Francis Drake

Anyone asking who was Francis Drake must begin in rural Devon. He was born on July 13, 1540, at Crowndale farm near Tavistock, the eldest of the many sons of Edmund Drake, a farmer who later worked as a Protestant lay preacher ^[1]. The family's fortunes were unsettled. During the religious and social upheavals of the late 1540s the Drakes left Devon for Kent, where Edmund ministered to sailors on the Medway and the family reportedly lived for a time in the hulk of an old ship ^[2].

That riverside childhood shaped the boy's future. As a young teenager Drake was apprenticed to the master of a small coastal bark trading between English ports and the Low Countries. The work was hard and unglamorous, but it taught him pilotage, tides, and ship handling in some of the most difficult waters in Europe. When the old master died he left the vessel to his apprentice, a mark of unusual trust in so young a sailor ^[1].

Family connections pulled Drake toward larger ambitions. He was related to the Hawkins family of Plymouth, prosperous merchants and shipowners who were then pioneering English trade, including the slave trade, on the West African coast and in the Spanish Caribbean. By his early twenties Drake had sold his coasting bark and entered the Hawkins service, sailing on voyages that carried enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies in defiance of Spain's trading monopoly ^[3].

The turning point of Drake's career came in September 1568 at San Juan de Ulúa, the port of Veracruz in Mexico. A slaving expedition commanded by John Hawkins, with Drake captaining the small ship Judith, had put in for repairs when a Spanish fleet arrived. After a truce was agreed, the Spanish attacked. Most of the English ships were destroyed or captured, and only the vessels of Hawkins and Drake escaped across the Atlantic ^[3]. Drake regarded the episode as treachery, and it fixed in him a lifelong hostility toward Spain that conveniently aligned with profit.

He returned to the Caribbean repeatedly in the early 1570s, operating as a privateer in an undeclared war on Spanish shipping and settlements. His most famous exploit of these years came in 1572 and 1573, when he attacked the town of Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama and then, allied with the Cimarrons (Africans who had escaped Spanish slavery), ambushed a mule train carrying Peruvian silver overland to the Atlantic coast ^[4]. The raid made him rich and famous. During the same expedition Drake climbed a tall tree on the isthmus and became one of the first Englishmen to see the Pacific Ocean, reportedly praying that he might one day sail an English ship on that sea ^[2].

Because England and Spain were officially at peace, Queen Elizabeth I could not publicly celebrate him, and Drake spent a period in relative obscurity, including service in Ireland. But his reputation among investors and courtiers was made. When a syndicate formed in 1577 to send an expedition into the Pacific, a project with the queen's discreet backing, Drake was the obvious commander ^[1].

Drake sailed from Plymouth in December 1577 with five ships and about 160 men, his flagship the Pelican later renamed the Golden Hind. The stated destination was kept vague; the real purpose was to pass through the Strait of Magellan and raid the undefended Pacific coast of Spanish America ^[5]. The voyage nearly collapsed before it reached the Pacific. At Port San Julián in Patagonia, Drake tried and executed the gentleman adventurer Thomas Doughty for alleged mutiny, an episode that remains one of the most debated Francis Drake facts, and afterward famously insisted that gentlemen and mariners must haul and draw together ^[1].

Only the Golden Hind made it through the strait in 1578. Storms drove the ship far to the south, and Drake then ran up the coast of Chile and Peru taking prizes at will, since no Spanish port on that ocean expected an enemy. Off Ecuador in March 1579 he captured the treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, nicknamed the Cacafuego, loaded with silver, gold, and jewels: the richest single prize of his career ^[4].

Rather than risk returning the way he had come, Drake continued north along the California coast, careening his ship at a bay he claimed for the queen as Nova Albion, most likely at what is now Drakes Bay north of San Francisco ^[6]. He then crossed the Pacific, traded for cloves in the Spice Islands, survived a near fatal grounding on a reef off Celebes, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached Plymouth on September 26, 1580, after two years and ten months at sea. He was the first commander to complete a circumnavigation of the globe in his own ship, Magellan having died partway through the earlier Spanish voyage. The treasure repaid investors many times over, and in April 1581 Elizabeth had Drake knighted aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford ^[5].

