# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Hawkins, Richard

​HAWKINS or HAWKYNS, Sir RICHARD (1562?–1622), naval commander, only son of Sir John Hawkyns (1532–1595) [q. v.], was brought up almost from infancy among ships and seamen, whether at Plymouth or Deptford. He probably made at an early age short voyages in coasting or cruising vessels, but went for the first time to the West Indies in 1582, under the command of his uncle, William Hawkyns (d. 1589) [q. v.] In 1585 he was captain of the Duck galliot in Drake's expedition to the West Indies, the Spanish main, and the coast of Florida; on the return voyage Hawkins was driven into Mount's Bay on 21 July 1586, and himself carried the news of Drake's success to Exeter in fourteen hours (Cal. of MSS. at Hatfield, iii. 152; Hist. MSS. Comm.) In 1588 he commanded the queen's ship Swallow against the ‘Invincible’ Armada, and in 1590 the Crane in his father's expedition to the coast of Portugal. Meantime he was meditating a voyage which, in his conception, was to surpass any yet made. This was not only a voyage round the world, arriving at ‘the islands of Japan, of the Philippines, and Moluccas, the kingdoms of China and East Indies, by the way of the Straits of Magellan and the South Sea,’ but he designed principally, he tells us, ‘to make a perfect discovery of all those parts where he should arrive, as well known as unknown, with their longitudes and latitudes, the lying of their coasts, their head-lands, their ports and bays, their cities, towns and peoplings, their manner of government, with the commodities which the countries yielded, and of which they have want and are in necessity’ (Markham, p. 89). This was a project quite beyond his predecessors, Drake or Cavendish, whose principal end was to prey on the Spaniards, and who had been driven to sail round the world mainly by force of circumstances. There is nothing in Hawkyns's actions to show that his object was different from theirs; though when he wrote, thirty years afterwards, he may have persuaded himself that his voyage was primarily intended as one of scientific discovery. The ship in which he determined to go was built for his father in 1588, and named, in the first instance, the Repentance; afterwards the queen, admiring her graceful form, had ordered her to be re-named the Dainty, and as such she had sailed in the expedition to the coast of Portugal in 1590, and again in the voyage to the Azores in 1592. Hawkyns now bought her from his father, fitted her out in the river, sailed from Blackwall on 8 April 1593; and finally, after many mishaps and delays, left Plymouth about the middle of June, having a pinnace ​and a victualler in company, and a commission ‘to attempt some enterprise against the king of Spain, his subjects and adherents, upon the coast of the West Indies, Brazil, Africa, America, or the South Seas, granting him and his patrons whatever he should take, reserving to the crown one-fifth part of all treasure, jewels, and pearls’ (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1591–4, p. 376).
The account of the early part of the voyage, afterwards written by Hawkyns himself, is interesting from the intelligent descriptions of sea life and of the places at which the ships touched. They lost many men by scurvy; the Dainty was nearly burnt by accident; and about the end of October, having a very large number of sick, they put into Santos in Brazil. Here they were able to purchase oranges, lemons, and a few fowls; but the governor ordered them to depart within three days, nor would he permit them to trade or ‘to take any refreshing upon the shore.’ So they put to sea, though short of water, having, it appears, none except what they distilled; a process for which they had a proper apparatus (Markham, p. 164), though it afterwards went completely out of use, presumably on account of the difficulty of carrying sufficient fuel. On 5 Nov. they anchored between the Santa Anna Islands, to the north of Cape Frio. There they put the sick on shore, and refreshed them with sea-fowl and such fruits as the islands afforded (ib. p. 168 n.) Afterwards they watered at Isla Grande, to the west of Rio Janeiro; and on 18 Dec. shaped their course for the Straits of Magellan. At Santa Anna they had emptied out and burnt the victualler; off the mouth of the River Plate the pinnace deserted and made her way home again. The Dainty thus came alone to the Straits; passed through, not without danger; and on 19 April 1594 anchored at the island of Mocha, where fresh provisions were procured. ‘I have not tasted better mutton anywhere,’ Hawkyns noted. And so on to Valparaiso, where they plundered the town and ransomed the ships in the bay; thence going north, making a few prizes, they anchored on 18 June in the bay of San Mateo, where on the 19th they were found by two large Spanish ships, well armed and commanded by Don Beltran de Castro, brother-in-law of the viceroy, who had fitted them out expressly to look for and capture or destroy these English pirates.
