Sir Francis Drake’s Caribbean Raid (1585-86) and the Rhetoric of Blame

This essay delves into how Sir Francis Drake’s Caribbean raid (1585-86) inspired diverging accounts among English, Iberian, and colonial institutions. Relying on a transatlantic framework, including English and Hispanic literary and historical primary sources, this essay examines the intentions behind said discrepancies, such as the conceptual rearrangement of the terms “enemy” and “pirate,” and the reassertion of imperial ideologies in order to advance individual political ambitions. Beyond Drake’s military siege, the essay argues that the battle between English, Spanish,

In September of 1585, Sir Francis Drake (c.1540-96) sailed from Plymouth, England with two dozen ships and eight pinnaces. 1On New Year's Day 1586, his fleet besieged the city of Santo Domingo, capital of Hispaniola (today the Dominican Republic), where Drake received a payment of 25,000 ducats to end the attack.A few weeks later, they arrived in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), captured the city for 53 days, and left with 107,000 ducats, returning to England on July 22. 2 Both raids occurred in the context of a yet undeclared open war between Spain and England.To English eyes, Drake's attack was less a formal act of war than an expedition to the West Indies (Neale 298; Kelsey 241).However, the Spaniards, considered this event both an act of piracy and a military offense to their domains overseas.
The raid was documented in various cultural records, both historical and rhetorical, ranging from bureaucratic correspondence between Spanish-Iberian and colonial authorities, to an English travelogue and a Spanish-Caribbean heroic poem.Through the analysis of an interdisciplinary corpus that includes Juan de Castellanos's Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque (1586-87), depositions conducted by colonial authorities, enquiries (consultas) and other epistles sent by Iberian and colonial officials, I examine dissimilar descriptions of the attack and link them to the development of ambivalent narratives of blame that constructed internal enemies within the Spanish transatlantic power.The idea of a national Spanish supremacy lies at the very heart of such conflicting narratives of blame that diffuse the historical truth behind the attacks.While these narratives contradicted each other, they converged in their effort to support an ideology of power accentuating discursive overtones attached to economic, military, and moral affairs.Providing a comparative framework to the Spanish and colonial accounts of the event, while contrasting rhetorical similarities and dissimilarities among them, I incorporate Walter Bigges's concomitant perception of the attacks found in his Summary and True Discourse of Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage (1589). 3Through an intertextual approach that revisits the moral reiterations, political concerns, and economic interests found in the conflicting accounts of Drake's raid, I argue that authors rearranged the concepts of the enemy, the pirate, and the battle, in territories marked by chaos, to reassert their authority and emphasize their contribution to the imperial ideology of both Spanish and English powers.Thus, the retellings of the attack also reveal the clash of economic, political, and social values of the period.
Historians have drawn upon enquiries, along with other epistolary documents, to produce historical reconstructions of piracy attacks and to identify both contradictions and narrative similarities in these sources.Delving into Drake's historical and literary representations, the works of Harry Kelsey and Claire Jowitt have shed light on the shifting narratives in the portrayal of the English captain.Kelsey's seminal study demonstrates that Drake's adversaries tended to disguise unauthorized trading with the payment of ransoms.Jowitt registers an ideological and paradigmatic shift in the representations of English maritime predation found in Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations (c.1589) and Francis Drake the Younger's The World Encompassed (1628).According to Jowitt, these representations corresponded to dissimilar national and ideological projects which influenced the descriptions and narratives produced around Drake's circumnavigation of the globe (1577-1580).Hakluyt, for his part, stressed Drake's interest in becoming a merchant against the Spanish Iberian monopoly in the West Indies, whereas Drake's nephew, or "the Younger," consolidated Drake's skills as a gentleman by the early decades of the seventeenth century (Jowitt 49-50).In other words, Hakluyt emphasized several qualities among the English, such as their military prowess and intent to open new markets in the Americas, to placate Drake's raids by turning the attacks into legitimate economic transactions.For his part, Drake's nephew portrayed his uncle as a gentleman who, unlike his crew, was not interested in the economic profit resulting from the expedition.Upon perusal of the nuanced representations of Drake's image, I will build on this scholarship by arguing that Drake's Caribbean raid provides the grounds to establish the first notions of Drake as a gentleman and not only as a vicious merchant and violent pirate.
Regarding the colonial representations of the attack, Emiro Martínez-Osorio asserts that Castellanos's Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque conveyed an ideology of Spanish domination that praised the warrior class which had been replaced by administrators and bureaucrats without military experience ("En éste nuestro rezental" 26). 4 Expanding upon this argument, I will illustrate how, while branding internal enemies to eclipse the attacks, Castellanos's Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque, colonial depositions, and epistles demonstrate that writing about piracy became a strategic weapon to target specific rivals inside the colonial administrative apparatus, while paradoxically attempting to disseminate an idea of Spanish imperial strength.To this end, rather than focusing on the historical veracity of these letters and works, I assert what Rolena Adorno has denominated as "rhetorical referentiality" in colonial writing to emphasize their role in the recasting of the pirate from the viewpoint of the targeted Spanish territories. 5She argues that colonial writing -including a variety of genres and modes: chronicles, accounts, epic poetry, among others -may not be considered a truthful description of events because colonial writing becomes an event itself (4).The territorial disputes, during the second half of the sixteenth century, are related to her concept of "polemics of possession" that bridges the geographical debate -possession of land -and the foundation of a narrative field in which the possession of land entails a debate about the possession of a narrative identity, authority, or voice.Space and identity converged in challenging or assuming physical and rhetorical possession over lands and authority.In line with her argument, while the sources in question may be pointing to the origins of a criollo sensibility that differentiates Spanish Americans from their Peninsular counterparts, as in the case of Silvestre de Balboa's later poem (1608), this essay posits that the varying appraisals of Drake also register the distinction of geographical spaces that reshape specific attitudes and procedures towards maritime predation.This manoeuvre, primarily based on the transatlantic dichotomy of the here and there, relates to the classical topos of arms and letters.
