Francis Drake, the Pirate who Terrorised Spain and Saved England

Pirate and Protestant

0:00Francis Drake was one of the most successful pirates who ever lived. And he was also one of the oddest pirates that you'll ever have heard of. For one thing, he was an intensely religious man. He was also backed by the Queen of England. He earned a knighthood. He circumnavigated the globe. He almost made piracy respectable. But make no mistake about it, he was a pirate. He was feared by his enemies.

0:30He was a connoisseur of revenge. And he stole lots and lots of treasure. You are listening to Villains and Virgins Podcast. And this is an episode about Sir Francis Drake, the Queen's own pirate. But before we get into today's story, a couple of things. We're on a bit of a spree with pirate stories on Villains and Virgins Podcast. And this is the first one that's coming out, but there's a whole lot more coming very soon. So if you want to make sure that you don't miss any of them, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert.

1:05Because if you sign up as a free member, you will get a notification ahead of the release of each new episode. So you can make sure you get all of that. And if you want extra pirate episodes, you can become a supporting member and have access to the ever-growing library of additional history content. This month, for example, there is a whole other pirate story involving none other than a Roman you've probably heard of called Julius Caesar and Pompey. These two men have a connection with pirates in common.

1:38So that's coming out exclusively for supporting members on Patreon later this month. And if you'd like to talk more about all this history stuff, I hold monthly live history chats for supporting members on Patreon. And this is a chance for you to ask me all your burning history questions. Or to discuss things I've talked about in the episodes that you'd like a little more detail on. So if you're interested in any of those things, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and become a supporting member.

The Reformation and Europe

2:07Francis Drake is born about the year 1540 into a world that has been shattered by the Protestant Reformation. The Christian Church in the West, which has been more or less united for more than 1500 years, has now been shattered by the arrival of reformers who will become known as Protestants. Now you might think that religious reform is a fairly minor issue, some differences of opinion, some changes that might need to be made, but you would be incorrect. This fracturing of the Christian Church in the West is going to have profound effects.

2:41The ideas of a German monk called Martin Luther, which are made public in about 1517, in a place called Wittenberg in Germany, are going to spread out and radically reshape how people understand themselves and their place in the world. And it's going to be a bloody kind of transformation. By 1524, a mere seven years after Martin Luther has made his criticisms public, Germany experiences something called the Peasants' War,

3:12where tens of thousands of ordinary people, inspired by Martin Luther's ideas, rise up and demand radical reforms to the social order and significant improvements in the lot of everyday farmers and peasants. But these people are going to be brutally crushed. They die in the tens of thousands. And that's just a warm-up for what's coming, as the Protestant Reformation shakes out across Europe. Protestant communities begin forming in France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden,

3:47the Netherlands, and even Italy. And as this happens, divisions are forming in neighborhoods. People who used to live side by side are now divided by their religious identity. And what begins as internal persecution of religious minorities, such as Protestants, will soon metastasize into open warfare, as some states become fully Protestant and begin to see themselves as at odds with other states that are completely Catholic.

4:19The wars of religion, as they are collectively called, are going to get started by 1560, so as Francis Drake is a young man, and they're going to last for the next 80 years or so, as Europe tears itself apart over religious identity. And these wars don't finally come to an end until 1648. So it's going to be a period of intense upheaval, of warfare, there's going to be sacking of cities, rape, starvation, displacement, and economic ruination.

4:54It's a pretty major list of consequences that come out of this religious fracturing in Western Europe. So this is the world that Francis Drake is born into. And before we can understand his piracy and what is driving it, we have to have this appreciation of the background context of what's going on. Because you can't separate Francis Drake the man and his pirate activities from this larger religious and political landscape that they are connected to.

5:24And by the way, if you'd like more detail on that religious political landscape, I've done a couple of series on this specifically, so you can check out the Peasants' War on Villains and Virgins podcast, or the full series on the Protestant Reformation, which continues to be very popular. So that's available to you if you want more information.

