In their circumnavigation of the globe—also known as their “Raiding Expedition”—Francis Drake, along with his crew, encountered diverse soundscapes; they also altered the soundscapes of lands they visited through their distinctly English sonic presence.^[1] These transcultural sonic exchanges, among many other activities, were recorded by the priest Francis Fletcher, who accompanied Drake on the voyage. Drake’s nephew, also named Francis Drake, published an account of his uncle’s voyage as The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (London: Nicholas Bourne, 1628) using Fletcher’s notes and his uncle’s journal as sources. Several other versions of Drake’s circumnavigation were published, including Francis Drake Revived (London, 1653), and an abridged version in Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (London, 1598–1600).^[2] These texts all include anecdotes featuring the production of English sounds in foreign spaces as well as the English travellers’ perceptions of sounds from around the globe. While these narratives contain all of the standard hallmarks of Anglo sonic encounters with otherness—fear, conquest, conversion—the various sounds of “Otherness” catalogued in these accounts are not unequivocally vilified or dismissed as primitive, but were sometimes experienced as delightful and pleasing to English travellers transformed by new sonic environments. In his circumnavigation of the globe, Drake “took four viol players with him on the voyage,” evidence of his being “fond of music,” and throughout his journey, soundscapes and music played an important role in the narrative—both how sound could be marshalled to benefit the English travellers, but also how the sounds and music of different cultures impacted and transformed him.^[3] This brief essay will take a short acoustic survey of Drake’s journey, detouring to a few ports-of-call in the West before concluding with Drake’s remarkable experience of the gamelan in early modern Java.

“Francis Drake’s journey 1577-1580, by unknown c1590,” available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Francis_Drake%27s_journey_1577-1580,_by_unknown_c1590.jpg

Although sight is the sense most frequently invoked and studied in moments of cultural contact, I argue that sound plays a crucially important role in these instances: where sight distances a viewer from other people and objects, sound can actually function as an energy field uniting bodies and other matter present at a sonic event.^[4] Even early moderns conceptualized sound as a deeply impactful force, able to reach “into the centre of the heart” as Richard Braithwaite suggests.^[5] Sound, simultaneously both internal and external to a body, can create passionate responses in listeners, and the travel narrative archive is filled with descriptions of these responses to sound, which run the gamut from “delight,” “rapture,” and “marvelous” to “horror” and “fear.” “Sounding otherness,” as I term these kinds of moments of cultural contact, is a phrase with multiple valences of both words implied, and particularly germane to the discussion at this point is how “sounding” can mean both the production of sound, but also suggests testing or feeling out hidden depths (as in a “sounding” or “plumb” line of the kind used on ships like those employed in Drake’s journey). This sense of the word “sounding” indicates the way that sounds from other cultures could produce feelings of connection, surprise, and delight, but they could also provoke fear in those unfamiliar with the sounds they were hearing. In the early modern English-language travel narrative archive, English colonisers repeatedly describe their fear and/or horror at hearing sounds of otherness that are unfamiliar, and thus, frightening to them (consult, for example, John Smith’s writings about his travels to the so-called “New World,” in which every foreign sound he hears is “horrible”). Almost equally as often, these same travellers describe how their production of loud sounds of drums, trumpets, and cannon fire provokes fear in other peoples—an outsourcing of their fear-based emotional responses, to say the least.

As far back as Plato, thinkers have observed that sound can be employed as a colonising force; more recently, Michel Serres, Suzanne Cusick, and Steve Goodman have discussed this phenomenon.^[6] For example, Serres equates the word noise (generally defined as un-ordered sounds) to an inescapable nausea, while Cusick writes about the ways that loud music and certain frequencies have been weaponised to create nausea, disorientation, and other illness in wartime conflicts.^[7] Goodman describes this process: “A vibratory nexus exceeds and precedes the distinction between subject and object, constituting a mesh of relation in which discrete entities prehend each other’s vibrations” and “in which a body becomes merely another actual entity in a vibrational event, assuming not necessarily any more significance than the resonance between other entities within this nexus.”^[8] The danger for a traveller in an unfamiliar land is that one can lose themselves within this vibrational, sonic forcefield.

