Sir Francis Drake

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1:23The door of the lead carriage now opens, and, to an almighty cheer, Elizabeth, Queen of England, emerges into the spring sunshine. The light catches on the innumerable jewels stitched onto her scarlet gown, turning her distinctive red hair into a fiery halo. And she raises a gracious hand in acknowledgement of her subjects. Then she beckons to Marshamore. Hurrying to her side, he escorts her through the crowd, with her pale hand tucked into the crook of his elbow. They head towards a sailing ship, sitting in the dry dock and draped with royal banners in shades of red, blue, and gold. It is the Golden Hind, freshly returned from a perilous three-year circumnavigation of the globe.

2:11Marchement guides Elizabeth along the wooden boards that have been laid over the stinking mud of the riverbank to where a gangplank leads up to the ship itself. A stately train of courtiers follow, and behind them the raucous mass of onlookers, eagerly pushing aboard the famous vessel.

2:32Once Marchement and Elizabeth are safely on the ship's deck, an ear-splitting crack sounds from behind them. The ambassador whirls round, just in time to witness the gangplank splintering. Dozens tumble onto the muddy riverbank below. He starts forward in concern, but those on the ground are already laughing and picking themselves up. It seems no one has been harmed, beyond perhaps some wounded pride and grubby clothes. Relieved, he returns to the Queen and accompanies her across the deck to a carved wooden throne. There, a stout, strong-looking man with a pointed, reddish-blonde beard is already sweeping into a deep bow.

3:19Marchemont has met him recently at court. The Golden Hines captain, Francis Drake.

3:28Elizabeth takes a seat, and the French ambassador stands beside her throne, just as the herald blows a fanfare on a trumpet. it. The chattering crowd falls silent, and in a clear voice the queen bids Drake kneel, before taking hold of a sword offered by one of her guards. Smiling, she jokes about whether she should knight him or behead him, to appease the Spanish king whose ships he insists on raiding. Drake throws his head back, guffawing loudly. When the mirth has subsided, Elizabeth turns to offer Marchemont the sword. With a hint of challenge in her tone, she asks him to dub her new knight.

4:12The ambassador knows that doing as she asks will bind England and France tighter together against Spain, but he cannot publicly refuse. So he bows and takes the blade before stepping forward and gravely touching it to Drake's shoulders in turn. The newly knighted captain remains where he is until his queen speaks the illustrious words, Arise, Sir Francis Drake. A colossal cheer rings out as Drake stands, the sunlight gilding his hair and beard. The dauntless captain of the Golden Hind has become the queen's golden knight.

5:03Nowadays, Sir Francis Drake is most famous for his role in defeating the Armada of 1588 and saving England from a Spanish invasion. By that point in his life, he was already a wealthy and famous seafarer, the first Englishman to sail around the world, knighted by Queen Elizabeth I in recognition of this astounding feat. But though he is remembered in England as a naval hero, Drake spent most of his maritime career as a pirate. feared by the Spanish whose colonies and ships he terrorized. To them he was El Draque, the dragon, with a bounty placed on his head by King Philip II of Spain himself.

5:48So who was the real Francis Drake? Avaricious pirate or patriotic naval commander? How did a boy from an agricultural Devonshire family discover fame and fortune on the high seas? And to what extent is his heroic reputation overshadowed by his darker deeds? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Sir Francis Drake.

6:22The man who will one day become known as Queen Elizabeth's favorite pirate begins life near Tavistock in Devon, southwest England. Despite his later fame, many of the facts of his early life still lie beyond the grasp of historians. Hannah Cusworth is curator of the Atlantic at Royal Museums Greenwich. It's perhaps surprising we don't know 100 % when Drake was born. He was born during the reign of Henry VIII, between sort of 1539 and 1543, but records really vary. He also had, it's said, 11 younger brothers, apparently, which as a mother of one child is absolutely terrifying to me, the idea of having 12 sons.

7:13But his mother, Mary, apparently did it, so it must have been a very chaotic, busy childhood. The family do not remain in Devon for long. Around 1548, they are forced to move to Kent. Competing narratives have sprung up to explain this sudden flight Some reports were that it was as a result of religious tensions that were going on Particularly in Devon there was a religious uprising And it seems as though Francis Drake's father, Edmund, was potentially quite strongly Protestant Or at least we get that through in some of the sources But recently uncovered documents show that Edmund Drake later received a royal pardon for his role in a 1548 fracas and robbery, suggesting this as a likely explanation for the family's relocation.

