The King's Beard and the Quest for the City of Gold

By Leonard Wibberley

"Elizabethan Commando."—The New York Times

 

"Delightful reading for adults and thrilling fare for teenagers."—Los Angeles Times

 

Young John Forrester never knew his father, a man who left his family and his home in England in search of the treasure of El Dorado…and disappeared.

But when he receives news that his father is still alive and being held prisoner in Spain, John is thrust on a mission to save him…but he must save England first.

"Singeing the King of Spain's Beard" was what Queen Elizabeth and Sir Francis Drake called the daring and successful English raid on the Spanish fleet in the Bay of Cadiz in 1587.

 

From the author of The Mouse that Roared and The John Treegate Series on the American Revolutionary War.

 

"In 1587, the year in which this story takes place. It was not unusual for a lad of 16 to play a man's part in the adventurous, dramatic world aboard an Elizabethan man-of-war. John Forrester, young hero of The King's Beard, sees action of the most swashbuckling and satisfactory sort on board Sir Francis Drake's flagship, the Elizabeth Bonaventure. His exploits include an active part in the historic sea battle in the harbor of Cadiz, the rescue of his father who for many years had been a prisoner of the Spanish, and two meetings with Good Queen Bess herself. The result is a picturesque yarn. Most readers will have the traditional trouble putting down."—The New York Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Duchy of Grand Fenwick
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386566861

Book preview

THE KING’S BEARD

and the Quest for the City of Gold

By Leonard Wibberley

The King’s Beard

and the Quest for the City of Gold

Copyright © 1952 and 1980 by Leonard Wibberley

First Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 by

The Estate of the Late Leonard Wibberley

leonardwibberleybooks (at) gmail (dot) com

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Cover Art Painting by Cornelis van Wieringen (1577-1633)

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FOREWORD

I am indebted to a number of authors for the background material for my story. In particular I must acknowledge my debt to Sir Julian S. Corbett for his excellent two-volume work Drake and the Tudor Navy (Longmans). This work contains a graphic account of the raid on Cadiz, together with a reproduction of the map of Cadiz harbor drawn by William Borough, Clerk of Ships, who accompanied Drake on his raid. The original is in the possession of the Records Office in London. I have not, however, followed Sir Julian’s account of the battle.

For an insight into the character of Sir Francis Drake, I turned to many sources including E. F. Benson’s Sir Francis Drake (Harper) and Cameron Rogers’ Drake’s Quest (Doubleday). Hilaire Belloc’s Elizabeth, Creature of Circumstances (Harper) threw much light on that great queen and among other authors I found Irvin Anthony’s Raleigh and His World (Scribner’s) a fount of information on this statesman who has been praised and condemned for three hundred years.

All writers of Elizabethan sea stories must salute a gentleman by the name of Anthony Anthony, an Elizabethan whose drawings of the ships of the period are one of the few sources of reliable information available on the subject. The most helpful, besides this and the work of Sir Julian S. Corbett already acknowledged, proved to be The Shape of Ships by William McDowell, a.m.i.n.a. (Hutchinson, London) and Sailing Ships by Romola and R. C. Anderson (McBride). Both are excellent works, plentifully illustrated and easily understood by the landsman.

In describing the raid on Cadiz, I have taken a few minor liberties. For instance, Drake’s squadron arrived off Cadiz around four in the afternoon and he stood into the harbor there and then, without waiting until the following morning. This horrified his Clerk of Ships and Vice Admiral, William Borough, who had set ideas on the traditional method of entering an enemy harbor, particularly one of which no reliable charts were available to the attacking force. But Drake was of the Commando and Ranger temperament—he liked to hit hard and suddenly. He destroyed that part of the Armada gathering in Cadiz—more than 10,000 tons of shipping—and then ravaged the Spanish coast for several weeks. He capped his triumph by capturing the San Filipe, the King of Spain’s personal treasure ship, with loot assessed at nearly £113,949. He returned to Plymouth Sound on June 26, 1587, after two and a half months at sea, having completely disorganized Philip’s plans for the conquest of Britain.

Philip’s Armada sailed, nonetheless, in the following year, to meet its final destruction at the hands of the Elizabethan sailors and the violence of the wind.

All this is not only part of the history of Britain, but part of the heritage of America too. In this age it is good to remember that once we were one people and that the world was changed by the deeds of our common ancestors.

I must make one final acknowledgment—to my wife, who retyped the manuscript three times, and who prevented me from throwing it away by insisting that it had merit. This is, perhaps, the greater part of authorship.

Leonard Wibberley

Hermosa Beach

September 1951

CHAPTER ONE

The Attic

I have so often told this story of Drake’s raid on Cadiz and of the part that I played in it, and of the strange train of circumstances which was to take me from Devon to the court of Queen Elizabeth and then to Spain, that I have now decided to set it down, so that others may read it and perhaps gain some profit from my experiences.

