Biography
Walter Bigges (?-1586) was an English captain of land forces who died in the course of the expedition that Francis Drake led against the Spanish possessions in America in 1585 and 1586. His name remains attached to the principal printed account of that campaign, A Summarie and True Discourse of Sir Frances Drakes West Indian Voyage, of which he wrote the first part before a companion finished the text. Of the man himself almost nothing is known: neither the year nor the place of his birth is established, and his life before he embarked escapes the commonly accessible sources.
What is known of him therefore comes from the book. The list of officers placed at the head of the account ranks him, under the spelling "Walter Bigs", among the ten captains of the landing companies, placed under the authority of the lieutenant general Christopher Carleill. A nineteenth-century editor specifies that he commanded a company of musketeers, a detail the original text does not give. The fleet, twenty-five ships and pinnaces strong with about two thousand three hundred soldiers and sailors, embarked at Plymouth on 12 September 1585. Bigges thus took part, as witness and as officer, in the operations against Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands, Santo Domingo and Cartagena.
He did not see England again. The dedication of the English edition states that he died during the voyage, after the fleet had left Cartagena, that is to say in the spring of 1586; the exact day is not known. The list of the dead that closes the account names "Captaine Bigges" among the officers lost, out of a total of about seven hundred and fifty men lost, most of them to sickness. Editorial tradition counts him among the victims of the fever that had been ravaging the crews since Cape Verde, although the text does not say so expressly.
The question of authorship is raised by the book itself. The signatory of the dedication to the Earl of Essex, named Thomas Cates or Thomas Gates depending on the copy, declares that he recovered a copy of the account begun by Captain Bigges and afterwards finished, "as I thinke", by his lieutenant, Master Croftes, or by someone else. The attribution of the end of the text to Croftes thus rests on a supposition of the editor, and the exact share of each hand cannot be marked out with certainty. This is why library catalogues present Bigges as the author of a work completed by another.
The account circulated first outside England. A slightly abridged Latin version, Expeditio Francisci Draki equitis Angli in Indias Occidentales, appeared at Leiden from Raphelengius in 1588, accompanied by the town plans of Baptista Boazio, and a French translation, Le Voyage de messire François Drake chevalier, aux Indes occidentales, came from the same press in the same year. The English text, entered in the Stationers' Register in London on 26 November 1588, was printed in 1589, notably by Richard Field and by Roger Ward. In 1981 Mary Frear Keeler brought together the account and the other documents of the campaign in Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage, 1585-86, published by the Hakluyt Society. Bigges thus remains an author without a biography, known through a few lines of a book he did not see published.