The narratives of these documents share four core elements: 1) the governor of Cartagena, Pedro Fernández de Busto, and the governor of Santo Domingo, Cristóbal de Ovalle, were warned about the potential attacks; 2) both governors took precautions to protect the cities, although the acting President of the Consejo de Indias, Hernando de Vega y Fonseca and others, claimed that these precautions were neither efficient nor sufficient; 3) Pedro Vique, Captain of galleys in Cartagena, made negligent decisions; 4) local soldiers ran away when confronted by Drake's troops.Iberian and colonial authorities manipulated these key details to denounce larger issues of governmental administration and corruption in the New World, the lack of military resources in the Spanish strongholds that were attacked, and the transformation of piracy into a diplomatic and financial transaction.Eschewing anti-English propaganda and highlighting Iberian and colonial administrative incompetence instead, the sources underscored Spanish supremacy by blaming military defeat on internal failures that did not account for either macro military or administrative weaknesses in the empire.
The first section of this essay focuses on the portrayal of tensions and differing interests between colonial officials and Iberian authorities pertaining to the transformation of chivalric societal values into financial concerns.In this context, the moral undertones served both to endorse the officials' response to the English and to promote the valiant military men who, according to colonial authorities and Castellanos's heroic poem, used to risk their lives in the past.Only few of such men were now left.Regarding the negotiations conducted between the two governors and Drake, the essay's second section shows the debate on what constituted a pirate and how the governors transformed Drake into a legitimate adversary to justify their questionable leadership decisions and conceal their military weaknesses.The Caribbean raid thus illustrates the changing values of an era in which money -instead of military altercation -became the vehicle to resolve a war or to respond to a violent attack.The analysis of English, Iberian, and Spanish colonial sources provides a different angle on the configuration of rhetorical culpabilities to understand the fraught and nuanced relations among these powers.
READING DIVERGENT PERCEPTIONS OR SENTIMIENTOS OF THE ATTACK: THE ENEMY WITHIN Castellanos wrote the Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque as a coda to his "History of Cartagena," contained in the third part of his Elegías de varones ilustres. 6Finished a year after the English raid (1585-1586), the poem was sent to Spain along with a letter addressed to the abbot of Burgo Hondo, Melchor Pérez de Arteaga. 7 In his letter, Castellanos, a chaplain and beneficiado of the city of Tunja, claimed to have compiled the story from several accounts and interviews with eyewitnesses.Castellanos also revealed the inconsistency of some of the sources he consulted on account of different perceptions (sentimientos): "Unos dizen más y otros menos, según el sentimiento de cada uno, como en semejantes cosas acontece" (xv). 8In this regard, Martínez-Osorio and others have argued that Castellanos's intention was to assert his preeminence as a historical poet by alluding to his knowledge and to his methodology of comparing different accounts. 9Concurring with this substantiated claim, I propose that Castellanos's clarification also highlights the challenge of compiling truthful sources about maritime predation that triggers the formulation of divergent factual narratives which, in this case, were crafted and manipulated according to the author's particular interests. 10 In this sense, the sources became a vehicle for crafting narratives to blame several authorities or individuals, except Drake.For instance, Diego Hidalgo de Montemayor -governor of the city of Santa Marta and commissioned judge of the Audiencia de Santa Fe -stated that the varying culprits emerging from these narratives were primarily based on the interests of the complainant. 11 As such, these blaming narratives showcase that the specifics surrounding the attack, or the piracy event, were mediated by the Spanish colonial sources to advance a specific agenda -condemning or celebrating the deeds of several captains or high officials. 12In this section, I will analyze the denunciations supported by religious and moral values that appear in the governors' descriptions of the event to conceal military incompetence and justify local defeats in Santo Domingo and Cartagena.Also, I will show how these narratives labelled internal enemies by revealing issues related to political and economic corruption which seem to surpass Drake's raids.
As several scholars have posited, there was a rhetorical tendency to define piracy attacks as God's punishment for moral misbehavior during the first decades of the Spanish conquest (from both Spanish and English perspectives). 13This explains why literary and historical narratives of this attack rationalized the English military victory by resorting to religious discourse.A concerned Pedro Fernández de Busto, governor of Cartagena, sent a letter claiming: "Dióla Nuestro Señor al enemigo por mis pecados y de otros; y aprovechan poco prevenciones, quando Dios es servido de los contrarios" (qtd.In Castellanos 313).Officers in Santo Domingo blamed divine sources as well: "[E]ntendemos que fue castigo del cielo por los muchos pecados deste pueblo, aunque la gente dél estaua tan nueva y desusada en cosas de guerra y avia tanta falta de polvora y municiones, que siempre se entendió que esta ciudad estaua puesta como por presa y despojo de qualquiera que quisiese acometerla" (qtd. in E. Rodríguez Demorizi 24-25).Such a moralizing view echoes what historians have termed the Decadence Tradition: writing about a wrathful God who punishes Muslims, Protestants, and Christians alike because of their moral failings. 14In so doing, the governors entwined economic and political affairs to align the historical facts they provided to justify the payments of ransoms based on both moral and financial considerations.
