“The West Indian expedition of 1595-6 was a miserable failure.” Thus Dr. Andrews begins his Introduction to this volume of documents chronicling the voyage in which both Drake and Hawkins died. He has edited for us a superb collection of material, from which one can readily assess the reasons for that English failure and the Spanish success. As Dr. Andrews says, he offers us no new interpretation, it is for us to draw our own conclusions. Here we have all the means to our task: the English narratives, the reports of the Spanish defenders of the Canaries, Puerto Rico and Panama, the statements of English prisoners, the Exchequer Accounts, and a wide variety of letters, ranging from a Spaniard’s cynical view of the successful resistance to the half-hearted English attack on the Grand Canary to the honest and loving letters of Sir Thomas Baskerville to his wife as he neared home. These bring welcome relief from the official documents, where self-congratulation on the Spanish side and self-justification on the English make (after a while) depressing reading: it is the old, old story of exaggeration and excuse, but no doubt Philip II and Lord Burghley had to read bundles of documents like these every day, and had learnt, as scholars have learned, to sort out the reality from the half-lies and quarter truths. Dr. Andrews gives every help to enable us to do likewise; he is an admirable writer, unobtrusive but informative at those points where elucidation or explanation is required: the footnotes are there just when you need them. The two maps of San Juan de Puerto Rico and the Panama Isthmus are equally necessary for an understanding of the events at those places; I, for one, would have liked a third and general map of the West Indies to aid my faulty sense of place and distance. This is the only criticism I would have of a splendid volume.
Alas, from the English side this adventure was a sorry business. It brings to mind the raid on Dieppe of the Second World War; on that occasion men from the New World left their bodies on a shore of the Old, and they too died in vain. But who was to blame in 1595-6 is not as easy to say. In the end perhaps, despite some English incompetence, miscalculation, and the incompatibility of those two flawed old heroes, Hawkins and Drake, it was (as at Dieppe) the strength of the defenses, forewarned and prepared just in the nick of time at Puerto Rico and at Panama, that made the raid a fruitless one. Yet, true to type, the English fought, against Avellanda’s fleet, a successful rear-guard action and brought their ships home. And there is, when all is said and done, some straightforwardly stirring reading here, Thomas Maynarde’s narrative and the report of Miguel Ruíz del Duayen on the defense of the Isthmus and the battle at Capirilla being the most exciting. All in all, we are greatly indebted to Dr. Andrews for a volume that will not only be essential for scholars of the Anglo-Spanish contest, but would, I think, appeal to students and be useful to them also in their constant assessment of man’s endeavors.