Drake, like other European travellers, took measures to ensure that his English sound would dominate the soundscapes along his journey—or, at least, that seems to have been his plan. “Two Drums,” one of them possibly Drake’s famous drum, “and two Trumpets,” all loud instruments that served this colonising purpose, appear on an inventory of items brought on Drake’s journey.^[9] Fletcher recounts that these instruments were used for what has come to be called “sonic warfare” when the English captured the Isle of Pinos, now part of modern-day Cuba: “The Inhabitants stood amazed … by reason of our Drums and Trumpets sounding in so sundry places, that we had beene a farre greater number then we were,” the resonance of these unfamiliar instruments giving the English an unfair advantage.^[10]

Drake’s drum. Image credit: https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/viking-ghosts-still-haunt-bloody-2286420

The tables are later turned, however, when the English find themselves enmeshed in an unfamiliar bellicose soundscape in Mexico: “As soone as they discerned by hearing that we marched onward, they all rusht forwards one after another, … with their Arrowes ready in their Bowes, and their manner of Countrey Dance or Leape, very lustily, singing Yó pehó, Yó pehó, and so got before us, where they continued their Leape and Song, after the manner of their owne Countrey Warres.”^[11] Note that the native peoples are described as using their keen “hearing” to trace English movements and that Fletcher offers a phonetic transliteration of the Indigenous war-song, perhaps a method to control foreign sound by attempting to inscribe it.^[12]

Cross-cultural sonic encounters continue as Drake ventures from the Occidental to the Oriental hemisphere. While unfamiliar sounds could induce fright, at several points Fletcher emphasises other cultures’ enjoyment of English sounds, as he does with the “King” of Ternate. Writes Fletcher, “our Ordnance thundred, which we mixed with great store of small shot, among which sounding our trumpets and other instruments of musick, both of still and loud noise, wherwith he was so much delighted, …. The King being thus in musicall paradise, and enjoying that wherewith he was so highly pleased.”^[13] As suggested above, the crewmembers brought along viols for the journey, and they likely also took with them their own portable instruments, including other stringed instruments, recorders, and the especially popular Jew’s harps, to create such a “musicall paradise”; as I hope is apparent, these English-language accounts are mediated accounts and—at most—describe for us what the English travelers hoped to achieve by performing their music before members of other cultures, rather than providing an accurate account of other cultures’ audience response.^[14] It would behoove the English travellers to have Eastern potentates experience pleasure at their music—even if only at the reported discursive level—as England was still a relatively minor player on the international global stage at the time of Drake’s journey.

Fletcher notes that the inhabitants of “America” also supposedly enjoyed English music: at “prayers, singing of psalms, and reading of certain chapters in the Bible, they sate very attentively; and observing the end of every pause, with one voyce still cryed, oh, greatly rejoycing in our exercises. Yea they took such pleasure in our singing of psalms, that whensoever they reported to us, their final request was commonly this, Gnaah, by which they intreated that we should sing.”^[15] Indigenous “pleasure” is said to be evident by imploring the English to sing to them, and to sing Judeo-Christian psalms no less. But besides extolling the virtues of Psalm-singing, Fletcher provides a detailed description of a song and dance he witnesses, performed by the same people: “the Scepter-bearer with a composed countenance and stately carriage, began a song, and answerable thereunto, observed a kind of measures in a danc: whom the Ki[ng] with his guard, and every sort of person following, did in like manner sing and daunce, saving only the woman who danced but kept silence.” Fletcher relates that these songs were part of “supplications” to Drake so that “he would take the province and kingdome into his hand, and become their King and patron,” after which “the King himself with all the rest with one consent, and with a great reverence, joyfully singing a song, set the crown upon his head: enriched his neck with all their chains and offering unto him many other things honoured him by the name of Hyoh. Adding thereunto (as it might seem) a song and a daunce of tryumph: because they were not only visited of gods (for so they still judged us to be) but the great and chief god was now become their god, their king and patron, and themselves were become the only happy and blessed people in all the world.”^[16] This same episode is described nearly verbatim in Hakluyt’s Principall Voyages (1589).^[17] Decades later, John Smith would report a similar ceremony occurring in the Virginia woodlands.

Yet The World Encompassed concludes not with conquest, but with Drake’s delight at sounds of otherness. Toward the end of their circumnavigation in March of 1580, Drake and his men “presented the King” of Java and his “Raias” with English “musicke,” “wherin they tooke exceeding great delight with admiration”—again, according to the English people’s mediated account.^[18] Hakluyt’s version states that “The king was a man of tall stature, and seemed to be much delighted with the sound of our musicke.”^[19] In both instances, foreign Others are once again described as experiencing “delight” at hearing English sounds, suggestive of the musical expertise and abilities the English wished to present and to convey to readers back home.

However, immediately after the attribution of “exceeding great delight” and “admiration” to the Javanese upon hearing English music, both The World Encompassed and Drake Revived turn to another performance—one that is a calculated omission from Hakluyt’s imperialist tome—but is given as the final moment of transcultural encounter in Drake’s circumnavigation (the remainder of the narrative is a concise list of brief stops on their speedy return trip home to Plymouth). This last instance of intercultural musical exchange reads: “in requital of our musicke which was made to [Raia Donan, he] presented our Generall [Drake] with his Country musicke, which though it were of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull.”^[20] Critics suspect that this was a performance of Javanese gamelan, music that can still be heard today in Bali, and an example of which can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2937xfI_kKI.^[21] Gamelan is ensemble music that consists largely of percussion instruments (metallophones, i.e., hammered percussion instruments, as well as hand drums) and can include strings and sometimes even singers. The images below, from Michael Praetorius’s Syntagma Musicum II: De Organographia Theatrum Instrumentorum include among its “foreign” instruments some instruments that likely comprise the gamelan as Drake may have heard it, particularly numbers 6 in Plate XXIX and “Z” or 2 in Plate XXX.^[22] Robert Jourdain observes that “it would be three centuries before a European could comprehend gamelan music well enough to draw upon its ideas,” as this music with its unique system of tuning and timing was vastly more developed and sophisticated than any music produced by English ensembles or instruments.^[23] Jourdain also notes that there are many different tuning systems available and the slendro scale of Indonesian gamelan varies slightly among different ensembles: “These discrepancies are intentional, allowing every gamelan orchestra to bring a unique harmonic personality to the stage, much as an actor brings his unique style to Hamlet.”^[24]

Plates XXIX and XXX from Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum II: De Organographia Theatrum Musicum.

Whatever music the English travellers may have heard, the term “strange” connotes the foreign; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary definition of the word “strange” is not “unusual” or “bizarre,” but rather “Of persons, language, customs, etc.: Of or belonging to another country; foreign, alien” (1a). Thus, the “Country musicke” is described here unequivocally as foreign and non-English, sounds that are considered “alien” to those hearing them for the first time. And yet, this moment of intercultural sonic encounter is remarkable because the longer English-language accounts of Drake’s journey characterised this Javanese music as both “pleasant and delightfull”—a reversal of so many sonic encounters with foreign otherness that dismiss the music of other peoples as primitive, or sometimes as “noise” not worthy of the designation of “music” at all.^[25]

Although English travellers repeatedly ascribe pleasure to Others at hearing English sounds, the English experience of Javanese music as described in The World Encompassed reveals English pleasure at hearing sounds of Otherness. That this narrative account of Drake’s circumnavigation should culminate with rapture at the sounds of Javanese culture might give us pause—after all, Drake was a ruthless man, involved in the early English slave trade, rape, piracy, and execution of his own crewmembers; his unsavoury actions seem to be eclipsed by his achievement of circumnavigation and his resulting knighthood. Yet, closing the account of his circumnavigation with a sonic encounter in which Drake and the other travellers are enthralled—perhaps even “in thrall”—to the beauty of the music of another culture can also be considered as a testament to the power of this culture’s music. This episode is especially poignant since The World Encompassed and Drake Revived both conclude with this moment as the last instance of intercultural encounter. The “foreignness” of the Javanese music becomes eclipsed by the beauty of the music as the veil of difference or positionality between the two cultures is lifted and gamelan music enmeshes the English Drake in a delightful forcefield of Oriental sounds, moving his English body to tones and rhythms of Java. While accounts of Drake’s voyage present him and the English as occupying a superior position over the various cultures in which they come into contact, their experience of the “strange” Javanese music as “pleasant and delightfull” instead offers a fleeting instance in which the English were instead themselves overcome by Javanese otherness to the point that they were able to experience pleasure, rather than fear, at hearing sounds of foreign otherness.