Meanwhile, the governor of Cartagena singled out an internal moral enemy, as he blamed the religious office of Cartagena's bishop, Fray Juan de Montalvo, for influencing the negotiations with Drake: Quien más me inportunó y persuadió que se tomase esta hazienda de V. Mag.y rescatase la ciudad fue el Obispo de esta provincia, no por hazer bien a la ciudad, sino por parecerle que por esta vía me haría a mí mucho daño y me subcedería mal; y no solo esto, sino en todos los negocios que a mí me estén mal, los precura, por tener el pecho tan dañado como lo tiene contra mí.(qtd. in Castellanos 319) In his letter, Fernández de Busto cast himself as a victim by placing the bishop and Drake in the same category, as both of them were driven by distorted morals to endanger the economic state of the city. 15The agreement, Castellanos stated in his poem, was not against religious laws (leies de derecho sancto), since the Audiencia of Santo Domingo had also struck a deal with Drake: " [N]inguno lo juzgava por demençia/ni contra leies de derecho santo, /viendo que los señores del Audiençia/ con él mismo hizieron otro tanto" (Castellanos 206).On the one hand, the governor compared Drake's moral defects with those of an individual in charge of a religious office while on the other, Castellanos referred to the absence of religious laws that might intervene in these cases.In this manner, they strategically merged moral undertones and economic concerns to conceal questionable leadership skills.As we shall see further, such a moralizing view to explain the Spanish-colonial economic setback and military defeat, enabled authors to convey issues ranging from administrative incompetence and military weaknesses to political corruption and damaged social structures.
Besides intertwining moral considerations and military affairs, the governor of Cartagena accused Alonso Bravo -one of the renowned captains in Castellanos's heroic poem -of corruption for trading and not paying what he owed to the residents of the city.Another culprit, in the governor's letter, is Dr. Chaparro, a member of the Audiencia de Santa Fe, who paid exorbitant salaries to his own servants.He displayed his concern about Chaparro's intention to use Drake's raid as an excuse for squandering money by appointing several judges, such as Hidalgo Montemayor, to investigate the attack.If we saw before that the governor compared Drake's moral misbehavior with the bishop's evil intentions to damage his reputation, here the governor matched the economic bankruptcy caused by Drake's siege with the potential economic wreckage that Chaparro may lead to: "se teme esta ciudad que el dicho dotor Chaparro a de enviar muchos jueces, en esesibos salarios, sobre todo lo subcedido en Cartagena; que será otra rruyna poco menos que la del capitán Francisco"(qtd.In Castellanos 322).Through his report of Drake's attack and by equating Drake's and Chaparro's tactics, the governor discredited the juridical apparatus of Nueva Granada's kingdom and implied that Drake's attack was as dangerous as the internal economic corruption of the appointed judicial figures in the Indies.He thus deflected the reader's attention from Drake's successful attack by highlighting internal enemies within the Spanish colonial apparatus.
Although Castellanos and Bigges had different views -being subjects of opposing powers -they both emphasized the deterioration of the Spanish colonial landscape by specifically alluding to colonial military flaws.Bigges underscored that the English were better equipped with longer pikes while very few Spaniards were armed (251), and Castellanos stressed that local soldiers where "poorly armed" to protect the city of Santo Domingo and thus most of the population ran away (Castellanos 76-83). 16After stating that he also found conflicting descriptions of Cartagena's attack, Hidalgo Montemayor blamed the people that fled the scene after Pedro Vique ordered to set the galleys on fire (Castellanos 306).The governor of Cartagena accused someone from the Spanish side who ordered the troops' withdrawal: "[U]na voz de parte de los nuestros que se dixo 'retirar, cavalleros'" (Castellanos 306).Transferring the blame to local residents unable to fight, produced an ambivalent narrative that delineated the current chaotic state of the city and justified the further negotiations conducted by the governors.
At first glance, Castellanos's heroic poem as well as the Spanish Peninsular and colonial documents reflect the medieval conflict of the classical rhetorical topos of arms and letters (sapientia et fortitudo).During the seventeenth century, as Anne J. Cruz demonstrates, these categories were rarely at odds: rather, technological advances in weaponry shattered the values commonly associated with chivalric behavior, such as the soldier's selfless courage in the battlefield (191).Cruz affirms that Spain witnessed the first glimpse of this social paradigm by the last decades of the sixteenth century, evinced by the increasing number of non-military men (or letrados) appointed to run the government's bureaucracy.In exchange for their efficient administrative services, these men were often granted nobility privileges or were knighted into well-esteemed military orders (Cruz 202).This clash of social values -arms versus letters -traversed transatlantic waters and reached the Spanish colonial landscape.Referring to the English-Caribbean raid, the sources displayed such a conflict through the formulation of denouncing narratives that either criticized or approved the bureaucratic and military skills of high-ranking officers and the more privileged social sphere.
Even though Castellanos did not openly condemn the governors' decision to pay the ransoms, he emphasized local flaws related to chivalric values when reporting Drake's fleet's success in looting Spanish territories.It has been argued that Castellanos rationalized the loss of the cities of Santo Domingo and Cartagena as a result of the lack of properly trained military men and chivalric values that once populated the Indies.For instance, Luis Restrepo's seminal study compares Castellanos's regret towards the absence of brave and chivalric men in the Americas with the classical verse Ubi sunt to restore the notion of an idealized knight and conquistador (40).
