Jan Vlachos Westcott
Captain for Elizabeth
Westcott, Jan Vlachos, 1912 – 2011
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PART ONE
Chapter 1 …………. 3
Chapter 2 ………… 11
PART TWO
Chapter 3 ………… 23
Chapter 4 ………… 35
Chapter 5 ………… 42
Chapter 6 ………… 48
Chapter 7 ………… 56
Chapter 8 ………… 66
Chapter 9 ………… 73
Chapter 10 ……… 80
Chapter 11 ……… 84
Chapter 12 ……… 94
Chapter 13 …… 100
Chapter 14 …… 105
Chapter 15 …… 112
Chapter 16 …… 117
Chapter 17 …… 122
Chapter 18 …… 128
Chapter 19 …… 131
Chapter 20 …… 137
PART THREE
Chapter 21 …… 143
Chapter 22 …… 153
Chapter 23 …… 156
Chapter 24 …… 160
Chapter 25 …… 170
Chapter 26 …… 176
Chapter 27 …… 188
Chapter 28 …… 197
Chapter 29 …… 202
Chapter 30 …… 205
Chapter 31 …… 212
Chapter 32 …… 218
Chapter 33 …… 226
Chapter 34 …… 235
Chapter 35 …… 242
PART FOUR
Chapter 36 …… 249
Chapter 37 …… 258
Chapter 38 …… 262
Chapter 39 …… 272
Chapter 40 …… 281
PART FIVE
Chapter 41 …… 287
Chapter 42 …… 297
Chapter 43 …… 305
TO MOTHER
AND UNCLE BILL
All incidents, sea battles, and itineraries relating to the Desire, the Content, and the Santa Anna were taken from the journal of one of the gentlemen of the Desire's company—Master Francis Pretty of Suffolk, England. This journal appeared in Hakluyt's Voyages as the definitive account of Cavendish's (the third) trip around the world.
PART ONE
Chapter I
The anteroom was small, he came across its sixteen feet swiftly; he knelt.
"Madam," he said.
She used his surname: "Cavendish."
He stood with the grace of an animal. Without a word, she seated herself, spreading out her gown so that it flowed about her stiff chair, flower-like. The brocade rustled, sending its sounds into the room like the currents of excitement that the meeting aroused.
He was still standing, restlessly. She took joy from his presence. The small room caged him; it prisoned the essence of him, and she could taste it fully: the male recklessness, the strength, the cruelties and tenderness of which he was capable. For these moments he was hers, and she knew well enough there were many women who envied her.
"Sit, Cavendish," she said. "You've ridden from Plymouth."
He answered with his usual directness. "I'd as soon stand, Madam. For the reason that I've been in the saddle for hours."
She looked at him. From his fingers dangled the scarlet sea cap she had given him. On his feet were Cordovan leather boots, probably looted from a Spanish grandee. His eyes were blue, intensely blue; his thick hair was short and tinged with gray. He was thirty-one years old, and Elizabeth was as proud of him as though she herself had given him birth.
Both doors of the room were shut. Yet when she spoke her tones were low.
"You sail soon, then?"
"Thursday," he said.
"You have only two more days!"
Today was Tuesday. It was July, the 22nd of the month, and the day was hot. The afternoon air that fanned into the room was warm and heavy.
4
"I scarce love to see you leave," she said. "And I scarce think I can stay you. Yet I might try, even now."
"Do not try."
"Do not interrupt." She said it, not sternly, but as a wise mother to a child. And she paused.
"I like the men I have about me. And I need them. I have always needed them. I want them—for myself a little, for England much. I have brought peace to England. You and your kind are using peace to bring us closer to war with Spain. It is England, and not distant lands, to whom your allegiance should be offered!"
"My allegiance?"
She said, "I have perfect command of our tongue, Cavendish. Allegiance to me means staying home and guarding the shores that Spanish boots may be treading, because such as you dispute their claims to the New World. If there be war, it shall be a fault laid on your doorstep."
He was silent for a moment.
"I'll come back, Madam," he said, and there was on his face a rare appeal for understanding.
She was not appeased. Regrets nagged her. "You have been home but a few months."
"Five," he corrected, remembering his last voyage. He had an instant's vision of Roanoke Island, with its golden sand dunes, the giant oaks dripping with moss, the pines, the gardenias, the succulent grapes. It occurred to him that she had never seen the land they had fought for. What he had seen with his own eyes, she saw only with imaginative vision. "Madam," he said suddenly, "if you could see America!"
"I?" she said.
"Yourself," he said. A flash of humor crossed his face. "If I should ever take a woman aboard, I should take you. But if you could only see America, you would understand. Do you want, Madam, to let us leave it to the Spanish?"
"The colony you established there a year ago failed," she said.
"Certainly," he said. "Because there were a hundred men left on Roanoke, and not one wench among them. We'll try the colony again."
When he said it, like that, as though surely it were true that there would be more colonies, her fears were softened. She could see momentarily with his vision. . . . She would never lose all her doubts. But it was clear—the reasons for battle with Spain. As the risks were plain, so were the great gains, the prizes.
5
The uneasy peace between England and Spain was still peace, and it allowed her to let men like the one with her now sail forth on the restless seas and carry far, on their square-rigged vessels, the English flag.
"How long will it take you, this time?"
"The voyage? About two years. Look you, Madam. For the next twelve months I fight the Spanish in America, in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. After that, I am free to explore. Find the routes, chart the courses, and trade. Trade! We shall build an empire on it. And on a little force, if need be."
As if his restlessness were somehow appeased by speech, he sat down opposite her—there was a table between them—as he leaned forward. It was not often he spoke his thoughts; with her he was free to do so. The expanding world of his own age belonged to him, and it was not a vision but a reality. The horizons of the world were lifting.
"And besides that. Madam, Philip of Spain has sent Sarmiento to fortify the Straits of Magellan and thus close the entrance to the Pacific. I want to see what he has done down there. If there are forts, they must be destroyed. Else they will bottle up the Pacific more than nature herself has done."