POSTSCRIPT

In recent years the great stories of history have enjoyed a revival in interest, and among academic historians narrative has regained some of the ground formerly surrendered to social and economic analysis. But while the lives of important figures are again being deemed worthy of serious investigation, our knowledge of Sir Francis Drake has moved forward fitfully and his place in our history seems ever more uncertain. Of interest there is, however, plenty. Of five book-length biographical treatments that have appeared over the last fifteen years, one¹ is refreshingly detached, while another goes part of the way towards the comprehensive scholarly reappraisal still so very much needed.

Harry Kelsey’s Sir Francis Drake is the first attempt at a major academic life since Julian Corbett’s classic Drake and the Tudor Navy, and is based upon prodigious research in archives and libraries throughout the United States and Europe. None can speak too highly of the author’s outstanding industry and resourcefulness as a researcher, or of his sophisticated textual analysis of sources and multilingual skills. His complementary books on Drake and Hawkins suggested that a successor to the great authorities of the past, to Corbett, Williamson and Andrews, had been found. Though his research unearthed relatively little new information about Drake, Kelsey certainly makes important contributions, clarifying aspects of the story and historiography, and checking overused published transcripts against the originals.²

But books are a matter of judgement as well as research, and Kelsey’s Sir Francis Drake is a relatively uncomplicated man. Simply a pirate from first to last, he is therefore unworthy, and there is little more to him than that. He is not really capable of acting from better motives, or indeed of playing a significant part in British naval history. If he evolves, it is largely to acquire more iniquities. He remains morally and professionally stunted, guilty of desertion, piracy, murder, disloyalty, deception, fraud, brutality, greed, incompetence and neglect of duty. The list expands almost without relief.

There is, of course, much with which Drake can fairly be charged, but Kelsey is willing to construe almost anything to his disadvantage. The sailor’s childlessness, probably the result of medical infertility, becomes evidence of ‘cold … personal relations’. His attempt to check an epidemic disease by ordering an autopsy on one of the deceased (he chose the body of his own brother to disarm criticism) is turned into ‘extreme callousness’, Drake’s resolution in persisting with a West Indian expedition after several setbacks, including the death of two of his brothers, is used to illustrate the lack of ‘a strong sense of family attachment’. And his appeal to gentlemen and commoners alike to set aside social distinctions and work together aboard his ships is interpreted as a cynical attempt to recover lost standing among the common seamen. When Kelsey construes such matters as these so darkly, he makes hay with contemporary complaints. Thus Frobisher’s attack on Drake after the Armada campaign is blown into a far-fetched and unsupported charge that Drake abandoned his post in the midst of the crucial battle of Gravelines so that he could land prisoners he wanted to ransom and secure from injury.³

Such a catalogue of inadequacies and reprehensible traits certainly helps to explain why some contemporaries, as David B. Quinn has shown, ‘wished him no good’, but hardly the many ‘won over and gripped by affection for him’. Kelsey assures us, instead, that Drake had ‘no close friends,’ something he could not possibly know. This denigration is given additional force by the author’s failure to provide any context that could help explain Drake’s actions, or at least put them into historical perspective. Thus, for example, we are told that Drake possessed ‘a taste for violence,’ and so – by the standards of today’s western democracies – he did. But in the world of sixteenth-century warfare, sharpened by religious divisions, when whole armies and communities were routinely slaughtered in Ireland, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere, Drake’s operations were comparatively bloodless. Enemies familiar with that world regarded Drake as generally humane, and said so. Similarly, Kelsey rightly raises the quality of Drake’s leadership. The admiral’s arrogance, strength and independence certainly annoyed many colleagues, including Grenville, Frobisher and Borough, and he was deeply suspicious of opposition. But it also needs to be said that such problems were not entirely of Drake’s making, and rooted in a society that equated rank and birth. The resentment of officers who found themselves inferior to Drake in rank but his superior by birth played its part in such disputes as those with Doughty and Knollys.⁴

Perhaps most significantly, Kelsey allows his dislike of Drake to lead him to some very questionable, even eccentric, conclusions. Drake, he says, was not particularly godly. Religious professions in his letters were forgeries and his divine services mere tricks to discipline sailors or entertain Spanish prisoners with a ‘show’ – a laborious mosaic of explanations more fanciful than the obvious conclusion.