Spain and the Spanish Main

5:45So while all of this religious unrest is happening, there are also some other monumental shifts that are happening at this period. So Spain and Portugal have gotten started as of the late 1400s with what will be known as the Age of Exploration. And you might remember the year 1492 as pretty significant for Spain because that is when Christopher Columbus discovers land that he was unaware of. And this quickly becomes a new Spanish colony.

6:15By 1494, only two years later, the Pope decides to try to avert conflict between Spain and Portugal. And he does this with something called the Treaty of Tordesilla. Essentially what it does is divide the newly discovered world in half. The line essentially runs vertically through Brazil. And everything west of that line, including land that has yet to be discovered, is going to belong to Spain. Anything east of that line is going to belong to Portugal.

6:48Functionally, this gave a good chunk of modern Brazil, all of Africa, half of Asia, and some of Australia to Portugal. And it gave North and South America essentially to Spain. Now, as you might expect, countries not called Portugal or Spain were a little bit dubious about this proposed division of the world. How did the Pope get the authority to divide land that hadn't even been discovered yet and assign it as the property of two European countries?

7:21So these other countries are going to work to undermine this proposed distribution of the world. And that's going to be a major part of our story today. But let's talk a little bit about the Spanish main. Because if you've listened to any kind of pirate stories, you will have heard of pirates operating in the Spanish main. So what exactly are we talking about? Well, the Spanish main is a product of the Treaty of Tordesilla. It's basically land that is on the west side of that line, land that Spain regards as its own personal property.

7:54And it looks a lot like a circle, this region that is called the Spanish main. Imagine the Caribbean. Think of Florida along the top. Think of Mexico along the western edge. Panama towards the bottom. And then the coast of Venezuela and the top of South America along that bottom rim. Inside are all the Caribbean islands, including the Bahamas and Jamaica and Hispaniola. Everything inside there in the Caribbean, all of those islands are regarded as the property of Spain.

8:27By the Spanish, at least. And in case you're wondering why pirates of the Caribbean were operating in this area, rather than, say, the North Atlantic, you're about to find out. These Spanish colonies are managed by regional governors. And while some of them are fairly vigilant, others are really quite lax about matters of defense and protecting their coasts from unwanted visitors. And that creates opportunity. Now, as I hinted, other countries like France and England, for example,

8:58weren't particularly impressed with this Treaty of Tordesia and the division of the New World into the property of Spain and the property of Portugal. In fact, the King of France, Francis I, is reported to have said something like, I would love to see the clause in the Testament of Adam that excludes me from the division of the world. And what he's talking about with the Testament of Adam here is the Bible. He's basically saying, where in the religious text or the religious tradition

9:29is it written down that some countries have a right to this land and others, like France, do not? And if it's not in the religious tradition anywhere, then where does the Pope get off making this distinction and telling us who's in and who's out? And Francis is saying that very shortly after the Treaty of Tordesia, but by the time we get to post-1517, as the Protestant Reformation explodes across Europe, even more people are asking out loud, where does the Pope get his authority anyway?

10:01And why is it that we think we have to do whatever he says? So this only provides more fuel for people to question this division of the world. Spain is incredibly protective of its New World holdings, especially those islands in the Spanish Main. And they actually establish a trade monopoly there. So only Spain is allowed to sell and buy from these Spanish colonies. Later, they cut a deal with the Catholic Portuguese, and they say,

10:31okay, you can bring slaves in from West Africa and sell to our colonies because we need that labor to work those plantations, make things like sugar. But the Portuguese are going to need to buy a trade license. So essentially, they're going to pay the Spanish a tax for the purpose of selling in the Spanish Main. Anybody else is not welcome in these waters. So the Spanish regard any other ships besides Portuguese and Spanish ones as interlopers or trespassers.

11:03Whether their goal is trade or piracy, they're unwelcome. The Spanish are incredibly protective for good reason. It's because they are becoming fabulously rich as a result of these New World holdings. In fact, by the end of the 1500s, 60% of the world's silver is coming out of one mine in the Bolivian Andes. That is a Spanish colony. And that silver is going directly into Spanish coffers.

