Francis Drake
The first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe was also a pirate – if you wonder who Johnny Depp used as the basis for Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean (apart from Keith Richards, of course!) wonder no more. The seamy, sexy, smart and talented privateer (pirate with a licence, in other words) of choice was Sir Francis Drake.
Drake was born in Devon around 1540 and went off to sea at an early age, possibly even as young as ten, travelling to Guinea and the West Indies. In 1567, he commanded a slave ship for his cousin, John Hawkins as part of an expedition that was attacked by Spanish ships - only three ships of the Hawkins fleet survived. This experience was to change Drake’s life. From being a merchantman, that is, a sailor who carried a cargo, he transferred his skills and when he sailed again in 1572 he had obtained a privateer's licence from Elizabeth I.
What did this mean? It meant that off shores held by Britain, he and his crews had the right to chase down, board and ‘acquire’ ships belonging to hostile nations – that is, Spanish ships! It meant that Elizabeth wouldn’t hang him as a pirate if the Spanish complained because he had his licence, but she might if he attacked in the wrong place or the wrong ship (sounds a bit like the Belgrano is the Falkland war, doesn’t it, with everything depending on which way the ship was heading?) So his licence was some protection against death, but out on the sea, he was liable to be boarded in turn by the Spanish. On the Isthmus of Panama he had two great successes: he became the first Englishman to see the Pacific Ocean and he boarded and took possession of a Spanish fleet, returning to a wealthy and famous man.
In 1577 he went looking for trouble, cruising along the Spanish-owned Pacific coast of the New World, where he became the first Englishman to navigate the Straits of Magellan. (And this sounds like the yobbish driver souped-up car trying to find somebody to race with on a Saturday night in any English city, doesn’t it? It’s amazing how history repeats itself).
Around this time that he changed the name of his flagship to The Golden Hind (or Hinde) a move that may have been less than lucky as, in the Pacific, his fleet encountered dangerous storms which destroyed one ship, and sent another home, leaving Drake’s tiny vessel (under 100 feet long!) to continue north alone.
His travels took him to the Moluccas, Celebes, Java and the Cape of Good Hope. He arrived back in England with his decks piled with treasure and was acknowledged as being the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.REF:Drake’s voyage, an eyewitness account.
Elizabeth I was politically reluctant to recognise this achievement, in case it inflamed the Spanish, but deciding she could not placate them and would be better armed with a show of defiance, she visited him aboard the Golden Hind and knighted him.
In 1585 Drake sailed to the West Indies and the Florida coast where he sacked and plundered Spanish cities – technically this was marauding, rather than privateering! On his return voyage, he picked up unhappy colonists from Roanoke Island off the coast of the Carolinas (annoying the adherents of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose pet project the colony was) along with potatoes and tobacco and brought them all back to England.
In 1587, Drake entered the port of Cadiz and destroyed 30 of the ships the Spanish were assembling against the British – this act of defiance led to him becoming, in 1588, Vice Admiral in the fleet that defeated the Armada. His last expedition was to the West Indies and here his luck finally ran out. The Spanish were prepared for him, the naval engagement was a disaster, and he died on the return journey, of dysentery.
Other Great Explorers
tenzing, Vancouver, Almagro, Alvarado, Balboa, burton, clark, drake, eriksson, grant, heyerdahl, hillary, humboldt, ingstad, james cook, livingstone, magellan, Piccard, Raleigh, Scott, Shackleton