Drake’s powerful Protestantism was appreciated by all the great scholars of the past – Corbett, Williamson, Andrews and J. H. Patty among them. There is, in fact, a case for investigating whether the reformed religion proliferated among West Country mariners not only because of events in England but through association with aggrieved Huguenot ports, where letters of reprisal were sometimes available.⁵

Similarly, one suspects that few historians would agree with the claim that Drake had no great contemporary reputation in England. After the Armada’s defeat it was said, for instance, that Howard, the admiral of the English fleet, was alienated by popular talk giving ‘all the credit … to Drake.’⁶ And it is certainly nonsense to suggest that the English authorities were too suspicious of Drake’s abilities to entrust him with significant commands. Quite the reverse, for as early as 1581 Lord Burghley was advising Elizabeth to put Drake in command of ‘a very great and royal war’ on behalf of Dom Antonio, while the queen actually gave him a series of important commands between 1585 and 1595, two (those of 1585 and 1589) successively the largest that had ever left local waters. It was inevitable that Elizabeth’s existing Lord Admiral would have commanded the country’s first fleet in 1588, and Drake’s position as his vice-admiral represented a remarkable advance of status, not a demotion.⁷ When that fleet divided, Drake was raised to command the part not under Howard. In late 1587 and early 1588, for example, it was proposed that Drake cover Ireland and the west or attack Spain, while Howard remained in the narrow seas, and in 1589 the counter-armada devolved upon Drake when the proportion of the queen’s to private ships fell below that considered appropriate to the Lord Admiral.⁸

Kelsey’s Drake is a work of outstanding research that every serious scholar will want to mine and consult, but its value is considerably vitiated by the author’s transparent hostility towards his subject. This is too bad, because a project of this depth could have provided the comprehensive and measured assessment long overdue. It has, instead, greatly accentuated the need for that work, which is now a necessity.

In labouring the old charge that Drake was merely a pirate, Kelsey stirs a cauldron that has simmered for centuries. In his admirably balanced examination of Drake’s sixteenth-century reputation, Quinn points out that the English publications of the day were ‘almost wholly … complimentary,’ though in Spain the sailor was denounced for his robberies. Opinion therefore divided on nationalist and religious lines. However, private opinion blurred the matter considerably, with some Englishmen, whether from envy, personal animus or principle, depreciating ‘the master thief of the unknown world’, and a number of Spaniards expressing profound admiration for their adversary.⁹ It was inevitable that a man who rose so sharply to prominence on the back of exploits that could be disparaged, and whose low birth, arrogance and self-confidence were notorious, would have incited criticism.

The Victorians raised Drake far above the rascally sea-dog tradition. Reacting against the Whig interpretation of history, which saw the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688 as the fulcrum of modern England, James A. Froude’s classic History of England (1858–70) proclaimed the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 to be the crucial foundation. It provided a relatively tolerant environment in which a free-spirited entrepreneurial Protestantism set England upon the path of imperial greatness. The hardy sixteenth-century seamen were thus the harbingers of the greatest empire on earth. Charles Kingsley and Henry Newbolt enshrined similar ideas in literature, but it was Julian Corbett who fashioned them into the first great work in British naval historiography. Drake and the Tudor Navy, prompted by the misplaced criticism that greeted the author’s earlier short life of Drake, established the tough Devonian as a seminal figure in the making of English naval superiority.¹⁰

Critics of Drake were, even then, not far away. Scholarly detractors included E. G. R. Taylor and Henry R. Wagner, but nothing infuriated Drake’s admirers more than attempts to dismiss him as a pirate. The combative E. M. Tenison, whose massive miscellania relating to Elizabethan England (1933–61) brimmed with revisionary interpretations, vociferously attacked proponents of ‘the bold buccaneer fallacy’ and interested Geoffrey Callender, the first director of the National Maritime Museum, in writing a detailed refutation, though the project was first disrupted by the Second World War and ultimately ended by Callender’s death in 1946.¹¹ Tenison, like the formidable Elizabethan historian A. L. Rowse, preferred to view Drake as an instrument of national energy and policy. When Rowse commissioned Kenneth R. Andrews to contribute a short biography of Drake for a series he was editing in the 1960s, he not only flatly rejected the result – forcing Drake’s Voyages to find an alternative publisher – but lost few subsequent opportunities to denounce it in unequivocal terms. Even Rowse’s review of my own book recalled how Andrews had ‘turned in a book treating Drake simply as a pirate; I turned it down; I was not going to have it. The denigration of Drake is simply bad history by third-raters who do not qualify on that age and time.’¹² A learned but sometimes intolerant academic, Rowse tended to brand people who disagreed with him as ‘third-rate’. In this instance the charge was unjust, for Andrews was not only an accomplished scholar who had sought to ground Drake in the widespread maritime plunder of his day, but also one of the great seaman’s admirers. Nevertheless, the affair illustrated sensitivities at large.

