Corvo Island > Ilha do Corvo Azores Portugal

Sir Humphrey Gilbert, moving southward with three ships, loses the largest of them on August 29 and two days later turns homeward.

He is last seen near the Azores during a great storm in the Atlantic, shouting to his companion vessel, “We are as near heaven by sea as by land.”

Gilbert's ship is then swallowed by the sea.

The Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373 remains in abeyance by virtue of the Iberian Union, and as the Anglo–Spanish War is still ongoing, Portuguese shipping is a fair target for the Royal Navy.

A six-member naval squadron is waiting in 1592 off the Azores to intercept Spanish shipping from the New World when a Portuguese fleet comes their way near Corvo Island.

The English force the Santa Cruz ashore, taking whatever goods the Portuguese had failed to retrieve from her burnt-out hull.

Under threat of torture, they also force her purser and two foreign gunners to reveal that further carracks are on their way.

One of these is Madre de Deus, a large carrack returning from the East Indies and headed for Lisbon.

Built in Lisbon in 1589, she is returning from her second voyage East.

She is one hundred and sixty-five feet in length, has forty-seven feet of beam, weighs sixteen hundred tons (of which nine hundred are cargo)—three times the size of England's biggest ship.

She has seven decks, thirty-two guns in addition to other arms, six hundred to seven hundred crew members, a gilded superstructure and a hold filled with treasure.

On August 15 or 19 (sources vary), the English take her after a fierce day-long battle near Flores Island in which many Portuguese sailors are killed; the decks are bloody and strewn with bodies when the English board, especially around the helm.

Still, their squadron commander, Sir John Burrough, spares Captain Fernão de Mendonça Furtado and the rest of the wounded, sending them ashore to the Azores.

Among the riches are chests filled with jewels and pearls, gold and silver coins, amber, rolls of the highest-quality cloth, fine tapestries, four hundred and twenty-five tons of pepper, forty-five tons of cloves, thirty-five tons of cinnamon, three tons of mace and three of nutmeg, two and a half tons of benjamin (a highly aromatic balsamic resin used for perfumes and medicines), twenty-five tons of cochineal, and fifteen tons of ebony.

The English crew had stuffed their pockets full of these goods before Burrough could take charge of the cargo.

There is also a document, printed at Macau in 1590, containing valuable information on the China and Japan trade; Hakluyt observes that it was "enclosed in a case of sweet Cedar wood, and lapped up almost an hundredfold in fine Calicut-cloth, as though it had been some incomparable jewel".