Jennifer Linhart Wood is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University and is Managing Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive (Palgrave, 2019), which won the 2021 Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s David Bevington Award for Best New Book and was recognized as a finalist for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book award. Her scholarship is situated at the nexus of literature, performance, and music in the early modern period, and her work has been published in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Shakespeare Studies, The Shakespearean International Yearbook, and various edited collections. Her current book project examines aural cues for music and sound effects embedded in early modern dramatic texts. Jennifer is also a soprano, composer, and choral director, and she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2019 singing in Handel’s Messiah that year and each subsequent year The Messiah has been performed at Carnegie.

[1] While many celebrate Drake, it is important to note that his circumnavigation included raiding, piracy, and rape. Please see, e.g., Nikki Marmery, “Maria: The African Woman Who Sailed with Drake on the Golden Hind,” 15 March 2020, available at: https://www.historiamag.com/african-woman-sailed-on-the-golden-hind/.

[2] The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589). According to Anthony Payne, “Two alterations were made in the course of the printing and publication of this, the original edition of the Principall Navigations. At the last minute a narrative of Drake’s circumnavigation was printed on six unpaginated leaves for insertion between p. 643 and p. 644. Headed ‘The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake . . . ’, and usually referred to as the ‘Drake leaves’, this exists in the majority of surviving copies of the Principall Navigations.” Payne, “Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages (1582) and Principal Navigations (1589; 1598/9 to 1600) The Hakluyt Society, available at: https://www.hakluyt.com/richard-hakluyts-navigations/.

[3] Quotation from Ellen Castelow, “The Legend of Drake’s Drum,” Historic UK, 11 February 2020: https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Legend-Of-Drakes-Drum/.

[4] Jennifer Linhart Wood, Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibraitons in the English Archive (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). I discuss this phenomenon of calibration and the sonic uncanny at length in the introduction to this book.

[5] Richard Braitwaite, Essaies upon the five Senses (London, 1620), 6.

[6] Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010).

[7] Michel Serres, Genesis trans. Genevieve Jame sand James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Suzanne G. Cusick, “Music as torture / Music as weapon” TRANS 8 (2006), available at: https://www.academia.edu/333658/Music_As_Torture_Music_As_Weapon.

[8] Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 82, 46.

[9] Francis Drake Revived “Collected out of the Notes of the said Sir Francis Drake; Mastet [sic] Philip Nichols, Master Francis Fletcher, Preachers; and the Notes of divers other Gentlemen (who went in the said Voyages) carefully compared together.” (London, 1653) (page 8).

[10] Drake Revived, 10-11.

[11] Drake Revived, 63. This takes place at Venta Cruz.

[12] Michel de Certeau describes this process in relation to another traveler, Jean de Lery, in The Writing of History trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[13] Drake Revived, 88–89. “Still music” is probably quiet or soft music” of instruments like strings, while “loud noise” refers to the performance of instruments with a higher volume, like trumpets and drums. See, for example, Christopher R. Wilson and Michela Calore, Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 404 and 247.

[14] Jew’s Harps were so popular in early modern England that Christopher Marsh states that their tones “may well have been one of England’s most familiar musical sounds”; Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3. They have even been found at archaeological excavations in places like Jamestown, Virginia.

[15] Drake Revived, 63,72.

[16] Drake Revived, 76.

[17] Specifically, in “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, and there hence about the whole Globe of the Earth, begun in the yeere of our Lord, 1577,” sig. Mmm7v.

[18] Drake Revived, 106.

[19] Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiqves and Discoveries (London, 1599; STC 12626a), 739–40.

[20] Drake Revived, 107 and The World Encompassed, 107.

[21] I am grateful to Samera Hassan for sharing her experience of the gamelan in Bali with me. Writes Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 92, “To be sure, there had long been reports of this exotic harmony. As early as 1580, Sir Francis Drake, afloat off the coast of Java, had described in his ships log a king of music ‘which thou it were of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull.’”

[22] For a more comprehensive discussion of gamelan, consult Henry Spiller, Gamelan Music of Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2008).

[23] Jourdain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, 92.

[24] Jourdain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, 76–77.

[25] Although “noise” could certainly refer to even English music in contemporary early modern English parlance, travel writers are often at pains to differentiate the order and measure of English “music” from the disorderly, logos-resistance “noise” of other cultures that they heard and choose to repudiate.