About Me
Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral, (c. 1540 – January 27, 1595) was an English privateer, navigator, slave trader, and politician of the Elizabethan era. Drake was knighted in 1581. He was second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He died of dysentery after unsuccessfully attacking San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1595.
His exploits were semi-legendary, making him a hero to the English but a simple pirate to the Spaniards. He was known as "El Draque" (from the old Spanish meaning "the Dragon" derived from the Latin draco, meaning 'serpent', an obvious play on his family name which in archaic English has the same etymological root) for his actions. King Philip II was claimed to have offered a reward of 20,000 ducats (about £4m or $8m by modern standards) for his life.
Francis Drake was born in the parish of Crowndale, a mile south of Tavistock, Devon, in February or March 1540. He was the eldest of the twelve sons of Edmund Drake (1518–1585), a Protestant farmer who later became a preacher, and his wife Mary Mylwaye.
During the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, the family was forced to flee to Kent. At about the age of thirteen, Francis took to the sea on a cargo barque, becoming master of the ship at the age of twenty. He spent his early career honing his sailing skills on the difficult waters of the North Sea, and after the death of the captain he became master of his own barque (A ship with more than three masts). At age twenty-three, Drake made his first voyage to the New World under the sails of the Hawkins family of Plymouth, in company with his second cousin, Sir John Hawkins.
Sir John Hawkins
In 1569 he was with the Hawkins fleet when it was trapped by the Spaniards in the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulua. He escaped along with Hawkins but the experience is said to have led him to his lifelong revenge against the Spanish.
Queen Elizabeth I
In 1577 Queen Elizabeth sent Drake to start an expedition against the Spanish along the Pacific coast of the Americas. He set out from Plymouth on the November 15, 1577, but bad weather threatened him and his fleet, who were forced to take refuge in Falmouth, Cornwall, from where they returned to Plymouth for repair. After this major setback, he set sail once again on December 13, aboard the Pelican, with four other ships and 164 men. He soon added a sixth ship, the Mary (formerly Santa Maria) which had been captured off the coast of Africa from the Spaniards. More importantly, he added its captain, Nuno de Silva, a man with considerable experience navigating in South American waters.
The Mary
Drake's fleet suffered great attrition; he scuttled both the Christopher and the flyboat Swan due to loss of men on the Atlantic crossing. At San Julian, Argentina, the Mary was found to be rotten and was burned. After the trial and execution of Thomas Doughty, Drake decided to remain the winter in San Julian before attempting the Straits of Magellan.
The three remaining ships of his convoy departed for the Magellan Strait, at the southern tip of South America. The strait is named after the Portuguese navigator who first circumnaviagated the world in 1521. This course established "Drake's Passage" but the route south of Tierra del Fuego around Cape Horn was not discovered until 1616. Drake crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Magellan Strait. After this passage a storm blew his ship so far south that he realised Tierra del Fuego was not part of a southern continent, as was believed. This voyage established Drake as the first Antarctic explorer, because the southernmost point of his voyage was at least 56 degrees according to astronomical data quoted in Hakluyt's "The Principall Navigators" of 1589. Until James Cook's voyage of 1773, this was the furthest south any seafaring explorer had ventured.
A few weeks later Drake made it to the Pacific, but violent storms destroyed one of the ships and caused another to return to England. He pushed onwards in his lone flagship, now renamed the Golden Hind in honour of Sir Christopher Hatton (after his coat of arms). The Golden Hind sailed north along the Pacific coast of South America, attacking Spanish ports and rifling towns. Some Spanish ships were captured, and Drake used their more accurate charts.
The Golden Hind today
In one of his most notable actions, Drake captured a Spanish ship, laden with riches from Peru, which held 25,000 pesos of pure gold, amounting in value to 37,000 ducats of Spanish money (about 7 million British pounds by modern standards). Near Lima, they also discovered news of a ship, the Cacafuego, sailing towards Panama. They gave chase and eventually captured her, which was their most profitable capture. They found 80lb of gold, a golden crucifix, jewels, 13 chests full of royals of plate and 26 tons of silver.
Spanish Galleon
On June 17, 1579, Drake landed somewhere north of Spain's northern-most claim at Point Loma. He found a good port, landed, repaired and restocked his vessels, then stayed for a time, keeping friendly relations with the natives. He claimed the land in the name of the Holy Trinity for the English Crown as called Nova Albion - Latin for "New Britain." Assertions that he left some of his men behind as an embryo "colony" are founded merely on the reduced number who were with him in the Moluccas.
His voyage to the west coast of North America is important for a number of reasons. When he landed, his chaplain held Holy Communion; this was one of the first Protestant church services in the New World (though French Huguenots had founded an ill-fated colony in Florida in the 1560s). Drake was seen to be gaining prestige at the expense of the Papacy.
What is certain of the extent of Drake's claim and territorial challenge to the Papacy and the Spanish crown is that his port was founded somewhere north of Point Loma; that all contemporary maps label all lands above the Kingdoms of New Spain and New Mexico as "Nova Albion", and that all colonial claims made from the East Coast in the 1600s were "From Sea to Sea". Maps made soon after would have "Nova Albion" written above the entire northern frontier of New Spain.
