Francis Drake: the Elizabethan raider Spain called El Draque

To the English he was a national hero; to the Spaniards, as their ambassador put it, "the master-thief of the unknown world". Francis Drake rose from humble beginnings in Devon to sail around the globe, raid an empire and help face the Armada. Britannica calls him the most renowned seaman of the Elizabethan age, and also warns that much of his legend has little basis in fact.¹

Early life: Devon, Kent and the Hawkins ships

Drake was born near Tavistock in Devon, by local tradition at Crowndale, on the land of the Russell family, earls of Bedford. His birth year is uncertain. Britannica gives about 1540 to 1543; the Dictionary of National Biography, in an entry by the naval historian John Knox Laughton, notes that a passage in John Stow's Annals implies 1545, while two portraits giving his age in 1581 and 1594 point to a few years earlier.²

The story of his father is told two ways. Drake's grandson and the Elizabethan historian William Camden made him a Protestant refugee who fled religious persecution to Kent and lived in the hull of a ship there. Laughton found Camden's version inaccurate in its details, and Britannica, going further, calls the claim a later pious fiction: Edmund Drake, it writes, fled Devon after being charged with assault and robbery in 1548. The boy was brought up among relatives, the Hawkins family of Plymouth, merchants and sea raiders.³

Camden, Laughton writes, told of a boy apprenticed to the master of a small coasting vessel who left him the ship when he died. By the mid-1560s Drake was sailing to Guinea and the Spanish Main, and in 1567 he commanded the 50-ton Judith in his kinsman John Hawkins's slave-trading fleet.⁴

San Juan de Ulúa and Nombre de Dios, 1568 to 1573

In September 1568, at San Juan de Ulúa on the coast of Mexico, the Spanish attacked Hawkins's ships in harbor. Only the Minion and Drake's Judith escaped, and they reached England in January 1569. Britannica describes how Drake came home determined on revenge against Spain and Philip II; he would later speak of "wrongs" he meant to right.⁵

After two reconnaissance voyages, he sailed from Plymouth on 24 May 1572 with two small ships, the Pasha and the Swan, and about seventy-three men. On 29 July he attacked Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama; the raid failed when he fainted from a leg wound, and his men carried him back to the boats. In February 1573, guided by escaped slaves, the Cimarrons, he climbed a tree on the isthmus and saw the Pacific, the first Englishman known to do so, and begged God, as Britannica quotes him, for leave to sail an English ship in that sea. In April he captured a silver train, and on 9 August 1573 he was back in Plymouth, rich.⁶

Then comes a darker episode. In 1575 Drake served under the Earl of Essex in Ireland and took part in the massacre on Rathlin Island in July of that year. Laughton places the chief responsibility for the slaughter of the garrison on the army commander, John Norreys; Britannica simply notes that Drake took part in a notorious massacre.⁷

Around the world, 1577 to 1580

In 1577 the queen herself backed a new voyage. Drake left Plymouth on 13 December with five small ships and fewer than two hundred men, his flagship the Pelican of about 100 tons. At Port St. Julian in Patagonia he accused one of the gentlemen adventurers, Thomas Doughty, of plotting against him; Doughty was tried and executed. Laughton notes that the witnesses tell the story with the widest differences and that some accused Drake of murder; Britannica calls Drake a stern disciplinarian who would not go on without a loyal company.⁸

He entered the Strait of Magellan in August 1578, on the 20th by Laughton's dating and the 21st by Britannica's, and renamed his ship the Golden Hind after the crest of his patron Sir Christopher Hatton. The passage took sixteen days. A storm then scattered the ships; one went home, and only the Golden Hind went north along the Pacific coast of South America, where the Spanish towns had never seen an enemy ship.⁹

On 1 March 1579 he took the Spanish treasure ship known as the Cacafuego, whose cargo Laughton lists as 26 tons of silver, 80 pounds of gold, thirteen chests of coin and jewels. He sailed north in search of a passage home, turned back in the cold, and anchored on the coast of what is now California, where he claimed the country for the queen as Nova Albion. Then he crossed the Pacific, bought spices in the Moluccas, survived striking a reef, and rounded the Cape of Good Hope.¹⁰

On 26 September 1580 the Golden Hind sailed into Plymouth laden with treasure and spices; Britannica counts only 56 of the original crew left aboard. On 4 April 1581 the queen went aboard the ship at Deptford and knighted him, despite Spanish protests. Laughton calls him the first man of any nation to command a ship through such a voyage.¹¹

Plymouth and the West Indies raid, 1585 to 1586

Rich and famous, Drake bought Buckland Abbey near Plymouth and served as mayor of the town, in 1581 by Britannica's dating and 1582 by Laughton's. He married twice, first Mary Newman, in 1569, who died in 1583, then Elizabeth Sydenham; he had no children. Britannica notes that well-born commanders such as Martin Frobisher and Richard Grenville despised him as a common upstart.¹²

