Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
These were the years during which relations between Philip II's
Spain and Elizabeth I's England were steadily deteriorating. Philip's
most sacred ambition was to restore the stubborn queen and her
subjects to papal allegiance. Naturally, the leaders of the island race
were determined to resist such pressures. But it was not only in mat-
ters religious that rivalry between the two nations manifested it-
self. England was experiencing a period of unprecedented maritime
expansion. Her merchants and captains wanted access to overseas
ports and markets and mounted a determined challenge to the Span-
ish and Portuguese monopolists.
While England and Spain drifted into a state of undeclared war,
the politicians on both sides, as politicians always do, protested their
peaceful intentions. Diplomatic niceties were observed and there
was a genuine reluctance, in London and Madrid, to become involved
in the expense of open hostility. The seamen of both nations lacked
both the sophistry and the stomach for such detachment. They were
in the front line of the conflict, risking life and livelihood. Spanish
colonists and shipowners suffered raids on their American settle-
ments and piratical attacks on their homeward- bound convoys.
English captains and supercargoes were afflicted with constant har-
assment by Spanish officials. Their vessels and goods were confis-
cated. A still worse fate awaited those who were arrested, for they
might be handed over to the Holy Inquisition as heretics. In 1572,
Morgan Gilbert, a former shipmate of Francis Drake, received two
hundred lashes in an Inquisition dungeon and was sentenced to
twenty years on the galleys. Others were tortured, imprisoned, even
burned. Tennyson was not exaggerating when he described in
The
Revenge
how Captain Richard Grenville delayed at the Azores to con-
vey his sick men back aboard, despite the imminent arrival of a
Spanish fleet. The poet goes on to express the feelings of the scurvy
and fever-ridden crewmen:
