Episode 65 – The Magic Pirate – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 65 Show Notes

Source: English Folklore

This week on MYTH, we’re going to dive into the weird world of history for a strange local legend. You’ll learn if England’s favorite pirate was also a witch, if you can stop a wedding with a cannonball, and if you can save the country with a drum. Then, in a listener-suggested Gods and Monsters, you’ll meet an old vampire…rabbit? This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 65, “The Magic Pirate”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
Today’s story centers around Sir Francis Drake, and if you’re a student of English history, you definitely already know that name. Born in 1540, Drake was a famous sea captain, privateer, slave trader, pirate, and explorer during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In 1580, he completed the second successful circumnavigation of the globe, and the first where the captain survived to lead the voyage the entire way. He was a hated villain and pirate to the Spanish, whose ships he preyed on, but a hero to the English, especially after his defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Given all of this, it’s no surprise that a number of legends have grown up around the man.
His enemies accused him of witchcraft, claiming that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his prowess at sea. They claimed he worked with witches to raise storms against the Spanish Armada, and that the ghost of those witches still haunt Devil’s Point, which overlooks the entrance to Devenport. Stories have also grown up around Sir Francis Drake’s drum, which he carried with him on his trip around the world. After finally losing to the Spanish off the coast of Panama in 1596, Drake gave orders from his death bed that the snare drum, emblazoned with his coat of arms, be sent back to England. He swore that if, in times of great trouble, the people were to beat his drum, Drake would return from beyond the grave to save England.
There are several stories where people have claimed to hear the drum beating of its own accord, often in times of national victory: when the Mayflower left for Plymouth in America in 1620, when Admiral Lord Nelson was made a freeman of Plymouth in England, when Napoleon Bonaparte was brought into Plymouth Harbor as a prisoner, and in 1918 when the Imperial German Navy surrendered (the HMS Royal Oak was searched twice, but neither drum nor drummer could be found, and the incident was officially attributed to the legendary drum). It has also been known to sound in times of great danger, most recently in 1914 when World War I began. Legend also says that, if Drake’s Drum is ever removed from its rightful home in Buckland Abbey, the city will fall. During World War II, Buckland abbey was partially destroyed in a fire, and the drum was moved to Buckfast Abbey for safe-keeping. Plymouth was devastated by the air raids that soon followed, and so the drum was quickly returned to the damaged abbey, which kept the city safe for the rest of the war. Most recently, the drum was supposedly heard during the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940.
Perhaps the most bizarre story attached to Sir Francis Drake is the one known as Drake’s Cannonball and, like all of the best legends, is heavily steeped in verifiable history. The version of the story I’ll be using comes from The Book of English Folk Tales, collected by Sybil Marshall.
The Drake family has always had dark stories attached to it. There is a tale that, long before Sir Francis was even a twinkle in his daddy’s eye, there was a wicked Drake whose name has been lost to history. He was wicked enough that the local populace told him to fuck off, and banished him from the country forever. He was never to set foot in England again, but he never stopped longing for his distant home. He died far from home on a distant shore, but his ghost was held to this earth by his homesickness. It began the long, torturous walk from wherever he had died to the distant shores of England, wading through the sunless depths of the sea to get there.
As the ghost drew near to its ancestral home of Ash in Devon County, it began to manifest to the local populace. The locals didn’t much care for the ghost of that asshole any more than they’d cared for the asshole himself, so they called a priest to kick him the fuck back out of England. The priest came with bell, book, and candle, and the ghost was driven from England once more. Undeterred, the ghost simply began walking again, and when it again began to manifest, it was again exorcised with extreme prejudice. This continued time and time again until the ancestral home was burnt and demolished during the English Civil War in the mid 1600s.
Sir Francis Drake claimed Ash and the ancestral name, but the Drake family rejected his claim, saying that he was too lowborn to be worthy. A fight famously broke out in the court of Elizabeth I when Admiral Sir Francis Drake made his claim to the coat of arms in person to Admiral Sir Bernard Drake, who disagreed. Strenuously. With his fists.
And that matters, because at the time our story unfolds, Drake has only just been knighted for his piracy against the Spanish, his foray into the slave trade (the first Englishman to do so), and most importantly, his circumnavigation of the globe, and had already been married and become a widower. He was a famous bad boy of his day, just a step up from being a pirate himself (mostly because he raided the Spanish instead of the English). He was famous and powerful enough to have caught the eye of Elizabeth Sydenham, the only child of the Sheriff of Somerset, a powerful appointed position. Although she was being courted by men of higher rank and greater wealth than Drake, the dashing rogue had stolen her heart and they were soon engaged to be married.
Before they could be married however, Drake embarked on a long and dangerous expedition to Portugal. Legend has it that he left to seek a treasure worthy of his bride. They would be wed as soon as he returned, they vowed, and Drake set sail. Life on the high seas was exceptionally dangerous at this time (Drake had nearly been killed numerous times already on his voyages) and communication was impossible.
Days turned into weeks, into months, into years (although since his first wife had died in 1583, this part of the story is likely exaggerated). Sir Francis Drake did not return, and no word reached Devon or his bride to be of his whereabouts. Elizabeth began to despair that her betrothed was ever going to come back to her. She became depressed and bitter. Was Drake dead, rotting in a desolate stretch of sea somewhere? Had he fallen victim to the wiles of some foreign temptress, all smouldering eyes and a lack of British decorum? Why should she waste her youth and beauty languishing here, alone and forgotten? Many men had courted her and, although she was betrothed, there was no ring on her finger yet, and many of those men had come sniffing around again. If he wasn’t going to remain faithful to his vow, why should she retire to a nunnery to wait for a man who was never coming home?
So went Elizabeth’s thinking, and she thus soon convinced herself that she had every right to break off her betrothal and find a new man to marry instead. She forgot her lost sailor lover and began a new courtship with all of the handsome, rich young men who had been vying for her attentions before, and with each new day, she forgot Drake a little more. One day, she had forgotten him enough to promise her hand in marriage to a new man, a son of the Wyndham family.
A wedding day was picked and planning was begun for the festivities. Before the big day, the bride’s family threw an engagement celebration. It was a massive party, and all of the friends and relatives of the bride and groom showed up to drink, dance, and be merry. Hours passed; the people danced their asses off and the wine and ale flowed freely. The musicians dripped with sweat from the exertion of playing so hard for so long (and the heat of so many bodies in one room, closed with a massive oak door, didn’t help matters).
Late in the evening, there was a brief lull as one dance ended and the musicians readied themselves for a new song. Before they could start back up however, there was a scraping at the solid oak door to the great hall. The unexpected sound drew everyone’s eyes and as they watched, the great iron latch turned and the door swung open to reveal…no one. There was no one at all in the doorframe. The huge, heavy door had opened entirely of its own accord and with no mortal help.
Everyone stared in stunned silence at this impossible emptiness, and suddenly it wasn’t empty any longer but again, not with any human figure. A blurred shape screamed out of the sky and exploded into the earth just outside the door, bouncing gently out of the crater of its own impact and rolling ominously into the hall. It rolled down the entire length of the great hall, between the feet of all of the assembled dancers, and rolled to a stop at the feet of the trembling bride-to-be. She couldn’t drag her eyes away from the thing sitting at her feet – a cannonball, although there was no logical reason for it to be here. It was impossible. They weren’t anywhere near the sea.
Elizabeth shuddered in fear. She knew that this was an omen, and a fucking bad one at that. Her fiance, on the other hand, laughed at this absurd practical joke from (he assumed) one of his friends. Shaking his head at this odd joke, he stooped to pick it up one-handed and toss it out of the hall so that the dancing could resume.
Only he couldn’t. He strained and heaved with all of his might, but the little iron ball wouldn’t budge. He glanced around, ashamed at looking so weak in front of everyone here, and used both hands. It still wouldn’t budge. Smiling at his friend’s failure (he was going to give him shit about this for the rest of his life), one of the closer men stepped up to help the groom-to-be out. His smile faded as he too found that he couldn’t move the damned thing so much as an inch. They’d all seen it roll over here, but now it seemed fixed to the earth itself at the feet of Elizabeth Sydenham.
Puzzled and shaken, more of the assembled men tried to pick the cursed thing up, but it resisted each and every one of them, refusing to move, to even wobble. A group gathered to try and lift together, and they shooed the bride back to give them room. She took a few faltering steps towards the back of the hall, and the cannonball rolled all on its own to keep pace with her, stopping at her toes when she finally backed herself against the wall and could flee no farther.
Everyone assembled could now see that this was clearly an omen. Elizabeth knew that it had been sent to remind her of the promise she had made to Sir Francis Drake and to warn her of worse to come should she try to go through with this new marriage and shatter her promise once and for all. Her lost sailor had remained faithful to her, said the silent cannonball, and was coming back for her as he had promised he would. Elizabeth raced out of the hall, cast off her finery, and gave back the ring to her now-former fiance. He begged her to reconsider, but she knew that marrying him would be a mistake (and maybe she still had some affection for Sir Francis Drake, although fear seems to be the prevalent emotion).
A few days later, Sir Francis Drake rode back into town to claim Elizabeth as his wife. He came with the treasure he had set out to find, and the two were soon wed. He claimed no knowledge of the mysterious cannonball, and given that he had ridden here as soon as he landed, the cannonball had to have landed on the same day as he himself did, so there’s no possible way he dropped it there himself. Unless he really was a witch, though some versions claim he fired the cannonball from thousands of miles away and somehow made a perfect shot.
Now as I mentioned earlier, this story has some very strong historical roots. Sir Francis Drake was very much a real person, and Elizabeth Sydenham really was his second wife. He couldn’t really have been gone for years while she waited and pined for him since, as I said earlier, his wife of 12 years had only died in 1583 (though some sources say she died in 1581, so maybe Elizabeth did wait that long). Drake really did leave before their marriage for a perilous expedition, and everyone really did decide that he must have perished at sea. It was not Elizabeth but her father who decided that she should remarry however, and arranged her new betrothal.
More incredibly, Drake’s Cannonball appears to be real as well. Tradition holds that a meteorite crashed through the roof of the Church of St Mary at Stogumber on the day of the wedding, which was understandably seen as a bad omen (though more of a warning from God omen than a witchcraft-wielding pirate kind). It turned out that Drake had landed back in Plymouth that very day. The 14” diameter iron meteorite has been kept at Combe Sydenham Hall, ancient seat of the Sydenham family, and is on display to this day at the old house. So if you ever find yourself in Devon, consider taking a trip to see the rock that stopped one marriage and saved another. And so, with everyone married to the person that a lump of iron wants them to, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s monster is the Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle.
The Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle, which is a listener suggestion from Ross, is a more-than century old carving perched above the rear door of the historic Cathedral Buildings facing the rear door of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Newcastle upon Tyne. Even better, no one is really sure why the snarling blood-sucker, black as the night and red in tooth and claw (quite literally in this case) is there. The rabbit is a grotesque (similar to the more popular gargoyle, except that a grotesque is purely decorative while a gargoyle has a spout to carry water away from a building) and as far as we can tell, is an original feature of the building.
Local legend has it that, back at the turn of the 20th Century, grave robbing was a real problem in Newcastle. It was (and to some extent, still is) a problem in major graveyards. Since people are often buried with favorite personal effects and jewelry, corpses have been dug up since people first start burying their dead in order to steal their finery. In the early days of medicine, bodies would also be dug up to sell to desperate medical students and doctors to practice on. The story goes that a rash of such robberies had plagued the town until, one night, the robbers were out in the churchyard in the dead of night (the ideal time to skulk around in a graveyard and get up to illegal shenanigans) when the figure of the fanged rabbit rose out of the night to perch above the door, leering at the graveyard and scaring away the grave robbers.
The more accepted theory is that the little rabbit was intended to be a hare, but the builders put the ears on backwards, although the ears were actually shorter and more rabbit-like until the late 1980s, when the ears were supposedly damaged during renovations and replaced. That’s likely also when the rabbit got its black fur and red fangs and claws, since the rabbit used to be the same sandy color as the building it guards.
So why a vampire rabbit? There’s basically no precedent for using a rabbit as a grotesque, and certainly not one with huge Bunnicula fangs. We’ve seen a few stories of clever bunnies across the world, but they don’t intersect with vampire lore, or with churches. It’s possible that the Bunnicula wannabe was a nod to engraver Thomas Bewick, whose workshop was nearby and whose work often featured rabbits and hares, but given how unnatural the strange bunny looks, it’s a very tenuous connection, and there aren’t a lot of stories in English folklore about bunnies.
Hares are another story. They pop up in local folklore in a number of places. Across the island, superstition holds that a fire is about to burn your ass if you see a hare running through the village (which might have some basis in fact, since a wildfire is one of the few things that would drive a wild hare to enter a crowded village during the day). Folklore in Cornwall claims that seeing a white hare means that a big, nasty storm is bearing down on the coast. On the more creepy side of things, it was a common belief that witches would often take the form of a hare to attend their midnight black sabbaths, so seeing one at night would make people very uneasy. That gets us closer to a vampire rabbit, but not all the way there.
It’s also been theorized that the hare was added as a tribute slash gentle mocking of local doctor and Freemason Sir George Hare Phipson, who happened to be friends with the architect. This, I think, is probably the truth. Doctors have historically been called ghouls and vampires, given their tendency to practice on corpses and draw lots of blood, so it’s not hard to see how a guy wanting to poke his friend’s ego could get from his name and profession (Dr. Hare) and come up with a vampire rabbit, especially since the decoration is on the back of the building (and the front is not nearly as grandly decorated, with no grotesques at all, so the rabbit feels very intentional). Even more telling, the hare is an important symbol in the Masonic system, used to represent the Egyptian goddess Osiris and to indicate ‘moral illumination’, although her original function was a god of the dead (and of fertility in the pre-Dynastic period), which gives us another link to both rabbits and the undead. So the next time you find yourself in Newcastle, take a trip to visit the Vampire Rabbit (and maybe bring him a carrot to suck the juice out of – he looks hungry).
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, we’ll travel into the distant past for a listener suggestion special. You’ll discover the connection between sea water and semen (and yes I mean the naughty kind), that even foxes sometimes need a glow up, and that you should never have sex in a marsh. Then, in Gods and Monsters, we’ll unravel the conspiracy behind the mysterious Planet X and the true identities of the ancient gods. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.