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Updated: June 23, 2025
At Cartagena there began veritable forests of cactus trees, and a wild scrub resembling the olive. Thousands of tunas, the red fruit of the cactus, dotted the ground along the way. The sun sizzled its way through the heavy sky as we climbed the flank of a rocky range, the vast half-forested plain to the east sinking lower and lower as we rose. Then came broken country with many muddy streams.
Benbow fell in with a French squadron sent to supply and strengthen the place, and brought it to action north of Cartagena; but though superior in force, the treason of several of his captains, who kept out of action, defeated his purpose, and after fighting till his ship was helpless and he himself had received a mortal wound, the French escaped and Cartagena was saved.
Cartagena and Nombre de Dios came next. Then Carleill was to raid Panama, with the help of the Maroons, while Drake himself was to raid the coast of Honduras. Finally, with reunited forces, he would take Havana and, if possible, hold it by leaving a sufficient garrison behind.
The merchants of Gautemala, likewise, shipped their commodities to Cartagena by way of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan river, for they feared to send goods across the Gulf of Honduras to Havana, because of the French and English buccaneers hanging about Cape San Antonio.
Its accomplishment depended on the council at Carthage, on the head-quarters at Cartagena, on the courts of Pella and of Syracuse.
Only in so speaking we may not pronounce an absolute censure on the general: we see well the defects of the plan of operations pursued by him, but we cannot determine whether he was in a position to foresee them his route lay through an unknown land of barbarians or whether any other plan, such as that of taking the coast road or of embarking at Cartagena or at Carthage, would have exposed him to fewer dangers.
"Do you not know, sir, that he and his fleet, only last year, swept the whole of this coast, and took, with shame I confess it, Cartagena, San Domingo, St. Augustine, and I see you are too courteous, senors, to express before me what you have a right to feel. But whence come you, sir? From the skies, or the depth of the sea?" "Art-magic, art-magic!" moaned the bishop. "Your holiness!
They long to climb that tree in the Cordilleras and to look down, as Drake and Oxenham looked down, upon the old ocean in the East and the new ocean in the West; they would like to go on pilgrimage to Nombre de Dios Brothers, what a Gest was that! and to Cartagena, where Drake took the great Spanish ship out of the very harbour, under the very nose of the Spaniard, they would like to have been on board the Golden Hind, when Drake captured that nobly laden vessel, Our Lady of the Conception, and used her cargo of silver for ballasting his own ship.
Leicester's campaign in the Netherlands, feeble as it was, and Drake's expedition to Cartagena, put an end to the theory that Spain and England were at peace. It was known that in the ports of Spain and Portugal Philip was making his slow preparations for a naval attack; his ablest admiral, Santa Cruz, had formulated a vast scheme vaster indeed than Philip was ever prepared to adopt.
"Cartagena has a population of several thousands, you know; and I do not suppose it is at all likely that everybody will know everybody else, even by sight; it will be very difficult for anybody to point to anybody else and say, with assured certainty, that he is a stranger who has no right to be there.
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