The central thesis of Kelsey’s book is therefore an old sore, but recent scholars have emphasized the dangers of imposing modern concepts of piracy and privateering upon times that operated within different moral and legal parameters. In Drake’s day the sea was largely lawless debatable territory beyond the control of terrestrial powers, and the scene of habitual private and commercial warfare that flourished during both war and peace. That warfare was generally tolerated by recognized states, providing it was not directed against their own subjects or provoked excessive retaliation, and the issues between aggressor and aggrieved were usually matters for individuals, not nations. There were few effective means of redress, though a despoiled merchant might apply to his government for letters of reprisal under marcher law, and receive sanction to seize goods to the value of his losses from nationals of the offending nation. European seafarers, consequently, learned to live in a difficult dangerous world in which the distinctions between merchant and corsair, trade and plunder, and peace and war were blurred. Violence was a necessary tool, used in defence and retaliation as well as opportunist plunder.

In Europe change was underway and states were beginning to extend jurisdiction over local seas, but none of this held sway west of the Azores. Spain, for example, tried to shut foreigners out of the West Indies to protect her shipment of American bullion, but such pretensions were unenforceable, repudiated by other nations and incited attack. Even Spain herself acknowledged that her European treaties had no authority in the West, which was effectively a no man’s land beyond the ability of any state to control. Spaniards referred to Drake as a ‘corsario’ rather than a ‘pirata’. His raids of 1570 to 1573 were not authorized by his government, and undoubtedly reflected opportunism and self-enrichment, but they were also of a piece with the maritime world which had spawned him. He had, he believed, suffered at San Juan d’Ulua, and though Elizabeth had declined to issue letters of reprisal at a time of unusual tension between England and Spain, Drake took the matter into his own hands, generously recouping his losses in a traditional way. As Rodger has argued, ‘No prince or state then possessed or claimed any monopoly on the use of force [at sea], which remained a normal means of settling all sorts of private as well as public disputes.’¹³

If Drake was a more morally ambiguous figure in his own time than twentieth-century partisans of either stripe have portrayed him, the facts about his career also remain contentious. Harry Kelsey’s investigation of his family and childhood uncovered interesting material, though the reconstruction does not entirely convince. The theory that Edmund Drake, father of Francis, was a priest before he left Devon rests on no satisfactory direct evidence, and since clerical celibacy was required until 1549 it sits uncomfortably with his marriage and children. However, Kelsey has brought Edmund’s career in Kent into much greater focus. Edmund was first a curate at Upchurch in 1553, and later a curate and vicar from 1559 until 1566. It seems that without a university degree, he was entitled to read homilies but not preach. Kelsey’s research also raises doubts that Drake’s mother was one of the Mylwayes. It suggests the Mylwayes Edmund knew were based in Kent, not Devon, and probably became associated with him long after Drake’s birth. Edmund’s will, created shortly before his death, does refer to ‘my father Melwaye’, and identifies two of that name, a Clement and a Richard. But he may have been speaking affectionately of a patron rather than a relative. Six years earlier Clement Mylwaye, for example, had leased the rectory of Upchurch and supplied Edmund with an income.¹⁴

Drake’s childhood rests on the accounts of Camden and Howes, which Kelsey infers contradict one another. Accordingly, he discards Camden’s story that Drake was raised in Kent, and lodges him instead with the Hawkins family of Plymouth. Indeed, in his second book Kelsey claims ‘young Francis Drake, a cousin from Tavistock … later recalled that there were a dozen such fellows in the Hawkins establishment when he lived there in the 1550s’,¹⁵ But this goes beyond his source, Edmund Howes, who merely asserts that Francis was one of twelve brothers ‘brought up under his kinsman, Sir John Hawkins.’ There is nothing about the 1550s, nor any implication that Drake was the source of the story. Moreover, Howes may not even have spoken literally. Arguably, the sense of the passage was not that the Hawkins house bulged with immature Drakes, but that the latter were raised under the patronage of their kinsman. Though both the Camden and Howes accounts were probably embellished there is nothing inherently irreconcilable about them. If they had been incompatible, Camden, who knew Drake, would have had an advantage over Howes, who had no known connection with his subject.¹⁶

