Thomas Cavendish

English explorer

• Born: September 19, 1560
• Birthplace: Grimston Hall, Trimley St. Martin, Suffolk, England
• Died: c. May, 1592
• Place of death: At sea, near Ascension Island

A boldly enterprising voyager, Cavendish was the second Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. In the course of his expedition, he captured one of the richest prizes in the history of English privateering against Spain.

Early Life

Thomas Cavendish (KAV-ehn-dihsh) was born at his family’s estate of Grimston Hall, near the town of Harwich, in Suffolk, and he was baptized on September 19, 1560. He was the heir of William Cavendish and his wife, Mary Wentworth, sister of Lord William Wentworth. William Cavendish died when his son was only twelve, leaving a reduced estate. Thomas and his mother went to live with Lord Wentworth at Nettleshead, Suffolk.

At the age of fifteen, he entered Cambridge University, attending Corpus Christi College; he left in 1577 without taking a degree. In the next years he may have spent some time at the Inns of Court in London, studying law. In 1580, he went to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, where his sister Anne became one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Through his family, he had easy access to important figures at court; he became a friend of Sir George Carey, son of Lord Hunsdon; of Lord Chamberlain; and of George Clifford, earl of Cumberland, who became the most active aristocratic privateer in the country. Through the patronage of the earl of Pembroke, he was elected to Parliament from Shaftesbury, Dorset, in 1584 and for Wilton, Dorset, in 1586.

Life’s Work

As part of an ambitious and venturesome court circle, Cavendish was soon drawn into naval enterprises. When Sir Walter Ralegh organized a fleet of seven ships to send his first colony to Virginia in 1585, Cavendish contributed a ship of his own, the Elizabeth, and was high marshal for the expedition. The fleet under Sir Richard Grenville left from Plymouth in early April and sailed first to Puerto Rico, where, under the cover of building a pinnace to enlarge their fleet, they planned to attack Spanish shipping. Two well-laden Spanish vessels were captured and their crews held for ransom, an action that whetted Cavendish’s appetite for more privateering.

The fleet sailed on to Haiti, the Bahamas, and Florida before arriving on the Virginia coast near the end of June, 1585. In the next weeks, Cavendish became one of the party, including also Grenville and the artist John White, who conducted an exploring foray into what is now North Carolina. They came on three Native American villages, one of which they burned after a Native American stole a silver cup. Their reprisal may have generated some of the hostilities suffered by the ill-fated colony. In August, Cavendish was one of those who accompanied Grenville back to England, leaving 108 men behind under the governorship of Ralph Lane. En route, they were able to capture another rich Spanish prize.

The privateering success of the voyage, apart from the misfortunes of the colony, stimulated Cavendish to organize a much more ambitious enterprise. The example he chose to follow was that of Sir Francis Drake, who, eight years earlier, had won wealth, reputation, and honor in a plundering voyage around the world. Many English believed that the Spanish claims to monopoly on the territories of Latin America and the East Indies were invalid and that the riches being drained away from overseas possessions were legitimate targets for sailors bold enough to take them. The Spanish considered what they did to be piracy, but their own government favored them unofficially. Queen Elizabeth and her officers often took shares in the major voyages and always absorbed much of the profits.

His preparations must have begun almost immediately after he returned to England, since he was ready to sail the following summer . He had one major ship, the Desire, at 140 tons, and two small ones, the Content and the Hugh Gallant, with a crew of 123 men. A joint expedition with the earl of Cumberland may have been planned, since Cumberland was preparing a fleet at the same time, but Cavendish finished his preparations and sailed nearly a month before Cumberland was ready. He went first to Sierra Leone, then crossed to Brazil, where he paused to replenish his supplies and to build a small pinnace. Continuing southward, he stopped to slaughter thousands of penguins and take them on as food for the passage through the difficult and dangerous Strait of Magellan. Cumberland had followed him as far as Brazil but then turned back because of inadequate supplies.

Entering the strait, Cavendish came on a party of Spanish survivors from a failed colony; he took one of them with him and left the others to try to make their way to the Rio de Plata. Later, he found the remains of their settlement and took the cannon they had abandoned. After waiting a month for favorable weather, he was able to proceed through the straits without incident. The next eight months he spent cruising up the Pacific coast as far as Baja California, raiding Spanish ports and pillaging and burning some twenty ships.

On the coast of Ecuador, Cavendish learned from a captive of the expected arrival of a great ship from Manila; the capture of that ship became Cavendish’s principal aim and most striking achievement. The ship was the Santa Ana, which was bringing to Mexico the yield of gold mines in the Philippines. He waited off the tip of Baja California, his men occupying themselves by pearl fishing, until November 4, when the Santa Ana appeared, its crew ready for the end of their long trans-Pacific voyage and its cannon put away in the hold. The first two English attacks were repulsed, but the third forced a surrender. The Spanish aboard were put ashore at San Lucas, and then the English spent two weeks sorting out their winnings. The ship carried gold worth seventy thousand pounds and great quantities of pearls, silks, and other goods.