8:02There is no doubt, however, that the religious tensions of the time are formative to Francis' childhood and adolescence in Kent. Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church occurred shortly before Francis' birth, but during his teenage years, Mary I takes England back into the Roman fold. Then, after her death, the accession of her younger sister Elizabeth sees the firm restoration of Protestantism, the faith to which Francis Drake will cleave. As with his childhood, a precise picture of Drake's early manhood and training as a sailor is hard to paint precisely. He seems to have learned the trade that will make him famous both in Kent and back in Devon.

8:45Francis spent some of his childhood in Kent, developing his skills as a sailor, navigator, spends some time working on a type of boat known as a bark with another mariner, very likely going from across the English Channel to trade with France and what is now Holland and Belgium. But we also know that he spent time in the household of the Hawkins family, who were quite a big family, much wealthier and more established than the Drake family. and they were resident in Plymouth and we know that Drake spent some time as a child in that household and that had a big impact on him too. They were also very much like a seagoing family.

9:30The Hawkins family are kin to the Drakes and their patriarch, William Hawkins, is a renowned trader and seafarer, the first Englishman to sail to Brazil. Drake likely gains experience as a mariner alongside William's sons but this upbringing imbues him with more than the practicalities of sailing. On land he is taught to read, write, and count. At sea he is exposed to people from a variety of backgrounds, and he learns to discuss trade, politics, and foreign affairs, and to dress, talk, and act like a gentleman. These are lessons that Drake, an ambitious social climber, readily absorbs.

10:12It is from the 1560s that we can chart Francis Drake's movements with greater certainty. In this decade, he sails on a series of voyages commanded by his older relative, John Hawkins. But they're not just any voyages. Hawkins is notorious nowadays for his involvement in the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade. Trafficking enslaved people played a significant role in Drake's early voyages. The Hawkins family were, I suppose, at the forefront of changing the kind of patterns of English trade. And John Hawkins was the person who took Francis Drake on some of his early voyages. In 1562, Hawkins, Drake, and about 100 men set out from Plymouth.

11:04And Hawkins had previously been to the Canary Islands where he'd been trading and had found out from there that enslaved people and the trafficking of enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas could generate really sizable profits. So in this voyage in 1562, Drake and Hawkins capture 300 enslaved people in Sierra Leone. And they probably also attacked a number of Portuguese ships on the way over across the Atlantic, and they land in the Americas and sell these trafficked people.

11:39Drake sails on a number of such expeditions, each following a similar pattern. Hawkins buys or captures people in West Africa before shipping them to the Americas and selling them to Spanish colonists. In this period, seven decades after Columbus first reached the so-called New World, Spain's empire is vast, encompassing most of the Caribbean, as well as much of Central and South America. And though the Spanish crown disapproves of unlicensed English merchants trading with its colonies tax-free, it is to these Spanish possessions that Hawkins and Drake ship the Africans they have enslaved. At this point in time, the nature of the transatlantic slave trade is a little bit different to what it ends up becoming later, where it's very race-based and also a lot of the people who are trafficked are going to English plantations.

12:33At this point in time, when Drake and Hawkins are operating, England doesn't have big plantations in Barbados or Jamaica, for example. So it really is about taking enslaved people and then selling them over to Spanish colonists who are demanding these people to work on their plantations or in mines or as domestic workers, for example.

12:57Hawkins pioneers English involvement in the slave trade at a very early date, and is estimated to have trafficked 1 ,500 Africans to the Americas. And though some historians have sought to downplay Drake's culpability in this abhorrent practice, there is no doubt that he participates in and profits from the ventures. It is in fact Hawkins who gives Drake his first command, making him captain of the Judith. part of a four-ship fleet that set sail from Plymouth in 1567. In many ways, it is a repeat of previous journeys, but events take a turn for the worse off the coast of modern-day Mexico at a place called San Juan de Olua.

13:37By this time, Hawkins is firmly in the bad books of the Spanish, having repeatedly violated their trade monopoly in the Americas. But though right now he believes he's negotiated a truce, while he's repairing his ships, he is ambushed by the Spanish. The fleet, under heavy fire, Drake orders the Judith to set sail and return to England. Both men eventually make it home, although many crewmen are killed in the fighting. Hawkins will later write that Drake forsook us in our great misery. But within a few years, they are sailing together once more.

