Disturb Us Lord When We Are

This prayer is attributed to Sir Francis Drake and has been widely reproduced, though no primary manuscript source connecting it to Drake has been definitively identified. It belongs to a tradition of prayers associated with Drake's voyages and his Protestant faith, and it reflects the Elizabethan naval culture in which religious devotion and daring seamanship were understood as complementary. Drake was a devout Protestant who held daily prayer services on his ships and saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 partly in providential terms.