships encountered off Lisbon. From them he had learned that the supply vessels for the invasion were loading in Cádiz, and he had seized on this information. Supply ships would be easier to defeat, and — perhaps more important to the always greedy Drake — their cargoes would make more valuable plunder.

Drake’s deputy was William Borough, a famous navigator who had written a book about the compass. He now said: ‘But we don’t even have our full numbers — several ships are miles behind us.’

Barney reflected that two men could hardly be more opposite than Drake and Borough. The deputy was learned, scholarly and cautious, a man for records and documents and charts. Drake was impulsive, scornful of timidity, a man of action. ‘We have the wind and the weather on our side,’ he said. ‘We must seize the chance.’

‘Cádiz is a large harbour, but the entrance to the bay is treacherous,’ Borough argued. He flourished a chart which Drake did not condescend to look at. Borough pressed on. ‘There is only one deep-water passage, and that goes close by the tip of the peninsula — where there is a fortress bristling with cannons.’

‘We’ll fly no flags as we enter,’ Drake said. ‘They won’t know who we are until it’s too late.’

‘We have no idea what ships may be in the harbour,’ Borough countered.

‘Merchantmen, according to those Dutch captains.’

‘There may be warships too.’

‘They’re all in Lisbon — which is why we’re going to Cádiz.’

Borough found Drake’s insouciance maddening. ‘Then what is our battle plan?’ he demanded angrily.

‘Battle plan?’ said Drake heedlessly. ‘Follow me!’

He immediately began shouting orders to his crew. Barney and the rest of the captains hastily scrambled over the side to their boats, laughing with pleasure at Drake’s boldness, eager for action themselves. An imp of anxiety in the back of Barney’s mind whispered that Borough was right to be wary, but Drake’s fighting spirit was infectious.

As soon as Barney was back aboard the Alice, he ordered the crew to set the sails. There were six, two on each mast, all of them square-shaped. The sailors climbed the masts like monkeys, and in less than a minute the breeze was filling canvas, the ship’s prow was ploughing the waves, and Barney was happy.

He gazed forward. A smudge appeared on the horizon and gradually revealed itself to be a fortress.

Barney knew Cádiz. It was near the mouth of the Guadalquivir river eighty miles downstream from Seville, where he had lived with Carlos and Ebrima almost thirty years ago. A few miles inland was Jerez, source of the strong wine the English called sherry sack. The city of Cádiz, with its fort, stood at the end of a long peninsula that enclosed a large natural harbour. Two rivers emptied into a wide bay fringed with waterfront villages and settlements.

The ships of the fleet deftly eased into line behind Drake’s flagship, warships first and merchantmen after. Without orders, they adopted the formation known as ‘line ahead’, or single file, so that an enemy directly in front — which was where the Spanish were for the moment — could fire at only one of them at a time. It also meant that if Drake found the correct passage through the shallows, they all would.

Barney was scared, but his fear had an odd effect: it excited him. It was better than sherry sack. In danger he felt more alive than at any other time. He was no fool: he knew the agony of wounds and he had seen the terrified panic of drowning men as a ship went down. But somehow none of that diminished the thrill he felt going into battle, getting ready to kill or be killed.