11:33So this kind of wealth is allowing Spain to dramatically increase its power and influence in Europe. And it also allows them to fund armies for military projects in Western Europe, which are going to be pretty important because of the wars of religion that I've already mentioned. So now that we have a sense of the politics and the economics of the world in the 1500s, let's zoom in and look a little bit more closely at the main character of our story today,

Early Life and John Hawkins

12:02Francis Drake. So he's born in England to a poor Protestant family. And his father is actually on record as having engaged in some highway robbery before leaving town and becoming a Protestant minister. So in a way, you could say that taking things runs in the family. Francis Drake's own father had done something like this, but not with ships. It was very much a small scale land operation. Francis Drake's father lives during the reign of Mary Tudor,

12:33sometimes nicknamed Bloody Mary by Protestants in England. And it's kind of a wild time to be Protestant or Catholic in England because the country is veering wildly from one confession to the other. So let me explain briefly what's going on. Henry VIII, Mary's father, made England officially a Protestant country for purely personal reasons having to do with his marriage. His teenage son, Edward, continues the Protestant policy very fervently. But after only a few years, he dies.

13:05So the country then swings from being Protestant to very Catholic when Henry VIII's daughter, Mary, inherits the throne. Mary was raised by her mother, a Spanish Catholic princess, Catherine of Aragon. And she sees it as her mission to return England to the true faith, the Catholic Church. So she goes into persecuting Protestants and reinstituting Catholic practice across England. During this period, which Francis Drake's father lived through,

13:35many Protestants fled England as refugees. There were others who were burned at the stake or suffered other forms of persecution. So it was a very unpleasant time. This matters for our story because young Francis Drake was a fervent Protestant. And one of the books that he carried with him on every single voyage was called Fox's Book of Martyrs. And what this was, was a Protestant account of terrible things that had happened to Protestants

14:06during the reign of Bloody Mary Tudor, or Queen Mary. There are horrendous descriptions in this book of people being tortured and burned alive. And it was a book that had a huge impact on Protestant communities who passed it down and read it to reinforce in their minds this image of religious persecution. Now, historians today don't regard Fox's Book of Martyrs as entirely reliable in every detail. A good comparison are Catholic accounts of saints.

14:37And if you're looking at religious art from the medieval period, you can see absolutely awful depictions of people with their eyeballs on plates or having had body parts removed or being tortured in these horrendous ways. And so there are these very bloody accounts of people dying for their faith in the Catholic Christian tradition. And now with Fox's Book of Martyrs, the Protestants had their own version. They just called them martyrs instead of saints. I should note here that when Mary Tudor was succeeded

15:08by her half-sister, Queen Elizabeth, it wasn't all roses and religious toleration either. Elizabeth made a point of going after Catholic priests as potential agents of treason. And many of them had to live in hiding. And if they were discovered, suffered torture and execution as well. But what this does tell us is that Europe in general and England in particular was now sharply divided into these different Christian communities of Protestant and Catholic. Drake is fervently on the Protestant side.

15:41And by carrying Fox's Book of Martyrs with him around on every voyage for the rest of his life, he's continuously reminded of this Protestant identity and suffering at the hands of Catholics. Now, Francis Drake's father made very little money as a Protestant minister. And one account I read of his childhood actually has him raising his sons in the hulk of a ruined ship at one point. He has 12 children and not a lot of money. So very quickly, he has to make arrangements

16:11for other people to take care of his children, basically by making apprentice agreements for them. So farming his boys out to other people to learn a trade, to be cared for and fed by their new bosses and to learn the skills they will need to support themselves in the world. For young Francis Drake, this meant life on board a small ship. His father made an arrangement for him with a ship's captain. And this meant that as a child, Drake was now living on board this ship.