The values of such men, according to Restrepo, ultimately support Castellanos's foundational historical project of promoting a social order led by a martial aristocracy (Restrepo 40-41).Through the narrative representation of the conflicts among the Spanish colonial populations, Castellanos favored the conquistadors and encomenderos, by granting them a portion of land along with a number of indigenous individuals under their command (Martínez-Osorio, "En éste nuestro rezental" 26).To Castellanos, the internal enemies were servants, indigenous populations, and others who have become unreliable or "harmful" over time (Martínez-Osorio, Authority 118-21). 17avid Quint's study on classical rival epic traditions traces two predominant patterns -the victors and the defeated -exemplified by Virgil's Aeneid and Lucan's Pharsalia, respectively.While the first model showcases a linear teleology marked by the fate of the hero inserted in a coherent narrative structure, the latter relies on wanderings and digressions that serve as vehicles for dissident voices and result in open endings ruled by chance (Quint 8-11).Delving into Lucan's desire to project a class conflict or "a warrior nobility at odds with a central monarchy determined to limit their power," Quint analyzes the nostalgic tone used to describe anachronistic military technologies and the inconclusive endings and romance digressions found in La Araucana (1569, 1578, 1589).He also considers its overlapping aspects with Virgil's legitimizing narratives of imperial victors and Lucan's anti-imperial losers (Quint 9-18).I place Castellanos's poem in such an intersectional terrain between both epic models, the winners' and the losers', inasmuch as his poem nostalgically revamped the figure of the individual Spanish military conquistador, while acknowledging the importance of a centralized and incorruptible power to avoid future attacks perpetrated by the enemies of the crown of Castile.
Rehearsing the parameters of a local identity structured by the epic form, Castellanos's Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque portrays a local and transatlantic society defeated by the English military, Spanish colonial schemes, and corrupt social values.
Referring to La Araucana's ending, Quint argues that the lack of a definitive closure, aligned with Lucan's epic model of the vanquished that reinforces a political message of resistance, suggests an "ever-repeating cycle of Araucanian insurgency" (166).Castellanos's Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque also promoted this notion of repetitive cycles in what might be considered an open ending as well.At the end of the poem, he reflects on the ongoing work of historians that will register future events: "otros historiadores más enteros/dirán después sucesos venideros" (Castellanos 226).As time passes, the last verses concluded, the stronger light upon the historian's path is "hope fulfilled with uncertainty." 18In this manner, while alluding to the unforeseeable events and almost adopting the tone of a cautionary tale, Castellanos warns the reader that if maritime predation parallels the erosion of the social and moral fabric, the future of his current society might be more driven by economic interests than past heroic deeds.
For his part, Cartagena's governor uncovered serious concerns about corruption, unveiled internal conflicts between colonial forces, and alluded to the transatlantic conflict between colonial and Iberian authorities.He admitted such colonial tensions when suggesting his own removal and the appointment of someone from Castile cognizant in matters of land and sea.He also proposed that such an individual should hold more centralized power to avoid the internal disputes which, in the end, led to Cartagena's fall (Castellanos 321).In contrast, and acknowledging the predominance of letters, the president of the Consejo de Indias, Hernando de Vega y Fonseca, emphasized the governor's shameful decision to spend the money of the Royal treasury to pay Drake's ransom and finance Drake's accommodations, banquets, and conversations after the negotiations in Cartagena.From the English perspective, Bigges's account confirmed the alleged good treatment provided in Cartagena and Santo Domingo by Spanish authorities: During our abode in this place, as also at S. DOMINGO, there passed diuerse curtesies between vs and the Spaniards.As feasting, and vsing them with all kindnesse and fauour: so as amongst others there came to see the Generall, the Gouernor of CARTAGENA, with the Bishop of the same, and diuerse other Gentlemen of the better sort.( 258) Such a dramatization of banquets that took place between Drake and the governor of Cartagena -from both Hispanic and English sides -illustrates what Elizabeth Wright has termed the "fetish of recreation," through which courtiers disguised their economic interests by emphasizing leisure as the epitome of their respective courtly culture (31-32).These descriptions also support Kelsey's suspicion of unauthorized trading disguised as ransoms.They nonetheless exemplify the transposed social values -from military dominance to diplomatic advantage in the context of Spanish transatlantic territories and kingdoms.
National supremacy, in the case of the Spanish and colonial officials, means repelling the incursion led by Drake not in the battlefield but rather at the negotiating table.However, Spanish national supremacy also consisted in efficiently managing a hostage situation to conceal their imperial fragility and the tensions between colonial and Spanish Iberian societies.As many have argued, distance became one of the most harmful enemies of King Philip II's empire. 19In the context of the Caribbean raid, Spanish and colonial sources created strategic narratives for building a sort of "long-term resilience" -a term coined by Wright -to mitigate geographical distances and differences (Wright 38). 20As we have seen and shall see further, the English and Spanish colonial sides attempted to articulate an ideology of national supremacy, either based on military prowess or economic-bureaucratic advantage (arms and letters).Although Spanish and colonial sources celebrated or condemned the financial transactions, they agreed with their English counterparts in addressing colonial administrative issues and tensions between colonial and Iberian authorities, through the configuration of narratives of culpability.While Spanish Peninsular and colonial authorities looked for a scapegoat, the paradox lies in the fact that by considering Drake's attack as a symptom of internal fissures, the Spanish sources struggled to uphold and project the pursued notion of Spanish imperial and transatlantic strength.

