In 1585, with hostilities heating up again between England and Spain, the queen gave Drake command of a fleet of 25 ships. Several months after his return, Queen Elizabeth personally knighted him aboard the Golden Hind. He then sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa and arrived back in England’s Plymouth Harbor in September 1580.ĭespite complaints from the Spanish government about his piracy, Drake was honored as the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe and became a popular hero. Heading back west across the Pacific in July 1579, he stopped in the Philippines and bought spices in the Molucca Islands. Drake anchored near today’s San Francisco and claimed the surrounding land, which he called New Albion, for Queen Elizabeth. He claimed to have traveled as far north as 48 degrees North (on parallel with Vancouver, Canada) before extreme cold conditions turned him back. Drake Circumnavigates the GlobeĪfter plundering Spanish ports along the west coast of South America, Drake headed north in search of a passage back to the Atlantic. Drake’s 100-ton flagship, the Pelican (which he later renamed Golden Hind), was the only vessel to reach the Pacific, in October 1578. Of the five-ship fleet, two ships were lost in a storm the other commander, John Wynter, turned one back to England and another disappeared. When they arrived off the coast of Argentina, Drake had one of the men–Thomas Doughty–arrested, tried and beheaded for allegedly plotting a mutiny. The voyage was plagued by conflict between Drake and the two other men tasked with sharing command.
In 1577, Queen Elizabeth commissioned Drake to lead an expedition around South America through the notoriously stormy Straits of Magellan.
He returned to England with a large amount of Spanish treasure, an accomplishment that earned him a reputation as a leading privateer. Drake did just that in 1572, capturing the port of Nombre de Dios (a drop-off point for silver and gold brought from Peru) and crossing the Isthmus of Panama, where he first caught sight of the immense Pacific Ocean. Privateer for the British CrownĪfter leading two successful expeditions to the West Indies, Drake came to the attention of Queen Elizabeth I, who granted him a privateer’s commission, effectively giving him the right to plunder Spanish ports in the Caribbean. Many of their crewmates were killed in the incident, though Drake and Hawkins escaped, and Drake returned to England with what would be a lifelong hatred for Spain and its ruler, King Philip II. When they sailed to New Spain to sell their captives to settlers there (which was against Spanish law), they were trapped by a Spanish attack in the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulua. In 1567, Drake and his cousin John Hawkins sailed to Africa in order to join the fledgling slave trade.
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