Again, Kelsey does sterling work on the Hawkins family and their work, but the reconstruction of Drake’s early voyages treads thin ice. In Sir John Hawkins he argues that Drake sailed on five Hawkins voyages, including all three of John’s slaving ventures, as well as that commanded by Lovell. But his source – again Howes – hardly bears this construction. It refers to an unidentified voyage to Biscay as a purser, a trip that may or may not have had a Hawkins connection, and to two slaving voyages. One is undoubtedly Hawkins’s final disastrous venture, and the other – said to have occurred two years before – can reasonably be presumed to be Lovell’s. That said, Kelsey does document little known early connections between Drake and Hawkins. In 1576 they collaborated in importing goods from the Ionian island of Zante under the licence of Acerbo Velutelli, and Drake lost one of his ships in the venture, shipwrecked near Dover.¹⁷

In recent years hard work has been done on Drake’s travels, much of it in the field. Dean Webster, Michael Turner and John Thrower have closely examined the geography of Drake’s operations in Panama in 1570–73. Among the latest findings are a possible identification of Port Pheasant, Drake’s mysterious hideout, in the south-east corner of Caledonia Bay, Colombia; a clarification of the course of the Camino Real (Royal Road) that carried treasure across the isthmus; and an identification of the approximate site of Drake’s ambush of the mule trains inside the junction of the Nombre de Dios and Juan-Miguel rivers. Thrower has estimated that the raid may have netted nearly £57,000 (Elizabethan) in gold alone.¹⁸

The circumnavigation continues to consume more ink than any other episode in Drake’s life except the Armada campaign. My belief that the venture was primarily Drake’s, rather than a brainchild of the Hawkins brothers or other backers, and that trade and exploration were secondary considerations to plunder, though at odds with Kenneth Andrews’s important paper of 1968, seems to have been shared by most subsequent writers. For that reason I suspect that while Elizabeth supported the voyage, she declined to supply anything on paper that might have compromised her had Drake fallen into Spanish hands. The discovery elements of the voyage, muddied by an official policy of secrecy that followed Drake’s return, are perhaps becoming clearer, though red herrings abound. There seems little doubt that Drake discovered Cape Horn in 1578, and that the ‘utmost island of Terra Incognita’ on which he landed, and which he claimed for England under the name of Elizabeth Island, was in fact Horn Island. Utilizing the latitudes and observations recorded at the time, early maps, and the bearings of the various possibilities, Raymond F. Aker has satisfactorily disposed of a ‘poorly considered notion’ that Drake might have landed upon Henderson Island instead.¹⁹

Drake’s second geographical discovery was ascertaining the correct trend of the Chilean coast, made on his way northwards. His explorations in the northern Pacific still raise difficult questions, however. In search of a supposed passage home, he reached latitude 42° north on 3 June 1579, but two days later, the weather turning inclement, he ran towards the shore and made a landfall in a ‘bad bay’. As noted inside, explicit statements in some of the sources, the cold weather and the alleged westward trend of the land suggest that Drake reached as far north as 48°, but this would have been impossible within the two-day period available. Weighing the sailing qualities of sixteenth-century ships and the prevailing winds, Raymond F. Aker and Sir Simon Cassels have recently estimated that Drake’s northern landfall was made in the lee of Cape Arago (43° 23 min. N.). The Oregon dunes between 43 and 44° north conform to the ‘low and reasonable plaine’ described in the sources, but there are apparent incongruities, including the wintry weather the Elizabethans recorded for June and their report that the hills were ‘covered with snow’. Cassels shows that the striking white sand of the dunes led later navigators, including Cook in 1788 and Vancouver in 1792, to mistake it for snow, and cites new dendrochronological (tree) research conducted by a team from the University of Arizona to confirm that unusually bad weather conditions prevailed on the coast in 1579.²⁰

In the face of strong north-westerlies and bad weather, Drake abandoned his quest for the northern passage, and headed south, looking for a secure haven where the Golden Hind could be careened and prepared for a trans-Pacific voyage. The location of Drake’s anchorage, and the colony he claimed for England, has aroused more controversy than it deserves, and only a few years ago Brian Kelleher placed it in Campbell Cove, inside Bodega Head, California. But the evidence overwhelmingly favours Drake’s Estero in Drake’s Bay, a little further south, in present Marin County. There really is only one site that comfortably fits the contemporary evidence, a ‘faire and good baye’ in the region of 38° north, with ‘a convenient and fit harborough’, ‘white bancks and cliffes … towards the sea’ and islands ‘not farre without’. Raymond F. Aker and Edward Von der Porten of the Drake Navigators Guild have recently provided a succinct summary of the detailed historical, archaeological, geographical, anthropological and cartographical research done at this site, and it needs no elaboration here. I think it high time the United States register of National Historic Landmarks officially recognized Drake’s Estero as the Elizabethan anchorage.²¹

