Sir Francis Drake

Overview

Francis Drake’s career operates squarely on the boundary that the codex’s editorial line attempts to keep visible: from the Spanish perspective of his own lifetime he was a pirate of the first rank — El Draque, the dragon, with a price on his head and his name an oath — while from the English perspective he was a knighted vice-admiral, a member of Parliament, and from 1581 the personally-favoured naval commander of the queen. Both characterisations are accurate within their respective national-legal frameworks. He is included here under the editorial convention that “privateer with state commission” and “pirate” are points on a continuum rather than mutually exclusive categories.

Origins

Drake was born around 1540 in Tavistock, Devon, the eldest son of a Protestant farming family. He went to sea as an apprentice in the coastal trade in his early teens and by his twenties was sailing on the slaving and trading voyages organised by his cousin John Hawkins. He was present on the Hawkins expedition that ended in the disaster at San Juan de Ulúa (modern Veracruz, Mexico) in September 1568, in which a Spanish fleet ambushed the English squadron under a flag of truce and killed or captured most of its crews. Drake escaped with the surviving vessel Judith; the experience is the conventional explanation for the personal animus against Spain that shaped his entire subsequent career.

Career

Drake’s independent career began with two reconnaissance voyages to the Caribbean in 1570 and 1571, undertaken under privateering arrangements with the Plymouth syndicate organised by the Hawkins family. The 1572–1573 expedition that followed established his reputation: with two small vessels and a crew of seventy-three, supplemented by an alliance with the maroon community of escaped African slaves under their leader Diego, he ambushed a Spanish silver convoy on the overland mule-track between Panama and Nombre de Dios, returning to Plymouth with cargo variously valued at £40,000 to £60,000.

The expedition that made his international reputation was the 1577–1580 circumnavigation. Drake sailed from Plymouth in December 1577 with five vessels and a royal commission to attack Spanish shipping on the Pacific coast of South America — a coast no English vessel had previously reached. He passed through the Strait of Magellan, lost most of the squadron in storms in the southern Pacific, and emerged into the Pacific with a single vessel, the Golden Hind. The Pacific cruise that followed took Drake up the entire South American Pacific coast taking prizes including the treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción (Drake’s “cacafuego”) and her ten-week cargo of silver. With pursuit closed off behind him, Drake continued north along the California coast to a landing at what is now Drake’s Bay (which he claimed for the Crown as “Nova Albion”), then west across the Pacific to the East Indies, around the Cape of Good Hope, and home to Plymouth in September 1580. The voyage was the second documented circumnavigation of the globe.

The state revenue produced by the circumnavigation prize cargoes is variously estimated at between £160,000 and £500,000, of which Elizabeth’s personal share alone reportedly exceeded the entire annual ordinary revenue of the Crown. The yield, and the political symbolism, made Drake’s formal knighting aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford in April 1581 a foregone conclusion. He was thereafter an English officer of state, not a privateer captain. The 1585–1586 West Indies expedition (sacking of Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and St. Augustine) and the April 1587 raid on Cádiz harbour (the destruction of some thirty-seven Spanish vessels in preparation for the Armada) were straightforwardly naval operations of the English Crown.

Drake was vice-admiral of the English fleet under Lord Howard during the Armada campaign of July–August 1588, in which he commanded the squadron that engaged the Spanish fleet off Plymouth and was conventionally credited — in later English mythology rather than in contemporary tactical reports — with delaying the engagement to finish a game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe.

Fate

Drake’s final expedition, a joint command with his cousin John Hawkins against the Spanish West Indies in 1595–1596, was a failure: the Spanish defences had been substantially reinforced after the 1585–1586 raids, the principal targets at San Juan de Puerto Rico and Panama held, and dysentery swept the fleet. Hawkins died at sea in November 1595; Drake of the same fever off Portobelo on 28 January 1596, aged about fifty-five. His body was sealed in a lead coffin and committed to the sea off the Panamanian coast.

Legacy

Drake’s reputation has tracked the political fortunes of England closely. In Tudor and Stuart popular ballads he was the national hero of the war against Spain; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries he was the founding admiral of the Royal Navy tradition; in the late twentieth century historians began increasingly to recover the slaving voyages of his early career and the practical character of much of what he did in the Caribbean as piracy in the operational sense. Both framings are correct within their respective conventions. He is buried at sea; the Sir Francis Drake Memorial at the Devonport naval base is the principal English commemoration.