The business of writing and learning is one to which I have never taken easily, for my life has always been active, so that even at Exeter Grammar School my hardest task as a boy was to sit still on the bench listening to Master Hoxton discoursing on the Roman wars.

Yet it is to this same Master Hoxton that I owe a great debt, though not altogether by reason of his teaching me Latin and Greek—and, what seemed then a great waste of good time, and much hard thought, Spanish. I was an orphan, or so I then supposed, and it was he who brought me up, performing the offices of both foster-father and schoolmaster and, indeed, giving me his name. He was a stooped, slight man, always dressed in austere black, so that his clothes contrasted vividly with his sharp white face and long white hair. We lived together in a cottage near the schoolhouse in which he taught. And although it may seem strange, in all the time I lived in that cottage, my future, which was to take me to far parts of the world, was waiting for me in an attic directly over my head.

Our cottage consisted only of a kitchen, which served as a living room as well, a bedroom, another room which Master Hoxton used as his study, and a small terrace which surrounded the building on three sides and was bordered by flowers. Over the kitchen was an attic to which the only entrance was a trap door, set in the ceiling like the hatch in the deck of a ship.

I have sat many hours as a boy before the fire, my eyes fixed on the trap door—when I should have been studying my Xenophon or my Spanish verbs—wondering what might lie beyond it.

At times I imagined this attic to be frequented by pixies such as the countryfolk said lived in the desolate stretches of Exmoor and Dartmoor. Sometimes on particularly stormy nights, when the rain streamed down on the thatched roof and the wind came in great gusts across the moorlands, I would lie awake and fancy I could hear their tiny fists banging on the leaded window above the kitchen door.

These imaginings frightened me a great deal, and after one particularly rough night, I asked Master Hoxton what the attic might contain.

His reply did nothing to settle my fears, for he looked at me in a way which was most forbidding for him (outside the classroom) and said, Nothing for you—yet.

I did not press the matter further.

In the classroom, Master Hoxton was the strictest of teachers, quick with the cane which he could lay on with a force and vigor painfully surprising in one of his years. But once the day’s schoolwork was done, the greatest change would come over him. My ears might still be tingling from the tweaking of his bony fingers, yet he would take me by the shoulder in the kindliest manner and suggest that we go fishing for trout, or take a walk into Exeter to look at the shipping in the river, or listen to the tales of the seamen and fishermen.

Such were the background and circumstances in which I, John Hoxton as I was called then, taking the surname of my foster-father, grew up. And such they might have remained the rest of my life had not people unknown and events undreamed of suddenly intervened to alter them beyond my wildest fancies.

I was sixteen at the time, and the year was 1587.

CHAPTER TWO

Tallow Joe and the Indian

It was a bright day in April, almost a summer day in Devonshire, where spring comes in February, that I first met Tallow Joe. I was to meet him again many times, and I never saw him without a mingling of fear and loathing.

It had been our custom to go into Exeter on Saturdays, Master Hoxton and I, to do our week’s marketing, and I looked forward to these trips with keen anticipation. On this particular Saturday morning Master Hoxton had some work to do in his study, and he bade me set out alone on the shopping excursion, first writing down the list of purchases to be made. He bade me hurry back so that we might go fishing later in the day.

The road to town was thronged with countryfolk bringing their produce to market; packmen with great bolts of broadcloth, laces and satins to sell, tinkers with their kettles and pots glistening in the sun, millers driving their carts and white from foot to head with flour, and a dozen other conditions of people, walking, riding or driving into town. But the throng on the road was as nothing to the crowd which pushed and bustled, stared and shouted in and around the market place. For a visit to the market in Exeter on Saturday in those days was as good as a journey around the world.

Among the stacks of hides and buckskins piled on the cobbles would be torrents of silks and satins in the richest of hues—reds, blues, golds and greens—a veritable Aladdin’s treasure house of colors.

There were mounds of strange spices with scents that came from the farthest lands, and fruits too—limes so green they made your mouth tingle, golden oranges, purple figs, bright pomegranates—a host of things foreign and exciting.

As I wandered, fascinated, through these riches, there came from the center of the market place, a great bustling and babble, above which I could only hear the words An Indian! An Indian!

I could not see over the heads of the people who pressed around. But within a minute the market place was so jammed that stalls were overturned, bolts of cloth, mounds of fruits and spices were thrown to the ground and trampled upon, and every head was strained to get a glimpse of the center of attraction. Determined that I should not miss this Indian, I pushed and elbowed and squirmed my way forward until I reached the steps on which the old Butter Cross in the middle of the market place stood. And there I beheld standing, as disdainful as a monarch, an American Indian savage, puffing smoke out of his mouth from a long engine crudely and vigorously carved, and decorated with tufts of bright feathers. Even the boldest in the crowd held back from touching him, unmanned as much by the disdain and fierceness of his looks as by his smoking, which was something few in those parts had seen before this time.

