SIR WILLIAM MONSON The hardest thing to predicate about a man is whether he will be remembered when he is dead; and if so for how long. "It is enough," declares a great American, "if one competes successfully with his own generation," and in that view must lie whatever satisfaction most of us will ever get of fame. There is, indeed, but one sure way to keep one's memory alive. Among the paths to immortality,—an eminent ability in the destruction of one's kind, some superhuman service to the race, some more than usual villainy, some freak of fortune, character, or birth,—all men are equal till one writes a book; and truly if ever man had reason to believe the pen mightier than the sword it is Sir William Monson. Among the daring seamen of Elizabeth he was by no means the least; among the counsellors of her Stuart successors his voice was not the mildest; among the upholders of English naval supremacy he occupies a not unenviable place. Yet were it not for the inconsequential fact that in his later years the old sea-dog chanced to commit his growls to paper, we might well ask in vain of him,- as of a multitude of other worthies, stout men of head and hand who in their day did no little to direct the destinies of the world,-"Who was Sir William Monson?" Yet it would seem that his career might entitle him to remembrance, even had he not taken to driving quill when he left off wielding cutlass. There are greater figures than his in the stirring times when he played his part among the world's affairs, but there is scarcely one which touched those affairs on so many sides, or was so typical a product of the times. Certainly there is not one whom we can now recall that managed to live long enough to fight the Armada at one end of his life and to command a Ship-Money fleet at the other; least of all one so capable of recording his experiences. Not without high lights and purple patches which make it well worth recovering from the semi-oblivion into which it has fallen, his long career is a peculiarly accurate type of the successive generations which he adorned. And if you would find your way behind Elizabethan scenes and see how that magnificent spectacle was staged; if you would learn somewhat of its actors at first hand, and feel the stir of those days when carrack and galleon still sailed the seas, when Raleigh sought El Dorado and Drake led his handful of adventurers to sack the Treasure House of the World, go find Sir William, sit down beside the chimney fire and listen to the old sea tales which have been the inspiration of two centuries of naval preeminence. In nearly all of its earlier characteristics his life offers the typical features of his generation, and it is not the worse for that. It has been long since the boy who runs away to sea played the part in literature which he once played in life; but when young Monson exchanged the Balliol quadrangle for the deck of a privateer, neither in literature nor in life was such an escapade so rare as it has since become, for the world was then crowded with great events whose principal theatre was the sea. William the Silent was leading his countrymen in that desperate revolt against the Spanish power which was to become a landmark of liberty; Henry of Navarre was waiting his opportunity amid the civil wars which devastated France to make his way to Ivry and the crown; and every port of Spain and Portugal rang with busy preparation for the mighty enterprise which with the aid of Parma's army, then gathering in the Netherlands, was to crush England and Holland and so reëstablish the supremacy of Spain and the Vatican, now sadly shrunk beneath the strokes of the reformed communions. Hawkins and Drake and Frobisher, who had dealt some of the shrewdest of those blows, were then in the heyday of their spectacular careers, and among the crews of those innumerable vessels then pushing out from every English port to spoil the Spaniard there were many who, like this Lincolnshire youth, were fired by the exploits of their famous countrymen to draw a sword for England and her faith and, as Monson observes of himself, "inclined to see the world," and, it might well be, make their fortunes. To the oncoming generations each new age offers its peculiar opportunity. What the Crusades were to the young knight of the Middle Ages, what the plunder of Mexico and Peru was to the Spaniard of the early sixteenth century; what the camp was to Napoleonic France, and business to nineteenth-century America, privateering was to the Elizabethan. So, in embracing it as a profession, Monson was but an exponent of the spirit of his age when the sea and the court were the open way for the talents of an English youth. And he was not merely a type, he was the type destined to survive by its success. Not many of his fellow-adventurers could boast, like him, of having helped bring back from his earliest enterprise the first Spanish prize ever seen in an English port; fewer still were able to congratulate themselves on such rapid rise thereafter. It is not likely that the parental blessing was difficult to secure for one whose professional career had begun so auspiciously, and it was evident that this, or some kindred influence, contributed to place the young adventurer almost at once in command of a ship of his own. It must have been that seamen were developed rapidly in those strenuous days, or that he had some extraordinary influences at work in his behalf. But, even so, when at the mature age of eighteen he voyaged to the Canaries and, disguised as a Fleming, found his way into and out of Flores harbor unharmed; and when later