No aspect of Drake’s career has suffered more false leads than the site of Nova Albion. Matters began reasonably satisfactorily, and Henry Briggs accurately located the anchorage on his 1620s map, but the issue was clouded by James Burney, whose Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean (1803–17) questioned the location without ever having examined the alternatives. In 1936 a plate purporting to have been erected by Drake in 1579 was found near San Francisco bay, further obscuring the picture for the forty or so years it took to reveal the artefact as a fake. In a new misdirection, Samuel Bawlff has written two books to prove that Drake made his North American landfall as far north as 50°. Even more, he has his hero then proceeding further north, rather than south, and completing fantastic peregrinations around the islands of British Columbia and Alaska. Only after penetrating Chatham Strait in 57° does he give up the quest for the northern passage and return south.²²

There is simply no evidence for this adventure, which even Bawlff admits is ‘impossible’ to reconcile with the records of the voyage. But that gives him no insurmountable problem. Drake’s voyage was so politically sensitive, the author explains, that its details, including the ‘true location’ of Nova Albion, were kept secret, and the public evidence falsified to mislead. The contemporary maps, Bawlff insists, were ‘cryptograms’ and facts, latitudes and details were fabricated. Thus all inconvenient statements in the records can be discarded in order to fit the imaginary odyssey into Drake’s itinerary. Even the ethnographic data relating to the natives the English encountered in Nova Albion, which by no stretch of imagination could be held to describe the striking culture of the north-west coast Indians, does not weigh in the balance.

In England there was certainly some delicacy about the route Drake followed in the Pacific. For example, the first tract to be published on Drake, Nicholas Breton’s Discourse of 1581, was delayed until the completion of difficult negotiations with Spain. But while all historians have to be alert to issues of authenticity in the materials to hand, their speculation must in the end be bounded by serious evidence of some kind, however inconvenient it may be to any preferred solution. Once evidence is discarded merely because it exists, and a virtue is made of the lack of evidence, the only bounds that remain are the author’s imagination and gullibility. Bawlff has simply carved a hole from the accepted record, and filled it with a fictional ‘secret’ odyssey of his own creation.

Drake’s later voyages have attracted much less attention than the circumnavigation, but worthwhile accounts have appeared. Simon Adams has used new material to re-examine the origins of Drake’s West Indian raid of 1585. He shows how the campaign evolved from a plan to take a fleet to the Moluccas in 1584, first to renew the trade connections Drake had made five years before, and latterly to raise the Portuguese East Indies against Spain under the flag of Dom Antonio. Elizabeth ventured £10,000 and two ships in the enterprise, but it was aborted early in 1585, possibly because of fears that Drake would be away too long at a critical time. A more close-range operation evolved. Since Drake’s commission and instructions have not survived, Adams speculates that the naval campaign of 1585 was not intended to free English ships embargoed by Spain, as popularly believed. It was bad weather that brought Drake to Bayona. Rather, his aim was to intercept the Spanish treasure flotas, either in the West Indies or off the coast of Spain. Delays frustrated these intentions, and Drake substituted a secondary plan to raid the West Indian possessions. This reconstruction confirms the central place Drake held in commercial and naval planning after his circumnavigation.²³

Other historians have written usefully of Drake’s Cadiz raid, the Portugal expedition and the final voyage of Drake and Hawkins in 1595.²⁴ The Armada campaign of 1588 naturally inspires the most scholarship, and continued disagreement. Did the ‘racebuilt’ galleons of the English confer a decisive advantage, or have the merits of Spain’s own warship development been overshadowed by the cumbersome Italian, Flemish and German merchantmen that comprised half of the Armada and tainted it as a lumbering convoy? How superior was English artillery and gunnery? Has the supposed advantage the English gained from the use of more mobile carriages been exaggerated, or the superiority of the Spanish in bronze, rather than inferior cast iron, pieces been neglected? One thing is certain. As argued within, the English made little impression upon the Armada in the battles in the Channel. A fresh calculation of the Spanish losses shows that only 117 of their ships got in action, of which three were lost wholly or in part by accident, one was sunk and two forced aground during the fighting. Total losses after the flight around the British Isles amounted to thirty-five ships, less than commonly believed. Morale, however, was less robust. A newly published source has graphically portrayed the divisions that opened up between the Spanish commanders. After the defeat at Gravelines, two of the senior officers, Leiva and Recalde, were for trying their strength with the English fleet again, while Medina Sidonia, who commanded the Armada, was facing up to the possibility of outright surrender. The council decided that their powder, shot and supplies were not up to fighting, and opted for flight, but the different dispositions of the leaders remained. Leiva accused colleagues of cowardice. ‘If it should thunder one night, our fleet will run away,’ he wrote. On his part, Medina Sidonia carried his respect for the English to the grave, and in 1592 referred to Drake as ‘a great seaman and gifted soldier’.²⁵