DEALING WITH THE ENEMY
By crafting a narrative that transforms a maritime attack into an economic transaction, the governors highlighted the efficiency of their negotiations with the English captain.They reported that the sum of money paid for the ransom was significantly less than what Drake originally demanded.In Santo Domingo's case, Governor Ovalle mentioned that Drake asked for a million, then for 100,000, and finally agreed to collect 25,000 ducats. 21The governor of Cartagena, Fernández de Busto, stated that Drake requested 400,000 ducats but that he counteroffered 20,000 ducats, and, after seeing that Drake's men were willing to burn the entire city, he raised the amount to 30,000 ducats.Once the bishop authorized that payment "without remorse," he ordered everyone to contribute according to their holdings and property.Finally, Drake settled for 107,000 ducats, and 79,000 ducats were borrowed from the royal treasury (Castellanos 318-19).He even mentioned that Drake provided him with a receipt of payment in exchange for the ransom.This section examines how these claims demonstrate that both governors, while formulating a narrative that portrayed them as successful leaders (or men of letters), attempted to reinforce the notion of Spanish supremacy by making it seem that they had outsmarted the English.Consequently, the governors claimed that the Spanish did not lose entirely but rather prevailed through negotiation.
The effort of the two governors to benefit from the rhetorical transformation of piracy into a legitimate economic transaction was not well received by Iberian and other colonial representatives for two reasons.First, this rhetoric undermined the Spanish military reputation and its presumed capability of protecting its territories.Second, to negotiate with a pirate posed the question of who might be considered or recognized as a legitimate adversary (or a just enemy).Only a decade before Drake's Caribbean raid, Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596) debated this topic in his Six livres de la république (1576).Although Bodin mentioned that pirates should not be protected by the law of nations, he stated that sometimes they forced sovereign leaders to negotiate with them when they had brought an overwhelming military force. 22This notion resonated in later texts dealing with the concept of diplomacy and the role and rights of ambassadors when "recognition" meant to "be acknowledged as a legitimate political agent" (Hampton 119).In the context of Drake's Caribbean raid, it could be argued that the two governors projected this trend by characterizing their negotiation with Drake as something honorable and officially conducted.Their narratives previewed the transformation of maritime predation into a modern diplomatic and economic exchange.After all, they were not military men but rather skilled in letters or administrative matters.
The debate about the figure of the pirate is crucial to understanding the justifications given by the colonial officials, especially the governors, who claimed a diplomatic and economic victory in dealing with a hostage situation.To this end, they had to transform Drake's public image of a ruthless pirate into a legitimate enemy.However, the juridical distinction between the pirate and the enemy was a subject of debate among European sixteenth-century legal theorists such as Balthazar de Ayala (1548-84) and Alberico Gentili (1552-1608). 23They posited that unlike the just enemy, who had the right of restitution and the power of negotiation, the pirate belonged to a notion of an enemy deprived of any such rights. 24In the context of the New World, the Spanish sources will sometimes refer to Drake as a just enemy or a pirate, depending on their underlying intentions.For instance, the governors, probably aware of the illegitimacy of pirates to declare war and negotiate a peaceful agreement to end military hostilities, converted Drake into a legitimate enemy to justify their negotiations.
As several scholars have pointed out, Drake and other maritime predators of his time, defy this ironclad classification.Jowitt underscores that, in theory, legislation passed by the English in 1536 defined piracy as a criminal offense, yet, in praxis, English authorities failed to properly enforce it because of the flexible relationship between criminal piracy and legitimate reprisal (50). 25It is precisely the semantic and linguistic ambivalence behind the terms pirate and corsair, that allowed both English and colonial authorities to render Drake's figure into a legitimate enemy in the ransom negotiations.During wartime in the early modern period, pirates were commonly understood as outlaw figures who betrayed their sovereign powers, while corsairs, who engaged in largely the same outlaw practices as pirates, were state-sponsored and seen as protectors of the stability of their sovereign regimes.However, there is no reference to the official larger Anglo-Spanish conflict or war during this English expedition.On the contrary, Bigges states that before navigating the New World's waters, they asked the people of Bayona if there was an official Anglo-Spanish war and if so, what were the merchants' regulations in place.The people answered that they did not know if, in fact, there was a war but that they certainly knew that they could not trade with them (220).
By using "corsair" and "pirate" interchangeably throughout the poem, Castellanos crafted a system of enunciation, a sort of sleight of hand, in which the figure of the pirate escaped any stable taxonomy.The scenes that staged the negotiation between Drake and the governor of Cartagena illustrate this linguistic and semantic differentiation of a pirate from a corsair.After raiding the governor's house, Drake found several royal cédulas in which King Philip II had warned the governor about the possibility of facing Drake, "the corsair" (Castellanos 204).However, Castellanos's ambivalent system of portraying Drake was also constrained by the rigors of the literary device of rhyme and thus the term pirata suited him better than the term corsario.Consequently, there is a further scene that portrays how Drake became enraged because he realized that the King had used the word "pirate" to describe him: "Su magestad tan mal lo trata/en ponelle renombre de pirata" (208). 26The governor tried to calm Drake's anger by suggesting that perhaps the King had not read the cédula, because he sometimes signed documents written by his secretaries without proofreading them.Drake threatened the governor and anyone, including the Spanish King and his secretaries, who dared to use this "base word" (palabra baxa) to characterize him. 27Aside from blurring the semantic difference between the categories of pirate and corsair, Castellanos implied that Drake's concept of his own condition enabled him to justify the attack and subsequent negotiations. 28This dramatic scene thus displays an effort to neutralize a potential legal case against both Drake and the colonial authorities who negotiated with him.The negotiation, also recorded in Spanish colonial depositions, reinforced the lack of leadership by articulating narratives of blame of the enemy within.Instead of criminalizing Drake's actions, Spanish Peninsular authorities brought several legal cases against the Spanish colonial functionaries involved in the event.