16:42He was the captain's assistant. He ate all his meals on the ship. He lived there and he learned the trade of life at sea. When Francis Drake is a teenager, Elizabeth I becomes Queen of England in 1558. And unlike her sister, Mary, she's a Protestant and she's willing to take a much more combative stance toward Catholic countries that are becoming increasingly powerful, such as Spain. So now let's talk about piracy for a second, because our teenage Francis Drake

17:13is soon to be introduced to the world of piracy. But what does that look like in the mid-1500s? We think of pirates as guys sailing under the skull and crossbones and looking for treasure wherever they can seize it. But piracy in the 1500s looked a little bit different. It was connected to this strong political and religious background that we've spent so much time talking about. For example, there are Protestants in France.

17:43They're called Huguenots. And at this point in the 1500s, they are actually paying English sea captains to attack Catholic shipping in the English Channel. And French Protestants aren't just encouraging English captains to do this. They're out there doing it themselves. So there are a very large number of French Protestant captains with their ships who are pirating Catholic vessels. Now, why are they doing this? Well, French Protestants

18:13are very much embattled in France. There's an ongoing conflict breaking out into civil war at various periods, and they need money. So who better to take money from than Catholics, seeing as Catholics are behind persecution of Protestants in France? Now, you might object, well, the Catholic ships they're attacking are mostly Spanish, and the Catholics who are oppressing them are mostly French. But that's not how people at this period saw it.

18:44Increasingly, in Western Europe, your identity was Protestant or Catholic, and any Catholic was an enemy and any Protestant a potential friend. So piracy in the 1500s is very frequent, it's very active, but there's a religious component to it. Protestant pirates aren't raiding Protestant ships, they're raiding Catholic ships. And Protestants from different countries, even countries that have historically been at odds with each other, like France and England, are willing to work together

19:16against the Catholic enemy. So one English sailor who's navigating these complicated waters and who's going to have a huge effect on Francis Drake is a guy by the name of John Hawkins. Now, John Hawkins is an English sea captain. He decides that he wants to break the Spanish trade monopoly in the Spanish main. John Hawkins figures there's a lot of money to be made trading with those colonies in the Caribbean, and why should the Spanish have it all to themselves?

19:46Hawkins is aware that the Portuguese are busy taking slaves from West Africa and then going and selling them to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. And they're paying a tax to the Spanish for the privilege of doing this. Hawkins comes up with the plan of doing exactly the same thing minus paying any tax to the Spanish. He just wants to bring slaves into the Spanish main and sell them directly. So John Hawkins makes a detailed plan and he gets some financial investment from people in London.

20:17This was pretty standard by the way. There was a lot of money required up front to outfit a ship or a small fleet of ships for an expedition like this. And so typically you'd have captains looking for financial investors to put up that capital and in exchange those investors would get a cut of any profits that this voyage brought back. In 1562, John Hawkins sails south from England for the coast of West Africa. His goal is to acquire black Africans as slaves

20:47and he does this by sending people ashore to kidnap whoever they can find and also by seizing Africans who've already been captured and loaded onto Portuguese slave ships. So by raiding Portuguese ships and taking human cargo, John Hawkins is already engaged in piracy. But he's also the first Englishman recorded as being directly involved in the slave trade. John Hawkins is now going to turn around and try to sell his cargo of slaves to plantation owners

21:19in Hispaniola which is a Spanish colony. That is modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic by the way. So he heads over there and he offers these slaves to Spanish plantation owners at a very low price. It's a tax-free price because he's not paying that tax trade license that the Portuguese slave traders normally do and which the Portuguese will then add on to the cost of the slaves that they're selling. So the Spanish plantation owners know that they're not supposed to be buying

21:49from some Englishman but they're very eager to acquire slave labor at such incredibly bargain prices. So they do business. Hawkins returns home with record profits. After all, if you pay nothing for your merchandise then you have a hundred percent profit. So he makes his investors very happy. It's gone so well that he does it several more times. John Hawkins is getting rich as are his investors. Now the Spanish are not too happy about this and they actually file

22:19an official complaint with Elizabeth I, Queen of England. But it's such good business for the people involved in Hawkins' voyages that this complaint while getting some concerned nods essentially goes nowhere. And this is partly because the Queen herself is soon going to be in on the profits of Hawkins' voyages. So she's going to actually invest in outfitting some of his expeditions and receive a cut of these profits herself. So that explains why she makes polite noises

22:50to the Spanish ambassador but doesn't actually lift a finger to change anything.