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15:10The profits from these slave voyages allow the new couple to set up home in Plymouth, although Mary is frequently left alone when Francis heads out to sea. Though he is now a married man with a comfortable house and a growing fortune, Drake continues to obsess over that ambush of a few years ago. It's a real defining moment of Drake's career, and it's also where we start to see him turning away from these trading voyages and trafficking of enslaved people for profit more to raiding the Spanish. And it might be, yeah, he was just motivated by revenge. What I find really fascinating about Drake is that he's kind of building this legend of himself in his lifetime and getting stories out there about what he's doing and why he's doing it.

15:58And it does seem as though he does have this hatred of Spain or real kind of fixation on Spain. Now, whether that is religiously motivated, whether that is politically motivated, whether he's just on this massive revenge arc through the rest of his time at sea, I don't necessarily know.

16:19Though disentangling Drake's own myth-making from historical fact is a tricky task, his naval career does become focused on attacking Spanish ships and colonies. At San Juan de Olua, they made a dangerous and implacable enemy. By 1571, Francis Drake is commanding ships in fleets not overseen by the Hawkins family. Building on the knowledge and experience gained in the previous decade, he joins a group of French pirates raiding Spanish outposts in Panama. They spend several months terrorizing poorly defended ships and ports in lightning-fast attacks. These missions are not without peril. In one such expedition, Drake loses two of his brothers, John and Joseph, off the coast of Panama.

17:09The first sustains a gunshot wound, while the second dies of an unknown disease that tears through the crew. Drake orders an autopsy to learn more about the sickness that killed Joseph, attempting to save others with the knowledge gleaned from his brother's corpse.

17:28Notwithstanding the personal cost, this voyage turns out to be one of Drake's most successful. Because it is at this moment that he discovers the route by which the Spanish transport the silver they have mined in South America to the Atlantic coast, from where it is shipped back to Seville. Drake is in his early 30s. He's travelled over to what is often called the Spanish Main. So we're sort of in the Central America Caribbean and to a place called Nombre de Dios. In this sort of expedition, he makes an alliance with a formerly enslaved man called Diego, who is described as a Cimarron. So it's someone who has got his own liberation.

18:11He's kind of run away. He's become free. What ends up happening is that Diego, in an alliance with the Cimarroons and with Drake, they attack a series of mules, like a mule train, with all of the Spanish silver on it. And they capture a lot of this silver, they take it back to England, and Drake is an incredibly wealthy man at this point. Over the coming years, Drake becomes legendary for his raids on the Spanish main. Coastal settlements in the Caribbean Sea, from Mexico down to Colombia and Venezuela. After Drake moves away from raiding and trafficking and enslaved people, historians think he actually made more profit from his raiding activities than he did trading with Hawkins.

18:59And that certainly was a really big motivation behind what Drake was doing, to make money for himself and to make money for the people who were backing his voyages. in some cases, including Queen Elizabeth I. The legal basis for these attacks on Spanish settlements is shaky. To the Spanish, Drake is a pirate and a criminal, plain and simple. But his raiding missions are often funded by leading noblemen and ministers. When the Queen herself backs him, the funds come with tacit royal support, though this can always be withdrawn if he poses too great a diplomatic threat. Though for much of Drake's life, England and Spain are not at war, relations between the two nations are always strained.

19:49As such, it is a fine line that the Protestant Elizabeth must walk between angering Europe's greatest Catholic power and profiting from Drake's raids. when Elizabeth first comes to the throne England and Spain had been very close because Mary had been married to the king of Spain Philip and therefore there was a really close connection between those two countries I think Elizabeth we know her as a real pragmatist and she was very keen I think not to be dragged into what would have been I'm sure a really costly war with Spain Drake's own motives for attacking Spanish possessions and the legal basis under which he believes he operates can perhaps be traced back to the incident at San Juan de Alúa.

20:39Maybe he sees his actions as lawful restitution for goods lost in that attack. But some believe that other forces may have driven him. What is quite hard, I think, for historians to figure out is how much Drake was really motivated by a hatred of Spain. And maybe that hatred was religiously motivated. There are a number of examples of Drake being quite a strong Protestant of taking services aboard his ship. But also it's hard because some of the sources that we have are very much created to portray England as this kind of plucky Protestant nation. And Drake is positioned as someone very much who's kind of a hero within that narrative.