To a great extent, the classical topos of arms and letters corresponded to sixteenth-century notions of the gentleman (or the knight) and the merchant, respectively.According to Quint, unlike the knight, the merchant was considered non-heroic in the classical epic world's code of ethics (264).Castellanos and several Spanish Peninsular and colonial authorities addressed these categories by criticizing military strategies and administrative decisions taken under Drake's siege due to the emphasis on merchant values against chivalric ones.The notion of the merchant acquired unlawful or piratical undertones whereas the knight emerged as a just enemy or corsair.However, the representations of Drake in this particular event blurred the dichotomy between these categories as they intermingled the notions of the pirate and the just enemy (corsair).This is evinced by Castellanos's indistinctive use of the terms and the governors who fashioned themselves and Drake, into merchants and "just enemies" (knights and gentlemen) to justify their negotiations.Consequently, if "letters" corresponded to the category of the merchant and "arms" to that of the knight and the gentleman, these narratives showcase a conflation of such ad hoc dichotomies.
To save the Spanish Crown from public shame, the Consejo de Indias' president urged the King to investigate and prosecute the subjects, if found guilty. 29In this way, his narrative warned that negotiating with either a corsair or a pirate, revealed the governors' inability to protect the Spanish strongholds.Also, dealing with Drake implied that colonial officials considered Drake a worthy and legitimate adversary and exonerated his piracy by closing an economic deal with him. 30More broadly, to regard Drake as a just enemy or legitimate rival is to acknowledge English military prowess and then, to cast piracy attacks as battles in a just war between England and Spain that -as evinced by Bigges's account -had not yet been officially declared.
As expected, Bigges reassured and justified on many levels the legitimacy of the expedition and the eventual negotiations. 31In the same fashion of the narratives concocted by the two Spanish governors, the English sailor's narrative carried an economic undertone to neutralize the arguable illegitimacy of their stay in such places (Bigges 261).He criticized the Spanish colonial economic model by decrying its incompetent exploitation of natural resources evinced by the lack of people working in mines, which were "wholly given over" and in which beasts were "fed up to a very large growth, and so killed for nothing" (Bigges 247).He repeatedly stressed that they were ransoming the places attacked because of their lack of military men, power, and resources.However, even if he acknowledged the legitimacy of the negotiations, he also criticized colonial officials by implying that the people in charge did not live up to the expectations of the Spanish king, and instead of being ashamed, they smiled (Bigges 245-46). 32he distinction between heroic deeds and moneymaking pursuits derived from the Renaissance ideology of discovery that considered trade and money constitutive aspects of mercenary behavior.During the seventeenth century, the increasing merchant audience contributed to the epic model's decline and the emergence of the romance genre that had to adapt to represent a "world of money and materiality" (Quint 263-67).This is evinced by a later Caribbean epic poem, Silvestre de Balboa's Espejo de paciencia, that retells the historical attack carried out by the French pirate Gilberto Girón, the abduction of the bishop Juan de las Cabezas de Altamirano, his eventual release, and the pirate's death at the hands of the local residents of the City of Yara. 33 The first canto portrayed the hyperbolized torture endured by the bishop while the second canto focused on describing how the population avenged the bishop by fighting against the French pirate.Whereas the first canto criticized the French pirates because of their economic greed in contrast to the moral, exemplary figure of the bishop, at the end of the canto the poetic voice emphasized the local efficiency in collecting the ransom and praised the importance of the Indies for carrying out international commerce. 34Here the poetic voice referred to contraband, since none of the countries listed were authorized to trade with the Indies without the intervention of Iberian authorities. 35Unlike the first canto, in which the main conflict's resolution is mediated by the payment of the ransom, the second canto displayed the Cuban and colonial fighting prowess as a means to resolve the conflict.In this way, the structure of the poem reasserted the conciliation of two conflicting ideologies of honor.On the one hand, honor could be found in the process of collecting ransoms and engaging in contraband practices with other countries, while, on the other, honor could also be achieved through conventional fighting against an overwhelming military force.This work displays the acceptance of financial transactions with chivalric and moral conventions that were previously criticized or embraced by the governors' rhetoric, Castellanos's poem, and Bigges's travelogue when reporting Drake's Caribbean raid.
Colonial and Iberian authorities used the attack as a pretext to blame internal enemies within the Spanish colonial apparatus.At the dawn of an age of increasing bureaucratization, the two governors concealed their questionable military leadership by employing moral undertones to highlight issues related to internal economic and political corruption.In doing so, they attempted to transform Drake into a legitimate adversary or a just enemy to justify the processes of negotiation.Meanwhile, Bigges, Castellanos, and several officials -who occasionally discredited the work of these governors -embraced the superiority of arms against letters or bureaucrats in charge of high governmental Spanish colonial offices.In the end, all Spanish colonial, Iberian, and English sources did not condemn Queen Elizabeth I, but rather they blamed the enemy within by rationalizing the outcomes of Santo Domingo and Cartagena's attacks as if they were selfinflicted wounds.
Despite the governors' attempts to vindicate their efforts when warding off the attack through negotiation, they did not succeed and were held accountable by Peninsular authorities.In the aftermath of Drake's raid, the President of the Consejo de Indias ordered the arrest of both captain Vique and governor Fernández de Busto.Fernández de Busto, who was over seventy years old, appealed his sentence by alluding to his 40 years of service to the King; and Pedro Vique, continued to live in exile as late as 1598 in Orán, a coastal northwestern city of Algiers. 36Governor Ovalle died several months after Drake's siege and several measures, including the strengthening of Santo Domingo's fortresses, were ordered by Iberian authorities.The report of the secret Spanish official Ángel González sent to investigate Cartagena's attack, mysteriously disappeared on its way to Spain.A Spanish representative in Cartagena, Dr. Juan Milio, stated in a letter that a Friar of Cartagena, Juan González de Mendoza, believed that the people of Cartagena may have stolen the documents because they proved more than what the king wished to know. 37Milio's statement confirms the Iberian suspicions of corruption in Cartagena's administrative apparatus, including the doubtful story of Drake's siege.