The Disaster at Veracruz

22:56Hawkins' next

The Disaster at Veracruz

22:57slave trading voyage goes from 1567 to 1568 and it's going to be a very different story from the ones that he's managed to complete so far. This time it includes a young Francis Drake. Francis Drake at this point is in his early 20s. He's actually distantly related to John Hawkins which is probably how he gets a job on board the fleet and he's very excited by what he's heard of John Hawkins' previous voyages. At first everything seems

23:27to be going well. Hawkins gets even more investment than before including from the Queen who's actually giving him a royal warship called the Minion as part of her investment in this next expedition. I think that's an amazing name for a ship so you can imagine this Minion with its many guns sailing off with Hawkins' fleet. Just as before Hawkins goes off to the coast of Guinea in West Africa. He seizes people off the coast with raiding parties and loads them

23:58into his ships and is then heading over to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean to try to sell them. Now this is not the first or even the second time that he's shown up with this illegal cargo and at this point Spanish colonists have been warned by the Spanish governors that they're not supposed to be doing business with renegade English traders. So John Hawkins is turned away from a number of Spanish ports. He shows up he tries to sell his slaves and nobody's buying so he has to get back on the ship

24:28and go a little bit farther down the coast. Finally he gets frustrated with this and he decides to try another tactic. Hawkins and his fleet have arrived at the port of Rio de la Haca and once again they've been refused. So Hawkins sends several hundred men ashore into the town and these people burn buildings they take hostages and they threaten to destroy the entire town unless the inhabitants buy slaves from them. Now I'm tempted to call this an example

24:58of gunboat diplomacy even though that's a term that dates to the 19th century and what it normally describes is the process of larger more powerful countries like America or England using the threat of naval force to get smaller weaker countries to trade with them. Perhaps the best known example of this is what the Americans did with Japan. Essentially an American naval commander shows up off the coast of Japan in 1858 with naval warships

25:29and he says you are going to trade with us. The problem was that Japan had been isolated from the rest of the world by their own desire for the last two centuries. They closed themselves off. So this was essentially the Americans forcing their way in and saying your time of being isolated from the rest of the world is over. You're going to make a deal with us otherwise we're going to start firing with the guns off our naval warships right into your city. The Japanese decided to do a deal even if that deal

25:59was very unfairly slanted in favor of these American invaders. However, in the case of John Hawkins and this attack on the port of Rio de la Haca there might have been an aspect of performative violence here. In other words yes, he's destroyed some buildings and taken hostages but this might have been staged in order to give the Spanish governor there plausible deniability. He could say to his overseers look the English came with such violence they threatened to destroy the town

26:30look at this building over here we had to buy slaves from them to make them go away. And this is exactly the deal that is made. The Spanish colonists in that port say fine we'll do business with you if you guys will just pack up and leave the town undamaged any further and go away. This possibility that the violence that Hawkins is doing here might have been staged in collusion with the Spanish governor arises because there are very different accounts in the records that Hawkins and his crew

27:01write of what they were doing there and the record that the Spanish governor sends back to his overseer. But having found a formula that worked Hawkins used his version of gunboat diplomacy at several other Spanish colonial ports until he'd sold all his slaves and filled his coffers. So far everything was going his way but soon John Hawkins' fleet was overtaken by a hurricane which is not that uncommon in the Caribbean. So this forced him and his fleet to take shelter in an island right across

27:32from the Spanish port of Veracruz which is in Mexico today but the Spanish at that point were calling it New Spain. So here's John Hawkins and his guys with badly damaged ships at this island but the very next day the new Spanish viceroy shows up with the Spanish fleet and they're going into the port of Veracruz directly across. Now the Spanish viceroy is going to be involved in governing all the Spanish colonies in the area and he's arriving to take up this post.