When Spain seized English ships in 1585, the queen sent Drake to the Caribbean with about 25 ships and eight pinnaces, Frobisher as vice-admiral and Christopher Carleill commanding the land forces. Herman counts some 1,600 to 1,900 men in all; Laughton puts the land forces alone at over two thousand. The fleet sailed from Plymouth on 14 September 1585, called at Vigo and the Cape Verde Islands, and on New Year's Day 1586 stormed Santo Domingo, which paid 25,000 ducats after parts of the city were burned.¹³ › Drake takes Santo Domingo, 1586

At Cartagena, entered on 9 February, Drake demanded 500,000 ducats, was offered 25,000, and settled for 110,000. In May the fleet destroyed St. Augustine in Florida, and in June it took home the 105 settlers of the failing Roanoke colony. The voyage did not cover its cost of £40,000, half of it the queen's, but Lord Burghley had to admit, Britannica records, that Drake was "a fearful man to the king of Spain". Herman judges that it diverted Spanish money from the Armada and the war in the Netherlands.¹⁴

Cádiz, 1587: singeing the king's beard

In April 1587, with Philip II's invasion fleet in preparation, Drake sailed into Cádiz with about thirty ships. In some thirty-six hours, Britannica writes, he destroyed many vessels and thousands of tons of stores meant for the Armada; Laughton counts thirty-three ships sunk or burned. Drake called it singeing the king of Spain's beard, and the blow delayed the Armada for a year. He then seized the castle of Sagres near Cape St. Vincent and took a rich Portuguese carrack off the Azores.¹⁵

The Armada, 1588: what did Drake do?

When the Armada sailed in 1588, Lord Howard of Effingham commanded the English fleet, and Drake, who had pressed for an attack on the Spanish coast, was one of his senior commanders; in July Laughton has him stationed off Ushant with a division of the fleet. On the way up the Channel the Spanish flagship of the Andalusian squadron, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, disabled in a collision, fell into Drake's hands; both Britannica and Laughton record the capture, and Laughton adds that it caused a bitter quarrel with Frobisher over the spoils.¹⁶

On his part in the fighting the sources disagree sharply. Laughton, writing in 1888, accepts the story that Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe when the Armada was sighted as an old and apparently well-founded tradition, and says that at the decisive battle off Gravelines, after the fireships had driven the Spanish from their anchorage off Calais, the lead of the fleet fell to Drake. Britannica's modern article, revised by the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, says that apart from taking the Rosario Drake is not known to have played any part in the fighting, and that his legend of coolness and fair play has little basis in fact.¹⁷

Command style

Drake's genius was at sea. Britannica calls his deep-sea navigation and pilotage excellent, and quotes Stow's praise of him as more skillful in all points of navigation than any. He was a hard captain, quick to punish disloyalty, as Doughty's fate and his arrest of his own vice-admiral William Borough on the Cádiz voyage both show, a quarrel Laughton describes in detail. He loved surprise: Nombre de Dios at three in the morning, the undefended Pacific coast, Cádiz before the Spanish could man their ships.¹⁸

Opinions of the man divided even in his own time. Fellow captains, Britannica writes, found him unreliable and self-seeking, while the Spanish credited him with almost diabolical powers as a navigator and, in their literature, with courtesy to prisoners. Laughton, a Victorian naval officer, admitted that by the standards of his own century Drake was a pirate.¹⁹

Later life and death

The counterstroke of 1589 against Spain and Portugal, led by Drake and Sir John Norreys, failed to take Lisbon and lost many men to sickness. At home Drake brought fresh water to Plymouth: Laughton records that between December 1590 and April 1591 he carried the river Meavy to the town along a channel some twenty-five miles long, and Britannica that the supply served the city for three hundred years.²⁰

In August 1595 he sailed with his old kinsman Hawkins and about twenty-seven ships to strike at Panama once more, but the Spanish were warned. Hawkins died as the fleet anchored off Puerto Rico, where the attack was beaten off. Drake died off Portobelo on 28 January 1596 and was buried at sea in a lead coffin. The cause is given differently: Laughton names dysentery, Britannica a fever that ravaged the fleet.²¹

Legacy and memory

Drake's property passed to his brother Thomas. His legend outgrew him. For the English he became the model of the bold, cool, improvising seaman; Britannica argues that the legend shaped English views of themselves while resting on little evidence. For the Spanish, Laughton notes, his name in the colonies became a byword for the devil himself.²²

Read the story of his raid on Santo Domingo, or follow the naval wars of later centuries in the life of Horatio Nelson.