Divergent sentimientos or perceptions of the same event foster multiple ambivalent narratives of culpability.Peninsular and colonial authorities maligned higher officials and identified internal enemies or denounced misguided military tactics.In this way, they disavowed Drake's prowess and reinforced an imperial narrative of Spanish supremacy over the affected territories.Iberian and colonial sources thereby claimed that they were defeated because they were not properly prepared, not because they were weaker.Meanwhile, the governors' depiction of their negotiations with Drake, in which they resorted to diplomacy instead of war, paradoxically asserted a Spanish victory as they tackled the timely ideological tensions between military and emerging diplomatic societies.
Caribbean marginal economies thrived on illegitimate commercial trade unbeknownst to the Spanish Crown, circumventing Iberian monopolistic restrictions.Writing about maritime predation shaped and reinforced a collective imaginary of the existing conditions in the New World in which the Caribbean remained a geographical referent of chaos, marred by the constant threat of foreign attacks.The analysis of rhetorical blames and factual inconsistencies, found in both literary and historical accounts in the region, allows for a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of maritime predation across the transatlantic borders of the Iberian power.Given that there were no specific legal directives or religious laws to address a piratical siege, as Castellanos and Bigges stated, Drake's raid provided a rhetorical scenario for rehearsing ideological premises concerning the limits of war, the conception of the enemy, and the possibility of repealing attacks through negotiations and economic transactions.
Neither did the English nor the Spanish fulfill their expectations from this incident: the English did not gain the expected economic profit from the collection of ransoms while the Spanish lost both profits and military prestige. 38Both sides, nonetheless, turned the descriptions of the attacks into claims of victory.While the English transformed an economic defeat into a military victory and scored a rhetorical triumph over the Spanish empire, colonial governors cast a Spanish military defeat as an economic and diplomatic victory. 39By exploiting the rhetorical value -evinced by the contrasting factual and literary descriptions of the attack -both the English and the Spaniards crafted their descriptions to ultimately advance an ideology of national supremacy.The significance of the English narratives of military preeminence, along with Spanish and colonial narratives of blame, is neither military nor economic.The profit derived from Drake's attack is the rhetorical capital of its depictions. 40Beyond the 132,000 ducats that Drake collected from colonial ransoms, the lasting profit of this venture was the account of the attack, as English ambitions became manifest.Along these lines, although the Spaniards were militarily defeated and economically harmed, they crafted their descriptions of the event to perpetuate their status as a dominant empire, thereby securing an ideological profit as well.
These portrayals of piracy reveal the circumstances that led England to replace ideological mercantile values with projections of empire.In the context of the Caribbean raid, however, Drake is portrayed as both a merchant and a gentleman.The analysis discloses that both the descriptions of the attack and the narratives of blame forged an ideology that braids the notion of imperial and national military supremacy with early modern increasingly mercantilist values.Depictions of maritime predation, therefore, set an ideological precedent for the articulation of the military and economic values that underpinned further European projects of colonization in the Americas during the following century.Bigges recorded the events that took place until he died of fever in Cartagena.
The first edition of his account was published in Latin, in 1588; and two other English editions appeared in 1589.4 Among those flaws, Martínez-Osorio mentions: "the absence of a more reliable system of communication, the lack of forethought by local authorities, and the military incompetence of newly arrived merchants and bureaucrats" ("En éste nuestro rezental" 13). 5 Here I draw on Rolena Adorno's argument about the "referentiality" of colonial writing, which "is not historical, as in the historical truth whose referent is a past event.It is instead rhetorical and polemical, with the objective of influencing readers' perceptions, royal policies, and social practices" (4).6 All the references in Spanish from Castellanos's Discurso come from Ángel González-Palencia's 1921 edition.7 The facsimile of the surviving copy of the poem and the letter was published by the Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, Madrid, 1921.According to González Palencia's "Noticia biográfica," Melchor Pérez de Arteaga, was oidor of the Audiencia de Santa Fe in 1557.He was later accused of several crimes that involved negligence, abuse of power, and corruption (285-87).8 The word sentimiento stands for sensus ("observation, perception, view, prevailing mode of thinking") in both Nebrija's editions of the Vocabulario de romance en latín (Salamanca, 1495; Seville, 1516).9 Luis Restrepo, in his study of Castellanos's Elegías, overcomes the dichotomy between history and literature in Castellanos's work by proposing that Castellanos consciously imbricated a variety of literary genres to create the foundational history for the future Nueva Granada's viceroyalty (20-21).10 Castellanos's Discurso was suppressed by the acting censor of the Consejo de Indias, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa -previously abducted by Drake during his circumnavigation of the globe -sometime before 1592.Even though Sarmiento de Gamboa's annotations do not explain the reason for cutting the Discurso, it has been suggested that Sarmiento de Gamboa's censorship was intended to conceal the insufficient military defense put on by Cartagena's local authorities.Focusing on the censorship of Castellanos's Discurso, María Ríos analyzes the relationship between English piracy and the debate around the legitimacy of the Spanish presence in the Americas (161-76).11 Diego Hidalgo de Montemayor claimed that: "blame … except as is above related, does not appear to attach to the residents … in this city.Having all fled and deserted the city, each one lays the ones on the others and says that the others … fled and he himself left because he found himself alone among the enemy … and the (governor?) to exculpate himself reports that the enemy was stirring … killed many English, and other impertinent matters, declaring that … a voice [was] saying: 'Withdraw gentlemen!' and he does not know whose voice it was … trying to evade the blame which is generally laid upon him … sought to place an excessive value on this city, more than it is worth, in order to give the impression that it was advisable to effect the ransom" (qtd. in Wright, Further English Voyages 136).12 Here I draw on Jowitt's methodological approach which, albeit referring to Drake's circumnavigation (1577-80), demonstrates that attitudes towards piracy change according to political and financial considerations.
