Sir Francis Drake
Quotes & Wisdom
Sir Francis Drake: The Pirate Who Saved England
To the English, he was a national hero. To the Spanish, he was "El Draque" - the Dragon - a pirate and a thief. Sir Francis Drake, born around 1540 in Devon, rose from humble origins to become the most feared seaman of the Elizabethan age. He was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, a voyage that took three years and returned treasure worth more than the entire annual revenue of England. He singed the King of Spain's beard at Cadiz, played a decisive role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and made Queen Elizabeth I fabulously wealthy from his raids on Spanish shipping. Drake embodied the contradictions of his era - navigator and plunderer, patriot and privateer, devout Protestant and ruthless warrior - and his exploits helped transform England from a second-rate island kingdom into a global naval power.
Context & Background
Francis Drake was born around 1540 in Tavistock, a market town in Devon, on the southwestern coast of England. His father, Edmund Drake, was a farmer who later became a Protestant lay preacher - a vocation that would shape the family's fortunes when they were driven from Devon during the Catholic uprising of 1549 and settled near the royal dockyard at Chatham in Kent. The young Francis grew up among ships, sailors, and the salty tang of the Medway estuary.
The England of Drake's youth was a small, vulnerable nation finding its footing after decades of religious upheaval. Henry VIII's break with Rome, the brief Catholic restoration under Mary I, and the Protestant settlement under Elizabeth I had left the country divided internally and threatened externally. Spain, under Philip II, was the superpower of the age - its empire spanning the Americas, the Philippines, and much of Europe, its treasury swollen with silver and gold from the New World. England's navy was tiny by comparison, its merchant fleet modest, its colonial ambitions barely formed.
Drake's education was practical rather than academic. He was apprenticed to the master of a small trading bark that plied the North Sea and the English Channel, and he learned seamanship in the most demanding school possible - cold, dangerous waters, unpredictable weather, and the need for constant vigilance. By his early twenties, he had graduated to the Atlantic trade under the patronage of his kinsman John Hawkins, who combined the roles of merchant, slave trader, and privateer with the easy conscience of the age.
The event that transformed Drake from a competent seaman into a man driven by a burning grievance against Spain occurred in 1568 at San Juan de Ulua, a harbor on the coast of Mexico. Hawkins's small fleet, engaged in illicit trade with Spanish colonies, was attacked by a Spanish naval force despite having been given assurances of safe conduct. Most of the English ships were destroyed, and many men were killed or captured. Drake escaped, but the treachery at San Juan de Ulua left him with a lifelong hatred of Spain and a conviction that he was owed a debt that only Spanish treasure could repay.
Over the next several years, Drake conducted a series of increasingly audacious raids on Spanish shipping and settlements in the Caribbean. In 1572-1573, he attacked the treasure port of Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama and, in alliance with escaped African slaves called Cimaroons, ambushed a mule train carrying silver from Peru to the Caribbean coast. He returned to England wealthy and famous - and with a burning desire for a far greater prize.
In December 1577, Drake set sail from Plymouth with five ships and approximately 164 men on what was publicly described as a trading voyage to the Levant. In reality, it was a secret expedition authorized by Queen Elizabeth I to pass through the Strait of Magellan and raid the undefended Spanish settlements on the Pacific coast of South America.
The voyage was harrowing from the start. Drake suppressed a mutiny by executing Thomas Doughty, a gentleman adventurer, in a dramatic trial on the shores of Patagonia. Three of the five ships were lost or turned back. Only the Pelican - renamed the Golden Hind in honor of the expedition's patron, Sir Christopher Hatton, whose coat of arms featured a female deer - made it through the treacherous Strait of Magellan.
Once in the Pacific, Drake ravaged the undefended Spanish coast with devastating efficiency. His greatest prize was the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, a treasure galleon carrying twenty-six tons of silver, eighty pounds of gold, thirteen chests of coins, and cases of jewels and precious stones. It was one of the richest hauls in the history of piracy.
Drake then sailed north along the coast of California, where he landed and claimed the territory as "Nova Albion" for the English Crown. He crossed the Pacific, navigated the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived back in Plymouth on September 26, 1580 - three years after his departure, with only one ship but a cargo of treasure valued at approximately 600,000 pounds. The entire annual revenue of the English Crown at the time was about 300,000 pounds.
Elizabeth boarded the Golden Hind at Deptford and knighted Drake on its deck. The Spanish ambassador demanded Drake's arrest as a pirate. Elizabeth kept the treasure.
Drake's most consequential military action came in 1587-1588. In April 1587, he launched a preemptive strike on the Spanish fleet assembling at Cadiz, destroying or damaging over a hundred vessels in a raid he cheerfully described as "singeing the King of Spain's beard." The attack delayed Philip II's invasion plans by a full year.
When the Spanish Armada - 130 ships carrying 30,000 men - finally sailed into the English Channel in July 1588, Drake served as vice admiral under Lord Howard of Effingham. According to famous legend, he was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe when news arrived of the Armada's approach and reportedly declared: "There is plenty of time to win this game, and to thrash the Spaniards too."
The English strategy, which Drake helped devise, was to avoid the close-quarters boarding actions at which the Spanish excelled and instead use their faster, more maneuverable ships to fight at a distance with superior gunnery. The decisive moment came at the Battle of Gravelines on August 8, when Drake and his fellow commanders sent fire ships into the anchored Spanish fleet, scattering the formation and enabling the English to inflict heavy damage. The Armada's attempt to regroup and return home via the treacherous waters around Scotland and Ireland resulted in further catastrophic losses. Fewer than half the Spanish ships returned to port.
The defeat of the Armada did not end the war with Spain - which continued until 1604 - but it established England as a major naval power and ended the immediate threat of Spanish invasion. Drake's role in the victory made him a national legend.
Drake's famous prayer - "Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves" - is one of the most widely reproduced prayers in the English language, yet scholarly research has been unable to verify that Drake actually wrote it. The earliest known printed version dates to 1985, nearly four centuries after his death. The quote that can be reliably attributed to Drake, from a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham in 1587, is characteristically practical rather than poetic: "There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory."
Drake's legacy is deeply entangled with the violence and exploitation of the Elizabethan era. He participated in John Hawkins's slave-trading expeditions, plundered Spanish colonies whose inhabitants had no quarrel with England, and sometimes treated captured enemies with casual cruelty. To celebrate him as a hero requires acknowledging that his heroism was inseparable from acts that would be classified as piracy and war crimes by modern standards.
His later expeditions were less successful. A major expedition against Spain and Portugal in 1589 failed to achieve its objectives. In 1595, Drake and Hawkins sailed for the Caribbean on what would be their final voyage. Hawkins died of illness off Puerto Rico. Drake, suffering from dysentery, died on January 28, 1596, off the coast of Portobelo, Panama. He was buried at sea in a lead-lined coffin - somewhere in the waters of the Caribbean he had spent his life plundering.
Drake's circumnavigation proved that English seamanship could compete with any nation on earth. His role in defeating the Armada secured English independence from Spanish domination. And his raids on Spanish treasure helped finance the transformation of England into a global maritime power. The pirate from Devon had changed the course of history.