Our knowledge of the English tactics remains sketchy, blighted by the paucity of information. Pierson has suggested that during the battle off the Isle of Wight Drake’s division occupied the centre, with Howard’s, rather than the right flank – as Corbett had concluded – but the argument is speculative one way or the other.²⁶ The most perceptive contribution to the subject has been made by N.A.M. Rodger, who in depth, scope and originality is arguably the greatest British naval historian since Corbett. His valuable paper disposes of any lingering ideas that the English tactics were dominated by their experiences as ‘privateers’. Rodger emphasizes that by 1588 the English had united the advantages of the sailing ship to the offensive power of the war galley. Early in the century galleys had achieved a fearsome reputation by mounting heavy guns ahead and astern and protecting their vulnerable flanks by a line-abreast formation. English sailing ships partly followed suit, mounting their main weaponry on the bow and stern, and deploying their broadsides as secondary batteries. Battle tactics maximized these advantages. ‘Privateers’ interested in taking prizes used the weather gauge to charge and deliver ‘the prow’ (that is, fire ahead from the bow) and perhaps a broadside. The purpose was to soften up opponents before closing and boarding. In the Armada campaign, however, the English did not attempt to close and board. They remained at a distance, subjecting enemy ships to repeated fire.²⁷

That fire was delivered by ships charging in line ahead, successively giving ‘the prow’ as they approached and then, by hauling on a parallel course, a broadside. Each ship then retired to reload for another charge, yielding room for the following ship to take her place in the meantime. As one contemporary explained, ‘In the first place, your [bow] chase guns are to be given; and coming up somewhat nearer, your whole broadside in order, as your pieces will be brought to bear. This done, you are to run a good berth ahead or beyond your enemy’s ship, if it may be, and then edge up into the wind … so … your consort … may have the opportunity to come up with the enemy and do as you have done.’ Repeated fire was not primarily achieved within each ship, but by a succession of ships, each discharging her guns before temporarily withdrawing. Each English ship, Rodger estimates, fired her guns only once an hour. Frobisher alone, perhaps, misunderstood the tactics, for when Drake declined to close at Gravelines and retired to reload, he accused him of cowardice. Yet Drake’s actions exemplify the English practice. He led his division into the battle in line-ahead formation, delivered his prow and broadside, and then – in Frobisher’s words – ‘kept his luff, and was glad that he was gone again’. Indeed, in the same battle Drake may have later elaborated the English tactics by ‘letting fly every way from both her broadsides’. In this manoeuvre the ship luffed up after the first broadside to fire from the stern, and then came round on the opposite tack to present her unengaged broadside before retiring to reload.²⁸

Not surprisingly, Drake’s career, rather than his private life, has occupied the attentions of recent historians, and we know so little about him at home that the smallest snippets paint pleasing pictures. His young wives figure in recent findings, Mary possibly taking up with another man in the belief that her husband – then in the Pacific – had died, and Elizabeth loitering at Richard Drake’s house at Esher, where she delighted in entertaining Don Pedro de Valdes, captured by her husband in 1588.²⁹ There are more details of Sir Francis’s property, including his half-share of Sidbury Manor in Devon, purchased in 1582 and partly sub-let as a sheep pasture to one James Huyshe five years later. And we see Drake dining with Mayor Philip Holworthy of Bridgewater and paying for a peal of the bells at Yeovil in 1583 or 1584.³⁰ At or about court he associated much with his great patron, the Earl of Leicester. In Westminster for the parliamentary session of March 1585, Drake visited Leicester House, where he and George Gifford relieved the Earl of forty-one pounds at the gaming table.³¹ Another protégé of Leicester’s was the courtier Walter Ralegh, knighted in 1584. Drake may have been related to Ralegh through the Drakes of Ashe in Devon, but must often have met him in maritime circles or about Leicester. We now know that it was Ralegh who wheedled from the queen permission for Drake to visit Leicester in the Netherlands in 1586.³²

We will never know Drake as we know, say, Nelson, or even Marlborough, for the personal letters and papers which might once have provided a foundation for that understanding have largely disappeared. But considering that he was a sixteenth-century commoner, his life is surprisingly recoverable, more so than Admiral Robert Blake’s, who was born of more favoured parents three years after Drake’s death. In Drake’s case the problem of inadequate documentation is compounded by acute difficulties in interpretation. The subject almost immediately engages powerful personal, religious and national bias, let alone the guilt that dominated so much of the writing on imperial history in the later twentieth century. For some time prospects for the satisfactory academic biography of Drake that is still needed have not seemed bright. The last generation of British scholars specializing in Tudor overseas endeavour, a distinguished community that produced, among others, David Quinn and Kenneth Andrews, appeared to have few obvious successors. But naval and maritime history is belatedly showing signs of a renaissance, and a new portrait of Drake that is both comprehensive and convincing may yet emerge. If so, it will be done by an industrious scholar able to clear away an ever-developing mythology and stand aside from destructive prejudices, and who above all will place and judge Drake in his own Elizabethan world.

