Francis Drake

• 1. Introduction

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  To the Spanish, Sir Francis Drake was El Draque, the Dragon, a pirate to be feared. To the English, he was a hero. He was the man who, between 1577 and 1580, led the second circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition, and the first English one to do it. He had started as a simple seaman. He rose to become a vice admiral against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He died of dysentery in January 1596, off the coast of Panama, after a failed assault. How does a Protestant farmer's son from Devon become the most celebrated and most hated mariner of his age? What did he see when he climbed a tree on the Isthmus of Panama? And why did Queen Elizabeth declare the written accounts of his greatest voyage to be secrets of the Realm, sworn to silence on pain of death? Drake left behind no words of his own. He left only his actions, and the bitter disagreement over how to read them.

• 2. A Devon Childhood Uprooted

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  Crowndale Farm in Tavistock, Devon, was where Francis Drake was born, the eldest of the twelve sons of Edmund Drake, a Protestant farmer, and his wife Mary Mylwaye. The first son was said to have been named after his godfather, Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford. His exact birth date is not formally recorded. A date of around 1540 is suggested by two portraits, one a miniature painted by Nicholas Hilliard in 1581 when Drake was said to be 42, the other painted in 1594 when he was said to be 52. Religious persecution drove the family out during the Prayer Book Rebellion in 1549, when the Drakes fled from Devon to Kent. There Edmund Drake gained an appointment to minister to the men in the King's Navy. He was ordained deacon and made vicar of Upchurch Church on the Medway. As a boy, Francis was placed into the household of a relative, the Plymouth sea-captain William Hawkins, and began his seagoing training as an apprentice on Hawkins' boats. By 18, according to the English chronicler Edmund Howes, he was a purser. The master of a small barque trading between the Medway River and the Dutch coast was so pleased with the young Drake that, being unmarried and childless at his death, he left the barque to him.

• 3. Among The Slave Voyages

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  In 1562, the West African slave trade was a duopoly dominated by the Portuguese and the Spanish, and Sir John Hawkins devised a plan to break into it. Drake was not among the financiers, but his presence as one of hundreds of seamen on Hawkins's voyages has long been assumed. There is good evidence for his presence on the last two of four slaving voyages made by Hawkins' ships between 1562 and 1569. For his second voyage in 1564, Hawkins gained Queen Elizabeth I's support, and she lent him one of her ships, Jesus of Lübeck, as his flagship. Scholar Kris Lane lists Drake among the first English slave traders. When the Queen forbade a third voyage, Hawkins set one up with a relative, John Lovell, in command in 1566, and Drake went along; it failed, and more than 90 enslaved Africans were released without payment. The last joint voyage with Hawkins, in 1567, ended in disaster at San Juan de Ulúa near Vera Cruz, where the newly arrived viceroy of New Spain, Martín Enríquez de Almanza, attacked the English ships. The Spanish launched a fireship against Jesus of Lübeck. Drake, by then captain of Judith, fled, leaving Hawkins behind. Hawkins limped home on Minion with a crew of just 15, and hundreds of English seamen were abandoned. Hawkins later accused Drake of desertion and of stealing treasure, charges Drake denied. Across these four voyages, approximately 1,200 Africans were enslaved, and an estimated three times as many killed. Scholar John Sugden writes that Drake was in his twenties and did not question what his elders accepted, but must share some culpability. The voyage of 1567 to 1569 was Drake's last association with slaving, and it turned his life toward attacking Spanish possessions wherever he found them.

