Selkirk's Island by Diana Souhami (new books to read .txt) 📗

had sailed far north into freezing waters. They were weak from scurvy, cold, and lack of food.

There was no liquor left on the Duke, Dutchess or Marquess. The men were primed for battle with drinking chocolate and prayers. Hunger and hardship made them a determined enemy. This was the prize they would die to take. This was why they were 7000 miles from home, on starvation rations in a shit-encrusted, rat-infested tub.

All day of 21 December and all through that night the Duke closed on its prey. The intention was to board it at dawn. To defend itself the Disengano hung barrels filled with explosives from each yardarm. The Duke and Marquess began to bombard it at eight in the morning. The Dutchess could not get near – there was not enough wind. The battle lasted three hours. ‘The Enemy fired her Stern Chase upon us first’ Woodes Rogers wrote

which we return’d with our Fore Chase several times, till we came nearer, and when close aboard each other, we gave her several Broadsides, plying our Small Arms very briskly, which they return’d as thick a while but did not ply their great Guns half so fast as we. After some time we shot a little ahead of them, lay thwart her Hawse close aboard, and plyed them so warmly that she soon struck her Colours two thirds down. By this time the Dutchess came up, and fired about 5 Guns with a Volley of Small Shot, but the Enemy having submitted, made no Return.

On the Disengano, twenty men were killed, wounded by gunfire or ‘blown up and burnt with Powder’. On the Duke, Woodes Rogers was shot in the face by a musket ball ‘in att my Mouth, and out att my left Cheek’. Part of his upper jaw and several of his teeth fell out on deck. In the night he swallowed a lump of jawbone clogged in his throat. The only other casualty among the privateers was an Irishman, William Powell, who got wounded in his bottom.

So, with what were considered light casualties, the galleon was taken. It was only the second time in 120 years that the English had achieved this feat. The Disengano’s cargo was of gold dust, gold plate and coins, spices, musk, beeswax and textiles. Among its china was a service for Queen Maria Luisa of Spain. There were calicos, chintzes and silks, 5,806 fans, 1084 pairs of cotton stockings and 37 silk gowns. There were quantities of ploughshares and shoes for mules. There were oil paintings of the Virgin Mary, jars of sugar candy, a chest of priests’ vestments, Spanish coconuts, tanned goatskins, handbells and bugles, old books, a large looking glass, pictures, snuffboxes, pontificals for the new Archbishop of Lima, and a supply of tanbes, sannoes, charroadorees, palampores, paunches, mulmuls, humhums, nucaneas, sooseys and basts and ‘several parcels of odd things’.† Such were the treasures of the material world, the stuff of avarice and endeavour, the reward for the fight.

The privateers were elated by this haul, but not satisfied. Interrogation of the captain and officers of the Disengano revealed they had sailed from Manila in consort with a bigger ship, with a greater cargo, from which they had separated three months previously. Desiring the bigger, better and other prize, the men, inspired by their success, prepared themselves to pursue that too.

1709 A Brave Lofty New Ship

THE OTHER ship, the ‘great ship’, was twice the size. It was called Nuestra Senora de Begona and was on its maiden voyage.* Newly built in the Philippines, it had two decks, weighed nine hundred tons and could blast twelve-pound iron cannon balls from forty brass guns. Its captain Don Fernando de Angulo had a skilled master-gunner and an experienced crew of 450 men, many of whom were English or Irish freebooters, with personal stashes of plunder to defend.

On Christmas Day two sentries from the Duke, posted on a hill off Cape St Lucas ‘made 3 waffs’. They had sighted the second galleon. The Dutchess and Marquess closed in for a day and a night. At dawn on 27 December they bombarded the Begona with bullets, grapeshot, stones and cannon balls. In an eight-hour battle they damaged its rigging and mizzenmast, killed eight of its crew and wounded more.†

The Spanish response was slow but lethal. They had put netting round their decks to prevent the enemy from boarding. Their gunners were concealed ‘there being not a Man to be seen above-board’. From out of sight they lobbed fireballs, stink bombs and flaming grenades onto the decks of the English ships and smashed them with cannon balls.

The Duke arrived late on the scene. The prior agreement had been for it to separate and close in later, but then there was no wind. It got caught in the Dutchess’s fire:

those Shot that miss’d the Enemy flew from the Dutchess over us and betwixt our Masts, so that we ran the risque of receiving more Damage from them than from the Enemy.

There were only one hundred and twenty men capable of fighting on all three English ships ‘and those but weak, having been very short of Provisions a long time’. ‘The Enemy’s was a brave lofty new Ship’. Five hundred six-pound cannon balls did little damage to the Begona which blew up the foremast and gunpowder room of the Dutchess killing or injuring twenty men. It wrecked the rigging of the Marquess and smashed holes in its hull. It lobbed four fireballs on to the quarterdeck of the Duke, which destroyed the main mast, blew up a chest of arms and boxes of cartridges, and badly burned Carleton Vanbrugh the owners’ agent, and a Dutchman. Thirty-three other men were killed, wounded, or scorched with gunpowder. Woodes Rogers had his left heel blown off, Thomas Young, a Welshman, lost one of his legs and Thomas Evans’s face was ‘miserably torn’.

The privateers could not win this battle. They were outclassed in tactics and the Philippine ship was better built than any of