Francis Drake’s Fleet Sets Out on an Expedition to Circumnavigate the Globe: December 13, 1577

This text comes from our book, Lands of Hope and Promise.

In 1567, six English ships, anchored off the western tip of Cuba, were struck by a hurricane. The storm, which drove the fleet into the Gulf of Mexico, so badly battered the ships that the captain of the fleet, Sir John Hawkins, knew that he would need to refit his vessels before he could return to England. Sailing into the Spanish anchorage of Vera Cruz, the storm-tossed English demanded supplies.

Entering a Spanish port was an act of desperation, for Spanish law not only forbade Hawkins to ply Spanish waters, but to conduct (as he had been doing) illegal trade with Spanish colonists. The Spanish colonists had no quarrel with Hawkins; taxes on goods bought from their own countrymen were so high that they were glad to engage in a little illegal barter. The Spanish government, however, did not look kindly on such trade. Matters went from bad to worse for the English when, a day after their landing at Vera Cruz, a Spanish fleet sailed into harbor.

The Spanish ships had come to fetch the yearly gold and silver shipment; but seeing the English fleet, they mobilized. The Spanish attacked the crippled English ships, destroying four of them. Only two ships escaped—one piloted by John Hawkins and the other by his young nephew, Francis Drake. After a long and perilous voyage, Hawkins and Drake returned to England in safety, but penniless.

Sir Francis Drake, a 1577 engraving by Jodocus Hondius

Although bereft of his fortune, Francis Drake’s reputation did not suffer from this unfortunate affair. He had so skillfully fought off the Spanish and made the difficult voyage home across the Atlantic that he had gained the reputation for a skilled mariner and adventurer. Knowledge of his exploits even reached the court of Queen Elizabeth who, in 1570, granted Drake a commission to return to the West Indies to raid Spanish shipping.

Drake was a privateer, a “respectable pirate”; he harried ships with the queen’s good pleasure. In 1572, he set sail for the West Indies in two small ships, both to serve Her Majesty and to make up for his losses. In July he arrived off the coast of Panama and made plans to attack the small Spanish settlement of Nombre de Dios. Commanding two pinnaces—shallow-draft boats that could ply the shallow waters off the coast—Drake attacked the town by night. The English took the city, where they found a supply of silver bars; but they ended up snagging little of the loot. Drake had been shot and had fainted from loss of blood; to get him to safety, and fearing a Spanish counterattack, his men fled the city.

Despite this initial failure, Drake established a base in Darien and for the next several months conducted raids along the Spanish Main. He was able to penetrate into the interior of Panama, where, from the height of a tree, he beheld afar off the Pacific Ocean. He vowed he would one day sail its waters. In Darien, Drake received help from the Cimarroons—escaped black slaves who wandered the jungles in loose-knit tribes, raiding and plundering their former Spanish masters. With these allies and a group of French privateers, Drake captured a mule team bearing silver to Nombre de Dios for shipment to Spain. Enriched by the Spanish silver, Drake and his men sailed into Portsmouth harbor in England on August 9, 1573.

Queen Elizabeth was so pleased with Drake that she agreed to finance him in another expedition—this time, to circumnavigate the globe. Drake in his ship, the Golden Hind, and four other ships, set out on December 13, 1577. Four months later the fleet reached the coast of Brazil and anchored in the Río de la Plata, where Drake abandoned two of his ships. Continuing down the coast of South America, the small fleet on August 21, 1578 entered the Straits of Magellan. The passage of the straits took 16 days, during which Drake lost a ship, and another returned to England. Now with only one ship, Drake passed up the west coast of South America, seizing and plundering Spanish vessels along the way.

Drake was a terror—the Spanish called him El Draque, “the dragon.” Though he did not murder, rape, and torture the inhabitants of Spanish settlements, as later pirates would do, he desecrated Catholic churches, stealing their precious vessels and destroying crucifixes, statues, and holy pictures.

Destruction of the Spanish fleet on Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela by the English pirate Henry Morgan, April 30, 1669

Drake followed the Pacific coast of South and North America, finally passing into waters lying north of all Spanish settlement. Somewhere along the coast of California, Oregon, or Washington (no one is certain where) the ships anchored in a bay. (According to tradition, this bay is just south of Point Reyes in California.) On the shores of that bay, Drake and his men celebrated the first Protestant religious service in North America, and Drake laid claim to the land for Queen Elizabeth, naming it “New Albion.” From “Drake’s Bay,” the Golden Hind continued northward until she came to the Olympic Peninsula, where, in July 1579, she launched into the open Pacific. Traversing the Pacific and Indian oceans, and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, into the Atlantic, Drake and his men arrived at Plymouth, England, on September 26, 1580. At Portsmouth, Queen Elizabeth, despite her fear of Spain, publicly honored her explorer by knighting him aboard his ship, the Golden Hind. Thereafter he was known as Sir Francis Drake.

Sir Francis continued in the service of his queen. When open hostilities with Spain finally broke out a few years later, Drake commanded a fleet to the West Indies and took the cities of San Domingo, Cartagena in Colombia, and San Agustín in Florida. When in 1588 Felipe II of Spain sent an armada of ships to destroy the English fleet and invade England, Drake served as vice admiral in the small fleet that (with the help of a storm) defeated the enormous flotilla.

Drake died eight years later on an expedition in the West Indies. His body, placed in a lead casket, was cast into the waters near Nombre de Dios, the town he had plundered 16 years before.