He wore strange shoes made of rawhide, and his copper-colored body was decorated with blue designs, which extended even to his face though not above his cheekbones. His head was shaven except for a circle of hair at the top, and he had draped over his shoulder a robe of some animal skin, not unlike the hide of one of our Exmoor cattle.

Beside him stood a man dressed in a seaman’s wide canvas breeches which were supported by a broad leather belt. His hair, matted and black, hung down to his shoulders; but the most striking feature about his appearance was the color of his skin, which was as yellow as a taper. It clung to his lean skull like old parchment, and his presence was not improved by a wispy beard which straggled off his chin.

That’s Tallow Joe, said a man standing near to me, a great one for talking, he is. The crowd, for a moment, took their eyes off the Indian to gape at his strange companion.

This was the opportunity for which Tallow Joe had been waiting. He held up his skinny arms for silence, and in a surprisingly deep voice for a man of his physique, addressed the mob which pressed all the closer to hear what he had to say.

God save the Queen, he cried, and further her domain! The crowd repeated, God save the Queen, and then awaited his news. He gave it simply enough.

I have a message of great import for you all, he said. "My friend here comes from the new lands of America, thousands of leagues beyond the sea. He lives in a land flowing with riches. Its shores are thick with grapevines, its streams so full of silver fishes that a boat hardly may be rowed up them. The soil is so fertile that you have only to press a twig into the ground for it to grow. In the fields grows a magic weed called by the Indians ‘tobacco,’ which they smoke as a cure for all bad humors and agues, poxes, scurvies, wasting away, pains either of the head or back, and afflictions of the scrofula.

This savage who stands beside me is, by the best reckoning, two hundred and three years of age. There was a great murmur, like a sigh, from the crowd at this. "Yet he is as fleet of foot as a deer and will wrestle with the strongest lad in Devonshire. And all this great virtue of bodily health and keenness of mind and of eye comes from a potion which these Indians make from the ashes of this weed, tobacco.

"The secret of this life-giving unguent—the same which the Spaniard Ponce de Leon failed to find—was given to me by the father of this savage here, a great chief whose life I saved from a bear. And he has bid me come back to my own country with a small quantity of this potent panacea, called in the Latin tongue Pronastrobis ulcerobisimum, and make its blessings available to a fortunate few among you.

I have but a few boxes left at a shilling apiece. A touch will cure a running ulcer. A dab will banish warts in humans or hairballs from the bellies of cows. Who will be among the first to sample its benefits?

Tallow Joe had hardly finished talking than these simpletons must overwhelm him with such a rush of shillings, desiring to be cured of every ailment on the face of the earth, that he had to retreat to the White Hart tavern near by.

There they followed him like a swarm of bees, jostling and buffeting each other lest they should be too late to buy the miraculous salve.

The Indian remained standing impassively by the Butter Cross; and since the crowd had now drawn away, I was able to get a better look at him. For the first time I noticed that there were three livid scars across his chest which looked as if they had been made from burns. And while I examined these scars, and thought it strange that he had not used Tallow Joe’s potion to take them away, the savage turned his head toward me and a look of puzzlement and half recognition came into his eyes.

He hesitated a minute and then, to my astonishment, walked toward me and when only a foot or two away, held his hand in the air in a sort of salutation. I could only stand and stare, for I had never seen the Indian before—nor anyone like him, for that matter.

Seeing that I had been examining his scars, he pointed to them and said the word Matagorda. But this merely mystified me the more and I drew away from him, unable to make head or tail of what he said, and in some fear that he might wish to harm me, though he appeared peaceful enough.

The incident brought a knot of people quickly around us and soon the news was carried to Tallow Joe in the White Hart. He hurried out, looked at me very carefully, and then addressed some words to the Indian in his tongue.

What is your name? he said at length, turning to me

Hoxton, I replied.

Where is your father?

I took him to mean my foster-father and answered, At home. He is the schoolmaster of the Exeter Grammar School.

There was some more conversation between the two, during which Tallow Joe repeated the name Hoxton and pointed to me.

The Indian examined me again, more closely, and then from under his robe took a package wrapped in an oilskin and to Tallow Joe’s evident astonishment, as well as to my own, gave it to me, at the same time jabbering in his own tongue.

The Indian says you are to give the package to Master Hoxton, said Tallow Joe. It is to be opened privately.

I looked at it in some doubt, thinking this might be a stunt of some kind with which to sell medicines. On one corner, written in a fine scholarly hand, were the words: Life or Death. And in the center: For the eyes of Jeremiah Hoxton, Esquire, of Exeter.

Where did you get this? I asked.

For reply the Indian once again pointed to the scars and said the one word Matagorda. Tallow Joe, with the mob now agog, and pressing closely around, questioned him sharply