¹ Peter Whitfield, Sir Francis Drake (2004).

² Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake, the Queen’s Pirate (New Haven, 1998) and his Sir John Hawkins, Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (New Haven, 2003). For a competent review of the former, written by N.A.M. Rodger, see New York Times, 25 October 1998.

³ Kelsey, Drake, 66–7, 136–7, 393.

⁴ David B. Quinn, Sir Francis Drake as Seen by His Contemporaries (Providence, RI, 1996), 12, 14; Kelsey, Drake, 66, 193. For a fine study of how Drake’s style of command and success helped provoke unreasoning hostility in one contemporary critic, see James McDermott, Martin Frobisher, Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven, 2001).

⁵ Cheryl A. Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men. The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580–1603 (Westport, Conn, 2003), 114–23; N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea (1997), 195; N. A. M. Rodger, ‘The New Atlantic: Naval Warfare in the Sixteenth Century’, John B. Hattendorf and Richard W. Unger, eds, War at Sea in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Woodbridge, 2003), 233–47, p. 244; Jan Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1500–1650. Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (2000), 151–2; Kelsey, Drake, 393.

⁶ Neil Hanson, The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the Spanish Armada (2003), 465.

⁷ For ranks, see Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 297.

⁸ Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (1998), 225; Simon Adams, ‘The Battle That Never Was: The Downs and the Armada Campaign’, in M. J. Rodriguez-Salgado and Simon Adams, eds, England, Spain and the Gran Armada, 1585–1604 (Edinburgh, 1991), 173–96, p. 189; John S. Nolan, Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World (Exeter, 1997), chap. 8.

⁹ Quinn, Sir Francis Drake, 1.

¹⁰ For some of these ideas, see Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth. An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford, 2002), chap. 5; Donald M. Schurman, Julian S. Corbett, 1854–1922. Historian of British Maritime Policy from Drake to Jellicoe (1982), chap. 2; and Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Heroes (London, 2004).

¹¹ Tenison to Robert Parkinson, March 1957, from a copy in possession of the author.

¹² Weekend Telegraph, 16 June 1990.

¹³ Rodger, ‘The New Atlantic’, 247; Glete, Warfare at Sea, chap. 9. For the system of reprisal, see also David Loades, The Tudor Navy (1992).

¹⁴ Kelsey, Drake, 405.

¹⁵ Kelsey, Hawkins, 8.

¹⁶ Edmund Howes, The Annales, or General Chronicle of England (1615), 807. Howes was continuing the Chronicles of John Stow. Susan Jackson identifies Hawkins as the second cousin of Drake in The Drake Broadside (the journal of the Drake Exploration Society, published since 1997), 316.

¹⁷ Kelsey, Drake, 75, and Hawkins, 149.

¹⁸ See, for example, John Thrower, The Lost Treasure of Sir Francis Drake (Powerstock, Dorset, 1996); The Drake Broadside, 43–6, 205–207, 319–25; and Michael Turner, In Drake’s Wake: The Early Voyages (Boston, Lines., 2005). The other possibility for Port Pheasant is Bahia Zapzurro.

¹⁹ For what Aker considered ‘bare bones’ summaries of his identification, see Raymond F. Aker, ‘Francis Drake and Cape Horn’, Sea History, 80 (1996–97): 12–13. and ‘Sir Francis Drake Discovered Cape Horn’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 84 (1998): 81–4. Aker’s work was assisted by Peter Stanford, editor of the US National Maritime Historical Society’s journal, Sea History. Kelsey, Drake, 124–36. supports the Henderson Island theory with an interesting but ultimately unconvincing attempt to explain away contrary evidence.

²⁰ Sir Simon Cassels, ‘Where Did Drake Careen the Golden Hind in June/July 1579? A Mariner’s Assessment’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 89 (2003): 260–71. For a case that Drake reached as far north as modern Washington State, see Brian T. Kelleher, Drake’s Bay: Unravelling California’s Great Maritime Mystery (Cupertino, CA, 1997), 353–8.