The crew of the Dainty had been reduced by deaths to about seventy-five; the Spaniards are said to have numbered ten times as many (ib. p. 271), which is probable enough. Another estimate, making them ‘thirteen hundred men and boyes’ (ib. p. 278), may be pronounced a gross exaggeration (cf. Duro, La Armada Invencible, ii. 194). The Dainty was stoutly defended, and she might possibly have beaten off her assailants and made good her escape, but for the extreme carelessness with which she had been prepared for action. Hawkyns had left all the supervision as well as the preparation to the gunner, in whom he had perfect confidence, but who, in the hour of need, proved ignorant and incapable. There were no cartridges, much of the ammunition had been spoiled by damp, few of the guns were clear when they were wanted, and some of them had been loaded with the powder on top of the shot (Markham, p. 273). Hawkyns's own account of the action tells of such gross neglect and mismanagement, as to give rise to a suspicion that, whatever the gunner's faults, Hawkyns was not the ‘complete seaman’ and skilful commander that he would wish his readers to suppose. Of his stubborn courage, however, there is no doubt. The fight lasted through three days, till Hawkyns was carried below severely wounded. The ship was then almost knocked to pieces, with fourteen shot under water, seven or eight feet of water in the hold, and the pumps smashed; many of the men killed, many more wounded, and the rest mad drunk (ib. p. 302). Hawkyns therefore surrendered on capitulation, Don Beltran solemnly pledging himself ‘that he would give us our lives with good entreaty, and send us as speedily as he could into our own country.’ But at Lima the prisoners were claimed by the Inquisition; and, though the viceroy refused to give them up on the ground of having no instructions, they suffered much annoyance. In 1597 Hawkyns was sent to Spain in a galeon which was chased by the fleet under Essex into the roadstead of Terceira (ib. p. 304). She afterwards pursued her voyage and arrived at Seville. There, regardless of the capitulation, Hawkyns was thrown into prison. In September 1598 he escaped, but was recaptured and thrust into a dungeon. In 1599 he was removed to Madrid, and so kept, notwithstanding his own letters to the queen or the English ambassador at Paris, and the remonstrances of Don Beltran, who was indignant at the violation of his plighted faith. On 30 June 1602 Hawkyns wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, complaining that his ‘mother-in-law, Lady Hawkyns,’ would not pay the 3,000l. which had been allotted by his father's will for his ransom (Cal. State Papers, Dom.) Cecil probably interfered; at any rate, Hawkyns was released, though mainly, it was said, in consequence of the representations of the Count Miranda, the president of the council, ​who urged that formal promises made by the king's officers must be kept (Camden, Annales, iii. 683).
Notwithstanding his sufferings and losses, Hawkyns on his return home seems to have been still a wealthy and energetic man. He was knighted on 23 July 1603; was member of parliament for Plymouth in 1604, and vice-admiral of Devon, a title which at that time was far from honorary. The coast was swarming with pirates, and the vice-admiral's duties were real and multifarious, and occasionally brought him into antagonism with his neighbours (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1603–10, pp. 207, 437, 457; Hist. MSS. Comm. 9th Rep. App. 269 a). In June 1604 he memorialised the commissioners for the peace, setting forth the losses which his father and he had sustained from the Spaniards, and begging that ‘either a clause of satisfaction from the king of Spain unto me may be inserted in the articles of peace, or that I may not be concluded by them, but left free to seek my remedy according as the law of God and nations alloweth.’ The claims were absurd, including one for 100,000l. taken by treachery in time of peace from his father at San Juan de Lua, of which only a small portion belonged to John Hawkyns, even if the claim for compensation had been otherwise admissible. In 1614, when the governors of the East India Company were considering a proposal, which proved abortive, to send a ship through the Straits of Magellan into the South Sea, Hawkyns was named as a suitable commander, and expressed his willingness to undertake the voyage, either as an officer of the company or as a joint adventurer (Cal. State Papers, East Indies, 1513–1616, Nos. 706, 711, 744). In 1617 he was again an unsuccessful candidate for the command of the company's fleet (ib. 1617–21, Nos. 143, 159, 205) [see Best, Thomas; and Dale, Sir Thomas]. In 1620–1 Hawkyns was vice-admiral, under Sir Robert Mansell [q. v.], of the fleet sent into the Mediterranean to reduce the Algerine corsairs, and must share the blame which attaches to the miserable failure (Monson, in Churchill's Voyages, iii. 227; Lediard, Naval History, p. 459; Gardiner, Hist. of England, iv. 224). The vexation may possibly have acted unfavourably on his health. In his will, executed on 16 April 1622, he describes himself as ‘sick and weak in body but of perfect mind and memory.’ The next day (17 April) he was seized with a fit while attending the privy council on business connected with his late command, and died, as we are led to suppose, actually in the council chamber (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 17 April). By his wife Judith, who survived till 1629, he had issue, besides four daughters, two sons, John and Richard, from both of whom Mr. C. Stuart Hawkins of Hayford Hall, near Plymouth, claims descent.
Hawkyns had perhaps a higher repute than his actual services warranted, not only as his father's son, but chiefly on account of his ‘Observations in his Voiage into the South Sea, Anno Domini 1593’ (8vo, 1622). This was in the press at the time of his death, and was published shortly afterwards. it is a work of great interest, describing what he saw and the details of nautical life. It is full, too, of historical instances; but on these, as well as on the details of his voyage, it would be unsafe to rely. He wrote from memory, after the lapse of thirty years, and makes extraordinary blunders. His account of his father firing on the Spanish admiral in Catwater in 1567 (Markham, p. 118) has passed into current history, but is altogether fictitious. Of like character is his account of the launch and the naming of the Dainty by his step-mother, or, as he calls her, his mother-in-law (ib. p. 90); whereas a comparison of the dates shows that the Dainty was launched and in active service, as the Dainty, more than two years before his own mother's death [see Hawkins, Sir John, (1532–1595)]. Many similar instances of misstatement might be adduced.
No known portrait of Sir Richard Hawkyns is in existence. The picture of which a reproduction is given by Miss Hawkins in her ‘Plymouth Armada Heroes’ (p. 115) may possibly be one, but, on the evidence which she brings forward (p. 137; cf. Markham, p. xxi), cannot be accepted with certainty.
[Hawkyns's Observations, &c., contain most of the biographical information we have, down to 1594. The work, originally published in 1622, was included in an abridged form in Purchas, his Pilgrimes (iv. 1367), was edited for the Hakluyt Society in 1848 by Captain Drinkwater Bethune (cf. Froude's Short Studies, &c., i. 451), and again in 1878 (The Hawkins's Voyages) by C. R. Markham, whose biographical introduction leaves little to be gleaned elsewhere; Cal. State Papers, 1590–1622; Miss Hawkins's Plymouth Armada Heroes.]
J. K. L.