Loss of the Santa Ana was a serious blow to the Spanish it represented much of the year’s profits from the East Indies. Now, however, it presented Cavendish with a problem of surfeit. He did not have a crew big enough to staff the ship and take it home, and he could not even unload its cargo into his own vessels. He had been forced to abandon the Hugh Gallant on the South American coast, and he already had much of the cargo space in the remaining ships filled. In the end, he took what was most valuable and most easily portable and burned the rest, probably 90 percent of the cargo, along with the ship itself (it burned to the water line, but the Spanish were later able to salvage and rebuild it).

After the capture of the Santa Ana, the rest of the long voyage was anticlimactic. With the aid of a captured Spanish pilot, he crossed to the Philippines, arriving in January, 1588, but having lost the Content on the way. The pilot was hanged after trying to warn Spanish authorities, but without him Cavendish proceeded to the Sulu Sea, along the western shore of Mindanao, through the Banda and Flores Seas to Java. At every opportunity, he collected information about Spanish fortifications and apparently encouraged the Filipinos to resist the Spanish; conspirators arrested in Luzon the next year said that he had promised English support for their resistance. In March, he left again for England, arriving finally at Plymouth in September. The goods he brought back were officially valued at nearly ninety thousand pounds, a tremendous fortune for the time, but it is not known how much Cavendish kept after the queen and other officials took their shares. Cavendish made a great show of bringing his ship into the Thames, his crew in silk and golden chains, the ship itself rigged with sails of blue damask.

Cavendish was only twenty-eight years old when he returned to the acclaim of England. He was, for the moment, rich and famous, but his good fortune did not last. He expected to be knighted by the queen but was not, and the two-thousand-pound bond he had posted before the voyage was forfeited, possibly because of a skirmish with some Newfoundland ships or because he tried to conceal part of his prize. In the next years, he spent most of his new wealth, and by 1590 he was ready to try the exploit again. This time, however, he was plagued with misfortune. He left Plymouth in August, 1591, with five vessels and sailed for the Straits of Magellan, his fleet including John Davis in command of the Desire. The fleet was separated in heavy storms in the straits, however, and Cavendish turned back toward Brazil. He made unsuccessful attempts to land at Santos and Espírito Santo, then tried to reach Ascension Island. He died en route, believing that he had been deserted by his other ships.

Significance

Cavendish’s great voyage was one of the most daring exploits of Elizabethan seamanship. It inflicted a heavy economic blow and a more damaging psychological blow in demonstrating the vulnerability of Spanish trade even in the Pacific. Even more bitterly than the loss of the Santa Ana itself, the king of Spain is said to have mourned that it was taken by “an English youth . . . with forty or fifty companions.” On the remainder of the voyage, Cavendish collected useful information to supplement what Drake had learned about not only the Straits of Magellan and the Pacific coast of America but also the Philippines and the Indonesian islands.

Bibliography

Andrews, Kenneth R. Elizabethan Privateering. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1964. The most complete and careful study of how privateering worked, who took part, and who shared in the proceeds. Cavendish can be traced in the context of Cumberland, Drake, and the other privateers.

Dudley, Wade G. Drake: For God, Queen, and Plunder. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003. Monograph on Sir Francis Drake’s naval exploits paints a picture of Elizabethan privateering and the naval battles between England and Spain in Cavendish’s time.

Hakluyt, Richard. The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation. London, 1589. Reprint. Cambridge, England: Hakluyt Society/Cambridge University Press, 1965. One of the most important early achievements of English scholarship, a massive and exhaustive compilation of narratives of English voyages. Includes a lengthy account of the 1586-1588 voyage around the world based on the description of Francis Pretty, one of the members of the expedition.

Loades, David. England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce, and Policy, 1490-1690. New York: Longman, 2000. Exploration of the role of men like Cavendish in England’s development into a colonial power, and especially a maritime empire. Includes maps, bibliographic references, index.

McDermott, James. Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. History of Elizabethan privateering focusing on Frobisher’s naval campaigns. Includes illustrations, eight pages of plates, bibliographic references, and index.

Quinn, David Beers. The Last Voyage of Thomas Cavendish, 1591-1592. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. A contemporary account, believed to be Cavendish’s own, of the voyage on which he died. Includes an excellent biographical and textual introduction.

The Roanoke Voyages. Vol. 1. London: Hakluyt Society, 1955. A narrative of the 1585 expedition that incorporates all the major documentary sources. With careful and scholarly explanatory notes.

Sinclair, Andrew. Sir Walter Raleigh and the Age of Discovery. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. An attractive and highly readable description of the world that Cavendish shared with Ralegh at court, at sea, and in the colonies.