²¹ Raymond F. Aker and Edward Von der Porten, Discovering Francis Drake’s California Harbor (Palo Alto, CA, 2000), which contains the most authoritative track of Drake’s circumnavigation. I reviewed this publication in The Mariner’s Mirror, 87 (2001): 491–2. Field research into Drake’s circumnavigation has vindicated the general accuracy of contemporary latitudes and descriptions of places. Notwithstanding the erroneous latitude given for Drake’s northern thrust, Aker and Kelleher both found the latitudes given in The World Encompassed, the fullest source, to be generally sound. Readings taken on land varied from the true latitude by an average of only about nine minutes; those taken on board ship slightly more. See Kelleher, Drake’s Bay, 138–9. The margin of error could place Drake’s Californian anchorage in several sites around 38° north. Drake’s Estero, within Drake’s Bay, is actually situated in 38° 2 minutes north. But the physical description of Nova Albion cannot be gainsaid. The islands mentioned, for example, have to be the Farallon Islands about fifteen miles from Drake’s Bay. There are no alternatives north of the Santa Barbara Channel.

²² Samuel Bawlff, Sir Francis Drake’s Secret Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America, A.D. 1579 (Salt Spring Island, BC, 2001) and The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake (2003). These works may have been suggested by the publicity that accompanied Bob Ward’s claim that Drake careened his ship at Whale Cove, Oregon, in 44° 45 minutes north, for which see Bob Ward, ‘Lost Harbor Found! The Truth About Drake and the Pacific’, The Map Collector, no. 45, Winter 1988, and Helen Wallis, ‘Further Comments on the “Lost Harbor”’, The Map Collector, no. 49, Winter 1989.

²³ Simon Adams, ‘The Outbreak of the Elizabethan Naval War Against the Spanish Empire: The Embargo of May 1585 and Sir Francis Drake’s West Indies Voyage’, in Rodriguez-Salgado and Adams, eds, England, Spain and the Gran Armada, 45–69. For a re-examination of Philip Sidney’s involvement with this voyage, see Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney, A Double Life (2000), 269–74.

²⁴ See, for example: Peter Pierson, Commander of the Armada: The Seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia (1989), chap. 4; Nolan, Sir John Norreys, chaps 8–9; and Richard T. Spence, The Privateering Earl (Stroud, Gloucs., 1995), whose valuable account of the Earl of Cumberland’s capture of Puerto Rico sheds light on Drake’s own failed attempt of 1595. Alan Ereira’s television film, Drag’s Last Voyage (BBC, 1996), is interesting, but contains visual and factual errors, and overstates the role that new fortifications played in repulsing Drake’s last expedition.

²⁵ Some of these contentions are treated in Geoffrey Parker, ‘The “Dreadnought” Revolution of Tudor England,’ The Mariner’s Mirror, 82 (1996): 269–300; Jose Luis Casado Soto, ‘Atlantic Shipping in Sixteenth-Century Spain and the 1588 Armada’, in Rodriguez-Salgado and Adams, eds, England, Spain and the Gran Armada, 95–132; Geoffrey Parker, Andrew Mitchell and Lawrence Ball, eds, ‘Anatomy of Defeat: The Testimony of Juan Martinez de Recalde and Don Alonso Martinez de Leyva on the Failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 90 (2004): 214–47; Pierson, Commander of the Armada, 184. For literature on the Armada, see Eugene L. Rasor, The Spanish Armada of 1588: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 1993).

²⁶ Pierson, Commander of the Armada, 249–50. Corbett’s view (Drake and the Tudor Navy, 2: chap. 7) that had Drake been close to Howard the Lord Admiral would have said more of him in his narrative still seems reasonable.

²⁷ Rodger, ‘The Development of Broadside Gunnery, 1450–1650’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 82 (1996): 301–24.

²⁸ Ibid, 309–10.

²⁹ Quinn, Sir Francis Drake, 5–6; Kelsey, Drake, 345. Elizabeth Drake’s portrait, believed to have been painted by George Gower, Sergeant Painter to the queen, is reproduced in colour in the National Trust’s Buckland Abbey (1991), 29, 50. It shows her wearing a miniature of Queen Elizabeth received by Drake as a royal gift.

³⁰ The Drake Broadside, 25–8, 123–4, 162.

³¹ Simon Adams, eds, Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558–1561 (1995), 228.

³² Ralegh to Leicester, 5 October 1586, in Agnes Latham and Joyce Youings, eds, The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh (Exeter, 1999), no. 23.