21:28Less high-minded motives have also been suggested for his raids. I think it's also really interesting to notice that he seems to be a really pragmatic guy and an opportunistic guy. and at this time Spain was a major European power and had a lot of wealth that it was deriving from its colonies and imperial activities in the Americas. So whether he really hated Spain or just Spain had the money and he was really good at these kind of smash and grab raids, I don't know if we'll ever be able to determine that one conclusively.

22:06After his attack on the Spanish silver train, Drake returns to Plymouth a wealthy man. With two ships he is captured from the Spanish, he sets himself up as a merchant. In 1575, he's involved in ferrying English troops over to Antrim in Northern Ireland. The campaign there culminates in a bloody massacre of around 500 men, women, and children on Rathlin Island, though Drake's involvement in the atrocity is once again unclear. Soon afterwards, Drake embarks on his most ambitious expedition to date. With Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's Secretary of State, a plan is concocted for a circumnavigation of the globe.

22:47Hawkins, Walsingham and Elizabeth I all invest personally in the voyage. We really get the sense that part of the circumnavigation is for profit and the route is planned to take these raiding opportunities that Drake excels at. So they're thinking about crossing the Atlantic and raiding across the coast of what is then Spanish-controlled South America. I think there's also a real interest in opening up new trade routes and you get this real confluence of profit and exploration, whereby perhaps at the time they weren't really seen as two distinct things. You were exploring in order to find new trade routes or new opportunities to make money.

23:34The small fleet set sail from Plymouth in November 1577, with Drake commanding from the Pelican, soon renamed the Golden Hind. It is a 150-ton ship, double-planked and lead-sheathed for strength, and carries 11 guns. The co-commander of the fleet is a nobleman and soldier named Thomas Doughty, a friend of Drake's since the Antrim campaign and who has been instrumental in planning the expedition. The journey starts inauspiciously. Fierce storms force them to return to port, and it is not until the 13th of December that they once again brave the open seas. They first sail south to the Moroccan coast, stealing the cargo of any Spanish ships unlucky enough to cross their path.

24:22Sometimes the crews of such vessels are taken prison and ransomed. At other times, they are abandoned on shore and their ships burned. From Morocco, the fleet turns west and crosses the Atlantic Ocean. It is on this leg of the voyage that the relationship between Drake and the aristocratic Doughty begins to sour. The command, when they set out, appears to be a little bit unclear in terms of whether they're joint captains or whether Doughty is more senior. But there is a number of accusations that Drake levels against Doughty, which range from, like, stealing to witchcraft. So really the full gamut.

25:03And Drake strips Doughty of part of his command, which is obviously really offensive to Doughty. I think it's important to remember that Drake comes from relatively humble beginnings, and Doughty would have definitely seen himself as, like, Drake's kind of social superior.

25:22After relieving him of his command, Drake initially ties Doughty to the mast. It's a humiliating punishment, but worse is to come. The following June, the small fleet arrives off the coast of southern Argentina. Drake orders all his men ashore before assembling an impromptu courtroom. Claiming that the Queen had given him command, he accuses Doughty of mutiny, alongside a litany of other crimes, and forces a hastily selected jury to decide his fate.

26:01It is the 2nd of July, 1578. On Argentina's Atlantic coast, a harsh winter wind whips across a rocky promontory that juts out into the restless ocean. Thomas Doughty shivers inside his thick woolen cloak. On his knees, on the floor of a large tent, he's trying not to think about the cold seeping into his joints. He glances at Francis Drake, kneeling next to him. The other man seems immune to any discomfort.

26:35A chaplain enters, accompanied by a blast of frigid air. Doughty bows his head and interlaces his fingers, murmuring along as he is led in a prayer. After a few minutes, he opens his mouth to receive the communion wafer. The minister intones a blessing, and then Drake is standing, offering Doughty his hand and pulling him to his feet. He slings an arm around his shoulders and leads him to the other side of the tent, where a long table has been set up. Waving Doughty to a chair, Drake pours him a glass of wine before taking one for himself. Dishes of steaming stew are brought in and set before the men, along with another bottle of wine.