Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
absurd talk of becoming 'King of St Helena' and the subsequent fren-
zied attacks on Portuguese and Spanish ships and settlements. It is
easy, even for seasoned sailors, when at sea and under stress, to lose
touch with reality:
I became convinced that I wasn't really wanted at home - that it
wouldn't matter to anyone if I never got home and at the same time
I wanted to get to England and have done with the voyage as soon as
possible . . . I began to weave for myself a completely new life, inde-
pendent from and quite different to anything that I had experienced
before. It would be a fine thing to start life all over again . . . a new
pattern of living, a clean sweep away from everything that had gone
before. I would go off into some wilderness in pursuit of ideas - break
away from the humdrum for ever.
2
Forced to return home in disgrace, Fenton made a crazed attack
on his lieutenant, William Hawkins, in a desperate attempt to silence
him. Thereafter, he was probably fortunate to be allowed to live out
his life in relative obscurity. But to the end of his days (he died in
1603) he had to suffer the slow torture of observing his brother's
continued success in Ireland. Geoffrey, knighted in 1589, added a
distinguished political reputation to the one he had already estab-
lished as a man of letters and died in 1609 a wealthy and honoured
royal servant.
But if Edward Fenton's is a sad story, that of Thomas Cavendish
plumbs tragic depths of Sophoclean profundity. Cavendish deserves
better than the history-book footnotes where his name usually ap-
pears. For he was the first
true
circumnavigator. That is to say, he
was the first captain to set out with the declared objective of sailing
around the world and to accomplish that objective.
Cavendish was a well-educated, twenty-year-old gentleman,
newly established at the queen's court on that exciting day in