28:02So this is a little bit awkward for John Hawkins and his fleet. Here we are a bunch of renegade English traders who are not supposed to be in the Spanish main and now the new Spanish governor shows up and here we are and of course the Spanish governor has all of these warships which is really you know very inconvenient. So John Hawkins is forced to exchange messages with the Spanish fleet as they pass by on their way into Veracruz and say look we're just leaving here we're about to finish repairing our boats and we'll be on our

28:32way and the Spanish viceroy says okay that's fine and he takes his fleet and docks it in the port. Understandably John Hawkins and his guys are a little bit nervous is the new viceroy really going to begin his term of office by cooperating with renegade English traders? Maybe not. They were a little bit worried about his agreement that they could stay and repair their ships but they had no choice. As it turned out these worries about the Spanish viceroy

29:03were very well founded because the next day the Spanish launched an all-out assault on the English fleet at the little island across from the port and the Spanish have more ships the English are outnumbered and outgunned there's just no way that they can defend themselves from this attack. So the Spanish are firing their cannons at these English ships and then they send in fire ships. So these are ships that are set on fire and you sail them in towards the ships you're attacking

29:33and try to get them right up next to the enemy ship to set their ships on fire. So the English at this point are scrambling. one of their ships was set on fire four others had to be left behind because they weren't fit to sail and this left men scrambling to get on board the only two ships that were seaworthy and had a chance of making it out of the harbour and these were the Minion under the command of John Hawkins and the Judith which was now going to be commanded by Francis Drake. A large number of the English sailors are

30:04left behind on that island while others scramble to escape on these two remaining ships. The ones that are left on the island are left to the tender mercies of the Spanish and this is going to be a very uncomfortable situation for them. This meant interrogation under torture for many of them followed by execution or if they were lucky they could spend the rest of their miserable lives chained to an oar as a galley slave rowing Spanish ships around the Caribbean and we

30:35know this because there are records of the interrogation of some of these men Spanish records of what these English sailors said when they went through the process but we have these two ships that have escaped the minion under John Hawkins and the Judith under Drake the minion is heavily overcrowded and the problem is there are now far too many men on this ship and not enough food and water there's simply no way that they're going to be able to cross the Atlantic with this many men and so

31:06few provisions and have any chance of making it back to England so John Hawkins is going to be left in a very difficult situation and it's made more difficult by the fact that that night the Judith under Francis Drake sails away and leaves the minion all alone so there's no possibility of transferring some of the men over onto Drake's ship because it's already gone by the time the sun comes up the next day John Hawkins will never forget this abandonment

31:37by Francis Drake at this dark hour and what it means is that he's going to have to leave a large number of his sailors somewhere on Spanish territory so he's going to put them ashore and they're going to take their chances on land rather than try to survive the passage back across the Atlantic to England some of these Englishmen who were put ashore starve in the forests some are killed by indigenous people who live there and still others are captured by the Spanish and suffer the same

32:07fate as other English sailors left ashore why Francis Drake fled under these conditions and left John Hawkins in these circumstances has never been adequately explained we do know that John Hawkins never forgot it and didn't forgive Drake for it and it was something that counted as a dark spot on his reputation John Hawkins finally makes it back to England with a skeleton crew and of course Drake is already there safely home with the men on board

32:37his ship for Francis Drake this bloody episode is permanently etched into his memory and he blames the Spanish for everything he says the Spanish lied to us they told us that it was permitted for us to repair our ships but then they turned around and treacherously attacked us the next day now this moral indignation of Francis Drake's seems a little bit rich to me I mean after all the English were in the Spanish main where they knew they were specifically not allowed