Drake married twice. His first wife, Mary Newman, a Devon woman he wed in 1569, died in 1583 while he was at the height of his fame. Two years later he married Elizabeth Sydenham, the young heiress of a Somerset gentry family, a match that confirmed his climb into the landed classes. Neither marriage produced children, and his estates eventually passed to a nephew ^[1].

With the profits of the circumnavigation Drake bought Buckland Abbey, a former monastery near Plymouth previously owned by his rival Sir Richard Grenville. He also entered public life ashore: he served as mayor of Plymouth in 1581 and sat in Parliament, and he took a practical interest in engineering, backing the construction of a leat, a channel of about seventeen miles, that brought fresh water into Plymouth in 1591 ^[7].

Contemporaries described a short, stocky, red bearded man of enormous confidence, personally brave, sometimes vain, and capable of both generosity and ruthlessness. He was a committed Protestant who held daily services at sea, and his treatment of Spanish prisoners was often noted, even by enemies, as courteous ^[2].

Open war between England and Spain finally came in 1585, and Drake was its most aggressive English instrument. That autumn he led a large fleet to the Caribbean, sacking Santo Domingo and Cartagena and, on the return leg in 1586, evacuating the struggling English colonists from Roanoke in present day North Carolina ^[3]. The raid did lasting damage to Spanish credit and prestige.

In April 1587, with invasion preparations under way in Spain, Drake struck the harbor of Cádiz, destroying dozens of ships and vast quantities of supplies. He described the operation as singeing the King of Spain's beard, and it delayed the Armada by roughly a year ^[5]. He followed it by seizing the Portuguese carrack San Felipe, whose cargo alone justified the whole expedition.

When the Spanish Armada entered the Channel in July 1588, Drake served as vice admiral under Lord Howard of Effingham aboard the Revenge. He captured the crippled Spanish flagship Rosario early in the fighting, a prize that made him money but drew accusations that he had abandoned his station, and he took part in the decisive action off Gravelines that scattered the Armada ^[1]. The following year he jointly commanded the so called Counter Armada against Lisbon and Corunna with Sir John Norreys. The expedition failed with heavy losses, and Drake fell from royal favor for several years, retreating to his affairs in Plymouth ^[2].

In 1595 the queen turned to her old corsair once more. Drake and John Hawkins, now both in their fifties, shared command of a fleet sent to seize Spanish treasure in the Caribbean. Almost nothing went right. The Spanish had been warned, an attack on San Juan in Puerto Rico was repulsed, and Hawkins died at sea in November 1595 ^[3].

Drake pressed on to the Isthmus of Panama, scene of his early triumphs, but an overland thrust toward Panama City was beaten back. Weakened by dysentery that was sweeping the fleet, he declined rapidly. He died aboard his flagship, the Defiance, in the early hours of January 28, 1596, off Portobelo on the Caribbean coast of Panama. His men dressed him in armor, sealed his body in a lead coffin, and buried him at sea a few miles offshore ^[1]. Despite repeated searches, including modern expeditions with sonar, the coffin has never been found ^[6].

Any honest Francis Drake biography has to hold two reputations in view at once. In England he became a founding legend of naval power: the farm boy who circled the globe, humbled Spain, and helped save the kingdom in 1588. Statues stand at Plymouth Hoe and Tavistock, and the legend of Drake's Drum holds that the instrument he carried around the world will sound again when England is in danger ^[7]. In the Spanish world he was remembered as a pirate, and among historians of the Atlantic his early career as a slave trader with the Hawkins voyages has drawn increasing scrutiny, prompting museums and civic bodies to present his record in fuller context ^[6].

The list of Francis Drake achievements nonetheless remains remarkable by any measure: the first circumnavigation completed under a single surviving commander, the first English claim on the Pacific coast of North America, the raid on Cádiz, and a share in the defeat of the Armada. His voyages demonstrated that Spain's overseas empire was vulnerable and encouraged the English maritime expansion that followed in the next century ^[5].

His name is scattered across the map and across institutions: Drake Passage south of Cape Horn, Drakes Bay in California, and countless streets, ships, and schools. A replica of the Golden Hind sits in London, and Buckland Abbey, now managed by the National Trust, displays his drum and other relics. Four centuries after his burial at sea, Drake remains one of the most argued about figures of the Elizabethan age, admired, condemned, and never ignored ^[7].