• 4. The Treasure Of Panama

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  On the 24th of May 1572, Drake left Plymouth with a crew of 73 men in two small vessels, the 70-ton Pascha and the 25-ton Swan, to capture Nombre de Dios. This was the point on the Isthmus of Panama where the silver and gold treasure of Peru was carried ashore and transported overland to the Caribbean. His first raid came late in July 1572. Drake took Nombre de Dios but was badly wounded, and his forces retreated without the treasure. He turned instead to raiding galleons and, with his Cimarrón allies, escaped African slaves, looted the mule trains that carried gold and silver from Panama City. One of these men was Diego, who later became a free man after years of service under Drake. Near Cabo de Cativas, Drake joined forces with a French privateer, Guillaume Le Testu, who commanded the 80-ton warship Havre. On the 1st of April 1573, near the Campos River, they surprised the mule convoy and seized more than 200,000 pesos' worth of treasure, around 20 tons of silver and gold. They buried much of it, too heavy to carry, in an account that may have inspired later stories of pirates and buried treasure. Le Testu was captured and beheaded. Drake's exhausted men dragged what gold they could across some 18 miles of jungle mountains, only to find their boats gone. Drake built a raft and sailed twelve miles to where two pinnaces waited. When he reached his alarmed men, he teased them by looking downhearted, then laughed, pulled a quoit of Spanish gold from his clothes, and said, "Our voyage is made." During this same expedition, on the 11th of February, Drake and his lieutenant John Oxenham climbed a high tree where the Cimarróns had cut steps into the trunk, and became the first Englishmen to see the Pacific Ocean. Drake vowed that one day he would sail its waters.

• 5. El Draque And The Famous Voyage

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  Drake's so-called Famous Voyage was financed by a private syndicate that included Francis Walsingham, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, John Hawkins, Christopher Hatton, and Drake himself. Elizabeth I likely invested but never issued a formal commission. Diego sailed again, employed as Drake's servant and useful as an interpreter in Spanish and English. After bad weather forced a false start, Drake set sail on the 13th of December 1577 aboard Pelican with four other ships and 164 men. At the gloomy bay of Puerto San Julián in what is now Argentina, where Ferdinand Magellan had executed mutineers half a century earlier, Drake's men saw bleached skeletons on Spanish gibbets. Following Magellan's example, Drake tried and beheaded his own co-commander, Thomas Doughty, on the 2nd of July 1578, after accusing him of witchcraft, mutiny, and treason. Before the execution, Drake dined with him; the chaplain Francis Fletcher recorded that they ate "as cheerfully, in sobriety, as ever in their lives they had done aforetime." Passing through the Strait of Magellan, storms destroyed Marigold and forced Elizabeth back to England, leaving only Pelican, which Drake renamed Golden Hind in honour of Sir Christopher Hatton. Crew members found that an infusion of the bark of Drimys winteri worked against scurvy. Sailing north up the Pacific coast, Drake captured ships and used their accurate charts. At Mocha Island, hostile Mapuche wounded him and Diego with arrows. Near Lima he took a ship with 25,000 pesos of Peruvian gold, then chased and captured the treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, known as Cacafuego, finding 80 pounds of gold, a golden crucifix, jewels, and 26 long tons of silver. He dined with the captured officers and sent them off with gifts and letters of safe conduct.

• 6. New Albion And The Long Way Home

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  On the 17th of June 1579, Drake and his crew found a protected cove on the Pacific coast of what is now Northern California, having earlier made first landfall on the 5th of June at what is now South Cove, Cape Arago, in Oregon. He claimed the land for Queen Elizabeth I as Nova Albion, posting an engraved plate of brass to assert sovereignty for Elizabeth and every successive English monarch. The crew careened Golden Hind to clean and repair the hull, and Drake had friendly interactions with the Coast Miwok. They left New Albion on the 23rd of July, pausing the next day at the Farallon Islands to hunt sea lions or seals. Heading south-west to catch the winds across the Pacific, Drake reached the Moluccas in eastern modern-day Indonesia. There Diego died from wounds he had sustained earlier in the voyage. Golden Hind became caught on a reef and was nearly lost, saved after the sailors dumped cargo and waited three days for the tides. Drake befriended Sultan Babullah of Ternate before rounding the Cape of Good Hope and reaching Sierra Leone by the 22nd of July 1580. On the 26th of September 1580, Golden Hind sailed into Plymouth with Drake and 59 remaining crew, along with 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. To keep his activities hidden from rival Spain, Elizabeth declared all written accounts of the voyage to be the queen's secrets of the Realm. Drake presented her with a jewel of enamelled gold bearing an African diamond and a ship with an ebony hull. In return she gave him the Drake Jewel, an unusual gift for a commoner, now conserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