falling in with a "Biscayner well-manned, sufficiently furnished and bravely defended," his crew were forced by the height of the seas to ungrapple and leave some of their number fighting on board the stranger from eight o'clock in the evening till eight in the morning, when she finally struck, we must admit he had not chosen his profession ill, if some unusual quality of adroitness and courage and leadership be any proof. These, perhaps as much as family influence, doubtless enabled him a year after that wild night in the north Atlantic to embark as a volunteer on the Queen's own pinnace in the eventful week's fighting which ended at Gravelines and the overthrow of the Armada. This much is certain, that whatever star guided his early course, thenceforth Monson sailed no longer as a privateer but as an officer of those successive expeditions by which Elizabeth, so long as she lived, wreaked vengeance on the power which had threatened her life and throne, summoned her subjects to renounce her authority, fomented Irish rebellion against her rule, and supported the claims of her rival. In this long countercrusade, fleet after fleet put out from English ports to harry the weakened power of Philip the Second, till that power was no longer to be reckoned with as formidable, much less dangerous on any sea. Drake, Essex, Cumberland, in turn harassed the Spanish coasts and island ports, cut off convoys and merchantmen, and learned from them the wealth of Indian trade, the secrets of the sea-ways east and west. Their successors, following the track of Drake and Cavendish about the world, broke through the dangers and the prohibitions of the rich monopoly, and with the Dutch close in their wake poured into Europe the riches of the declining Spanish-Portuguese possessions over sea and shifted the colonial and economic balance of the world. In this exciting, profitable pursuit Monson had his full share. "Dangers and perils by the sword and famine, by danger of the sea and other casualties, as all men are subject to that run such desperate adventures," so he writes, were his in plenteous measure. His escape from shipwreck and starvation, by which, as he tells us, he "received two lives from God"; the daring attempt that he and Captain Lister made to cut out a ship from Flores harbor with a boat's crew, "rather like mad than discreet men," and finally taking it with the help of another boat sent out to rescue them; his capture of the rich carrack, the St. Valentine, which crowned his achievements in this field; such were the incidents which for a dozen years made up the sum of his adventurous life. Full of the thrust of sword and push of pike, attack, repulse, and stratagems and spoils, hair-breadth escapes by land and sea, they were busy years. It would be too long to tell of his innumerable adventures here; how once when Essex was outflanked by a fortified house, Monson, with fifty "old soldiers of the Low Countries," took it with no more danger to himself, he says "than a musket bullet through his scarf and breeches and the pummel of his sword shot from his side"; of how again, finding himself at night amid a Spanish fleet he had been sent to spy upon, he held a dagger at the throat of his Spanish servant compelling him to cry out that there was a strange ship among them; conceiving, as the event proved, that his enemies "having warning from me of it, of all others they could not suspect that I was she." Such was, no doubt, the daily lot of many men of those times as of all other times of war; yet to the man of peace to whom there comes across the centuries the echo of these long-dead rivalries, the exploits and the stratagems of old conflicts, they retain a charm not of phrase alone, they wake something of the spirit which made them possible. "All this how far away! Mere delectation meet for a minute's dream! Just as a drudging student trims his lamp, Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close, To the old solitary nothingness." The more so, perhaps, in that he knows the peace that no Elizabethan ever knew. For Monson's career in those eventful days and in the darker years to come was not merely of naval interest. Scarcely was he embarked upon his second voyage when he was captured, and from his experiences as a Spanish prisoner and galley-slave brought back, among other things, some of his choicest tales, with which, to the end of his days he was accustomed to amuse his family and his friends. That they were worth the hearing, the story of "Seignior Fernandez' bears witness, if we had no other specimen. Even in Monson's brief chronicle of his fellow-prisoner, the unfortunate agent of the dispossessed Pedro of Portugal, whom Englishmen once dreamed of making king again, there lives the flavor of a real romance. From this source, too, he drew much of that inexhaustible store of miscellaneous information which served him and his country well through many years. And if Sir William had only told us how he himself was freed from his imprisonment, he would have added to our entertainment and, perhaps to his advantage and our own, have cleared his own memory of the aspersion which some later biographers have cast upon it. But this Elizabethan, like so many of his kind, was an amphibious creature; and, in the intervals of voyaging against the Spaniard, he found time and opportunity to embark on a career no less adventurous and scarcely less hazardous than following the sea, for he became a courtier. Whatever moving accidents he had in that great enterprise he has not told, and we shall probably never know; but by them he gained more than by |