In June 1594, a year out of Plymouth, Richard Hawkins sailed his galleon the Dainty into the Bay of San Mateo on the coast of what is now Ecuador, carrying plunder taken from the Spanish colonial town of Valparaiso. Two Spanish warships were waiting. What followed was not the kind of battle that made the reputation of English seamen in the Elizabethan age. Hawkins was outgunned, the Dainty was battered until it was nearly sinking, 27 of his men were dead, and he himself was severely wounded when, on 1 July 1594, he surrendered on a promise of safe conduct home. The promise was not honored. Hawkins spent the next eight years in Spanish prisons. He used part of that time to write, and what he wrote became one of the most-read accounts of the English war at sea.
Richard Hawkins was born about 1562, the son of Admiral Sir John Hawkins - the slave trader, naval officer, and architect of Elizabeth I's fighting fleet. John Hawkins's early career trading enslaved Africans across the Atlantic is a part of his legacy that modern assessments cannot and should not elide. Richard grew up in that family on the water. By 1582 he was sailing with his uncle William Hawkins to the West Indies. In 1585 he captained a galliot in Francis Drake's expedition to the Spanish Main. In 1588, as Spain's Armada bore down on England, he commanded a queen's ship against it. In 1590 he sailed with his father's expedition off Portugal. By the time he bought the galleon Dainty in 1593, Hawkins was a seasoned officer in his early thirties, heir to an entire network of English naval and privateering interests - and, like most of that network, unable to resist the opportunities of a long war with Spain.
Hawkins set out in 1593 nominally on a voyage of discovery. In practice, as he more or less admitted afterward, his project was to prey on Spain's overseas possessions. After a difficult passage down the Atlantic, a storm blew the Dainty eastward off the mouth of the Strait of Magellan. On 2 February 1594 he sighted land he named Hawkins Maiden land in honor of Queen Elizabeth - now known as the Falkland Islands. Working back to the mainland, he passed through the Strait of Magellan and made his way up the Pacific coast of South America to the Spanish town of Valparaiso, which he plundered. He then pressed north, apparently expecting to slip past Spanish patrols. By June, he had reached the Bay of San Mateo at the mouth of the Esmeraldas River. Spanish authorities had had time to prepare. The two warships that intercepted him ended the voyage.
Hawkins had surrendered on a promise of safe conduct, but through no fault of the Spanish commander on scene, the promise did not hold in the wider imperial system. In 1597 he was transferred to Spain, held first in Seville and then in Madrid. Treatment of high-status prisoners in that era could be grim or surprisingly humane depending on political circumstances. In Hawkins's case the captivity was long - he was not released until 1602 - but productive in at least one sense: he had time to think and write. In 1603 he returned to England, was knighted, and was elected Mayor of Plymouth the same year. The following year he became the town's Member of Parliament and Vice-Admiral of Devon. The coast of Devon was then crawling with pirates - England's former privateers, deprived of legal targets after the 1603 prohibition of privateering, turning to less legal prey. Hawkins spent much of his remaining career trying to police them.
His memoir, Voiage into the South Sea, was published in 1622, the year he died. It became one of the most famous adventure narratives of the Elizabethan era and was republished by the Hakluyt Society in 1847 and adapted by Charles Kingsley in the 1855 novel Westward Ho! Hawkins wrote with generous respect for Spanish colonists he had encountered as adversaries and later as captors, describing them as temperate and gentle - a striking contrast to the anti-Spanish polemics then common in English print. Embedded in the book is a less celebrated but important observation: Hawkins recommended sour oranges and lemons for treating scurvy, which he had watched devastate his own crews. He wrote of the wonderful secret of the power and wisdome of God in the fruit. Scottish naval surgeon James Lind is usually credited with proving the link in 1753, a century and a half later. Hawkins had already been convinced, from the experience of keeping sailors alive on long voyages. He died in London on 17 April 1622, having served as vice-admiral under Sir Robert Mansell in the 1620-1621 expedition against the Algerian corsairs - the English word pirate attaching to both sides of that war depending on where a writer was sitting.
The key location in Hawkins's South American campaign is the Bay of San Mateo at the mouth of the Esmeraldas River, roughly 1.02N, 79.61W on the Ecuadorian coast. The nearest airport is Esmeraldas (SETN). Recommended viewing altitude over the bay is 3,000-5,000 feet AGL; the area is often hazy in the afternoon, with cleaner visibility in the morning. The river mouth is visible as a distinct break in the coastal mangrove line.