Drake now headed westward across the Pacific, and a few months later reached the Moluccas, a group of islands in the south west Pacific, in eastern modern-day Indonesia. While there, the Golden Hind became caught on a reef and was almost lost. After three days of waiting for expedient tides and dumping cargo, the barque was miraculously freed. Drake and his men befriended a sultan king of the Moluccas and involved themselves in some intrigues with the Portuguese there.
He made multiple stops on his way toward the tip of Africa, eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached Sierra Leone by July 22, 1580. On September 26 the Golden Hind sailed into Plymouth with Drake and 59 remaining crew aboard, along with a rich cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasures. The Queen's half-share of the cargo surpassed the rest of the crown's income for that entire year. Hailed as the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth (and the second such voyage arriving with at least one ship intact, after Elcano's in 1520), Drake was awarded knighthood by Queen Elizabeth aboard the Golden Hind on April 4, 1581, and, in September 1581, became the Mayor of Plymouth. He was also a Member of Parliament in 1581, for an unknown constituency, and again in 1584 for Bossiney.
The Queen ordered all written accounts of Drake's voyage to be considered classified information, and its participants sworn to silence on pain of death; her aim was to keep Drake's activities away from the eyes of rival Spain. Also considering the friction with Spain, on the occasion of the knighting, Elizabeth I handed the sword to the Marquis de Marchaumont, ambassador from France, and asked him to dub Drake as the knight. During the Victorian era, in a spirit of nationalism, the story was promoted that Elizabeth I had done the actual knighting.
On his return Drake presented the Queen with a jewel token commemorating the circumnavigation. It bore a ship with an ebony hull, enameled gold taken from a prize off the Pacific coast of Mexico, and an African diamond. For her part, the Queen gave Drake a jewel with her portrait, an uncommon gift to bestow upon a commoner, and one that Drake sported proudly in his portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts, 1591. On one side is a state portrait of Elizabeth by the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, on the other a sardonyx cameo of double portrait busts, a regal woman and an African male.
War broke out between Spain and England in 1585. Drake sailed to the New World and sacked the ports of Santo Domingo and Cartagena. On the return leg of the voyage, he captured the Spanish fort of San AugustÃn in Spanish Florida. These exploits encouraged Philip II of Spain to order the planning for an invasion of England.
In a pre-emptive strike, Drake "singed the beard of the King of Spain" by sailing a fleet into Cádiz and also La Coruña, two of Spain's main ports, and occupied the harbours, destroying the thirty-seven naval and merchant ships. The attack delayed the Spanish invasion by a year. Over the next month, Drake patrolled the Iberian Coasts between Lisbon and Cape St. Vincent intercepting and destroying Spanish supply lines. Drake estimated that he captured around 1600-1700 tons of staves to make barrels which is enough to make 25,000 to 30,000 barrels that can contain provisions.
Lord Howard of Effingham, Admiral of the British Fleet
Drake was vice admiral in command of the English fleet (under Lord Howard of Effingham) when it overcame the Spanish Armada that was attempting to invade England in 1588. As the English fleet pursued the Armada up the English Channel in closing darkness, Drake put duty second and captured the Spanish galleon Rosario, along with Admiral Pedro de Valdés and all his crew. The Spanish ship was known to be carrying substantial funds to pay the Spanish Army in the Low Countries. Drake's ship had been leading the English pursuit of the Armada by means of a lantern. By extinguishing this for the capture, Drake put the fleet into disarray overnight. This exemplified Drake's ability, as a privateer, to suspend strategic purpose if a tactical profit were on offer.
On the night of July 29, along with Howard, Drake organised fire-ships, causing the majority of the Spanish captains to break formation and sail out of Calais into the open sea. The next day, Drake was present at the Battle of Gravelines.
Battle of Gravelines
The most famous anecdote about Drake relates that, prior to the battle, he was playing a game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe. On being warned of the approach of the Spanish fleet, Drake is said to have remarked that there was plenty of time to finish the game and still beat the Spaniards. There is no known eyewitness account of this incident and the earliest retelling of it was printed 37 years later. Adverse winds and currents caused some delay in the launching of the English fleet as the Spanish drew nearer so it is easy to see how a popular myth of Drake's cavalier attitude to the Spanish threat may have originated.
In 1589, the year after defeating the Armada, Drake and Sir John Norreys were given three tasks. They were ordered to first seek out and destroy the remaining ships, second they were to support the rebels in Lisbon, Portugal against King Philip II (king of Spain and Portugal then), and third they were to take the Azores if possible. Drake and Norreys destroyed a few ships in the harbour of La Coruña in Spain but lost more than 12,000 lives and 20 ships. This delayed Drake and he was forced to skip hunting the rest of the surviving ships and head on to Lisbon.
Drake's seafaring career continued into his mid-fifties. In 1595, following a disastrous campaign against Spanish America, where he suffered several defeats in a row, he unsuccessfully attacked San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Spanish gunners from El Morro Castle shot a cannonball through the cabin of Drake's flagship, but he survived. In 1596, he died of dysentery, at age 56 while anchored off the coast of Puerto Bello, Panama where some Spanish treasure ships had sought shelter. He was buried at sea in a lead coffin, near Portobelo.
