Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
which would be highly provocative to her brother monarch in the
Escorial.
It was late July before she gave her consent to a venture of-
ficially described as a commercial operation bound for Alexandria.
But Drake could not start out even then. He had to waste precious
weeks in London sorting out the business end of the enterprise,
drawing up contracts with backers who included merchants,
courtiers and the queen, herself. Then it was posthaste to Plymouth
to oversee personally the provisioning of ships and mustering of
crews. By the time he was ready to sail the period of equinoctial
gales had arrived, and that meant further delays. It was 15 Novem-
ber before Drake weighed anchor in the
Pelican
and led his little
fleet out into the Sound. A fortnight later they were all back again,
battered into harbour by Channel storms. Not until 13 December
was Drake's convoy of tiny ships able to escape the land and begin
its historic voyage.
Tiny they certainly were. The
Pelican
(100 tons) was about a
hundred feet overall and twenty in the beam. Her consort, the
El-
izabeth,
was a mere eighty tons. There was a store ship or canter
named the
Swan
and a fifteen ton bark,
Christopher,
which was the
fleet's messenger, used for contact between the vessels, scouting out
anchorages, searching for missing members of the convoy, etc. Last
and least was the tiny merchantman
Marigold
which would prove
unequal to the task and was probably only included because she was
provided by the queen's favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton. With this
puny flotilla and a hundred and sixty-four men, Francis Drake set
out to do battle, not only with the might of Spain, but also with the
world's most awesome expanses of ocean.
He followed the now-established track of vessels bound for the
Americas. Coasting the western seaboard of Saharan Africa, he
called at the Cape Verde Islands for revictualling. There he had the
first of many strokes of good fortune. Or perhaps one should not