• 7. Knight, Mayor, And Member

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  On the 4th of April 1581, Queen Elizabeth awarded Drake a knighthood aboard Golden Hind at Deptford, but the dubbing was performed by a French diplomat, Monsieur de Marchaumont. By involving the Frenchman, who was negotiating Elizabeth's marriage to Francis, Duke of Anjou, the queen gained the implicit political support of the French for Drake's actions. During the Victorian era, a nationalist story spread that Elizabeth herself had done the knighting. Drake adopted the coat of arms of the Devon family of Drake of Ash, claiming a distant kinship; the right was disputed in court, so the queen awarded him his own arms instead. His motto was Sic Parvis Magna, meaning "Great achievements from small beginnings," and a hand from the clouds was labelled Auxilio Divino, "By divine aid." Drake first sat in parliament on the 16th of January 1581 for the constituency of Camelford, though he soon took leave of absence for "certain his necessary business in the service of Her Majesty." He became Mayor of Plymouth in September 1581, installed a compass on the town's Hoe, and contracted to build a leat bringing water from the River Meavy, along with six gristmills from which he profited. He represented Bossiney in 1584 and Plymouth in 1593, active in issues of the navy, fishing, early American colonisation, and defence against the Spanish.

• 8. Armadas, Defeat, And Death

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  On the 19th of April 1587, Drake arrived at Cádiz to find the harbour packed with ships as the Armada readied for invasion. He pressed his attack into the inner harbour and inflicted heavy damage, in what became known as the "singeing of the King's beard," delaying the Spanish invasion by a year. When the Spanish Armada reached the English coast near Cornwall on the 29th of July 1588, an English fleet of 55 ships set out from Plymouth under Lord Howard of Effingham, with Drake as vice admiral aboard the galleon Revenge. In closing darkness, Drake broke off to capture the disabled galleon Nuestra Señora del Rosario, taking Admiral Pedro de Valdés and most of his crew. By extinguishing the lantern that had been leading the English pursuit, he threw the fleet into disarray overnight. After a council of war aboard Howard's flagship Ark, the English launched eight fire ships into the Armada at Calais, and the decisive action was fought off Gravelines. The most famous, though probably apocryphal, anecdote claims Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe and said there was time to finish the game and still beat the Spaniards; the earliest retelling was printed 37 years later. In 1589, Drake and Norris led the English Armada against Spain, tasked with destroying the Atlantic fleet, raising a revolt at Lisbon for the pretender Dom António, and taking the Azores. It failed on all fronts. Estimates of the dead range from 8,000 to over 20,000. Charged by the Privy Council with deliberate failings, Drake fell out of favour and was given no naval command until 1595. That year brought further defeats, including the loss of the Battle of San Juan, where Spanish gunners from El Morro Castle shot a cannonball through his stateroom. He and Thomas Baskerville burned Nombre de Dios but were repulsed on the road to Panama City. On the 28th of January 1596, aged about 56, Drake died of dysentery while anchored off Portobelo. He asked to be dressed in his full armour and was buried at sea in a sealed lead-lined coffin, near where the wrecks of two British ships, Elizabeth and Delight, are thought to lie.

  Drake left behind no words of his own, only his actions and their interpretation, which, as Peter Whitfield says, "is open to deep disagreement." Two scholarly traditions emerged. The older one, in Julian Corbett's biography Drake and the Tudor Navy of 1898, casts him as the single most important figure in the founding and triumph of the British navy. The alternative locates him squarely within privateering, emphasising his flaws and failures. Whitfield describes scholarship moving "from the hero worship of the Victorians to the cold iconoclasm" of the twenty-first century. His afterlife has taken strange turns. His will became the focus of an extensive confidence scam that Oscar Hartzell ran in the 1920s and 1930s. Drake's Drum entered English folklore through the king-asleep-in-the-mountain motif and inspired a poem by Henry Newbolt. The video game series Uncharted made him a major focus through Nathan Drake, a self-proclaimed descendant who retraces his ancestor's voyages, and Terence Morgan played him in a 26-episode television drama from 1961 to 1962. His name marks the Drake Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, and places across Plymouth and Devon. After the George Floyd protests of 2020 drew critical attention to monuments tied to slavery, colonialism, and piracy, several California landmarks were removed or renamed. Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo became Archie Williams High School, named after a former teacher and Olympic athlete, a reminder that the Dragon's legacy is still being argued over four centuries after his coffin slipped beneath Portobelo Bay.