have produced more conflicts and rebellions in a stronger, more centralized system of rule" (38  Empire.26 "Su magestad tan mal lo trata/en ponelle renombre de pirata" (Castellanos 208).The English translation of this episode can be found in Lane and Arne Bialuschewski (26-28).27 About the semantic debate in Castellanos: "y el intérprete suyo, dicho Ionas, / en idioma propio las expuso, / a gran enojo van palabras pronas/por el nombre que nuestro Rey le puso porque dezían que cossario era, / como si por ventura no lo fuera" (Castellanos 204)."To whatever sir who invented this / Base word, should he write me, / The reply won't be long in coming / Because I will surely unmask the lie … And there we'll make it clear one day / So that I may be vindicated/Before the Great Philip who sent it / By the secretaries he confided" (Lane and Bialuschewski 28).28 Edmund Spenser assigned damaging and dishonorable moral attributes to the "brigants" (brigands) -in Book VI (about courtesy) of The Fairie Queen (circa 1599).While the Elizabethan author did not employ the term pirates, the word "brigants" encapsulated all the stereotypes conventionally associated with pirates such as their inclination to spoil, invade, capture, and murder.For instance, in Canto X, the poetic voice remarked that they were: "A lawlesse people, Brigants hight of yore, / that neuer vsed to liue by plough nor spade, / But fed on spoile and booty, which they made/ Vpon their neighbours, which did nigh them border, / The dwelling of these shepheards did inuade, / And spoyld their houses, and them selues did murder; / And droue away their flocks, with other much disorder" (Spenser Stanza 40, vv 345-51).Comparing the myth of Proserpina's abduction to Pastorella's, Alice Blitch argues that Spenser employed the term brigands instead of pirates to preserve the Italian connotation of "devil" from the word "brigante" and to stress the similarities of the encounter between the captain of the brigands and Pluto (Blitch 18).In Castellanos's Discurso, we see that both terms, pirate and corsair, refer to such characteristics and behavioral traits.29 AGI, Santa Fe, 1,72: "que conviene para lo presente y para dar exemplo en lo porvenir que enesto se haga demostracion y que una persona con autoridad y buena intelligencia vaya a aquella ciudad y haga información con diligencia y de fuerza y averigue todo lo que en esto paso y si resultaren notablemente culpados el governador y el don Pedro o alguno dellos hagan con ellos los procesos y los concluya y con sus personas presas los enbie al Consejo para que en el se vean y provea con justicia lo que convenga y quanto a lo demas particulares que dela información resultare haver sido culpados dando les traslado y haviendolos oydo sentencie las causas conforme a justicia."30 AGI, Santa Fe, 1, 72. 31 "Now to the satisfying of some men who maruell greatly that such as fanous & goodly builded Citie so well inhabited of gallant people, very brauely appareled (whereof our souldiers found good store for their reliefe) should afoord no greater riches then was found there, wherein it is to be vnderstood that the Indian people, which were the naturals of this whole Islands of HISPANIOLA (the same being neare hand as great as England) were many years since cleane consumed by the tyrannie of the Spabiards, which was the lacke of people to worke in the Mines, the gold and siluer Mines of this Island … The chiefe trade of this place consisteth of suger & ginger, which growth in the Island, and of hides of oxen and kine … and the said beasts are fed vp to a very large growth, & so killed for nothing so much, as for their hides aforesaid" (Bigges 246-47).32 "[They] would shake their heads, and turn aside their countenance in some smiling sort, without aunsering any thing as greatly ashamed thereof" (Bigges 245-46).33 Originally from Grand Canary, Silvestre de Balboa arrived in Cuba around 1592 and worked as a notary.For more about the literary and stylistic European ). 21 "[L]e pidieron un millón, y le dijeron que no lo harían menos de cien mil ducados … y porque no se les dieron, comenzaron a quemar la ciudad y quemaron de tres partes la una" (qtd. in E. Rodríguez Demorizi 31).According to governor Ovalle, other mayors and regidores, and the Treasurer, Alonso de Peña, agreed that the best way to save the city of Santo Domingo and stop the English's devastation was to strike a deal with them.22 Bodin refers to a case in which the Roman general of Pompeii signed a treaty with Mediterranean pirates (qtd. in Hampton 118).23 Lauren Benton elaborates on the issues encountered by lawyers, such as Gentili, when distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate captures (104-61).Daniel Heller-Roazen's study traces the rhetoric behind the different definitions of the pirate and the just enemy from classical times.24 Alberico Gentili, an Italian appointed lawyer for the Spanish Crown at the court of the Admiralty (1605-1608), in his famous legal treatise Hispanicae advocationis, posthumously published (c.1613), compiled specific disputes and pleas in which he defined piracy in contradictory ways depending upon whether he desired to legitimize or delegitimize an economic transaction.For a related specific analysis, see Benton's study.Balthazar de Ayala, a Flemish lawyer appointed by Philip II to the position of General Military Auditor, wrote De Iure et Officiis bellicis et disciplina militari (1584), in which he underscored the difference between the notions of a just enemy and a rebel.25 For more about the nuanced distinction between a pirate and a corsair, see Fuchs's and Andrews's respective works.For more about the emergence of different historical categories related to piracy (buccaneers, freebooters, etc.), see Lane's seminal study Pillaging the