33:07to be so they were already breaking the rules and then they're going to get very angry when the Spanish attack them apparently but this is Francis Drake's story remember that Francis Drake is already primed to despise Catholics he's on team Protestant and so anyone who's on team Catholic is automatically a bad guy for him driven by the memory of these bloody events the knowledge of the fate of many of his shipmates that he'd left behind and his hatred of Spanish Catholics Francis Drake

33:38makes it his personal mission to avenge himself on the Spanish initially John Hawkins and Francis Drake petitioned Queen Elizabeth for something called a letter of reprisal and basically what this means is that if you suffered financial losses such as destroyed ships and lost seamen or cargo as a result of action from another country that if you got a letter of reprisal it would allow you to attack ships of that country not necessarily the same ships that attacked

34:09you just ships from the same country and steal from them so that you could recover your losses this is what Hawkins and Drake are asking the Queen to give them permission to do but they've picked a really bad moment for this because the Queen has just reached some diplomatic agreement with the Spanish on a number of issues and she doesn't really want to rock the boats as it were so she's not going to be issuing any permission for this kind of a thing John Hawkins for his part has had quite enough of the Spanish for a while and so he

34:39decides to turn his attention to other matters but Francis Drake is consumed by this burning desire for revenge and he's not about to let the matter go now they say that revenge is a dish best served cold and Drake was an ideal man for this because he's very patient and very methodical so undeterred by the fact that he can't immediately go about executing a plan he decides to make a longer term design Drake is willing to bide his time and

35:10gather the information he needs to really hit the Spanish where it hurts and so he puts together a couple of voyages and heads back into Spanish waters but these are reconnaissance voyages he's not interested in capturing slaves or selling slaves or attacking anybody he's just trying to understand what are the defenses these Spanish ports have where are they most vulnerable and how are the Spanish moving their new world treasure

35:40across the colonies and getting it back to Spain

Raiding the Silver Trains

35:44by 1572 Francis Drake is ready to go full pirate he's in his thirties at this point and the next voyage that he puts together is going to have one purpose and one purpose only and that is to steal treasure from the Spanish before sending off Drake obtains something called a letter of mark from Queen Elizabeth and this is a really interesting document the Queen of England wasn't the only one issuing them there were a lot of pirates operating

36:14with this kind of a deal so a letter of mark was usually issued by a government or a head of state and essentially it said you can attack ships from that other country over there you can seize their treasure you can sink those ships whatever you want I'm giving you permission for this in exchange for a cut of the profits and you can use the ports in the country that issues this letter for shelter and also for selling your ill-gotten gains so a

36:45letter of mark didn't really protect a pirate who was captured by the Spanish for example but it did allow that pirate to do excellent business as long as he wasn't caught because you could bring your treasure back you could sell it in English cities in this case and you'd pay the queen a cut of your profits and make a ton of money Francis Drake had discovered that one of the most vulnerable points in the Spanish colonial network was a port called Nombre de Dios near Panama

37:15City and essentially this is a gathering point where the Spanish are sending all of the taxes they're collecting from their colonies as well as treasure that they're taking including silver from that mine in Bolivia and they're loading it into this port where it's waiting to be then put onto Spanish ships and sailed back to Spain Drake knows the location of the treasure storing house in the Port of Nombre de Dios and his initial plan is to roll up into the harbor in the middle of the night go through

37:45the town get to the treasure house seize that treasure and load it back on his ship unfortunately that plan doesn't go too well because they're spotted as they're exiting the harbor and coming into town the alarm is sounded and there's a battle during which Drake gets badly shot so he and his men are forced to retreat without any treasure Drake and his men leave the harbor in haste they load onto the ships and get out of that harbor as quickly as they can and they hole up somewhere farther

38:15along the coast for Drake to recover and so that they can try again for the second attempt obviously they can't try to hit the same place twice because people will know they're coming so Drake decides that they're going to try and hit a treasure convoy that's heading into that port city but to seize it before it gets there now for this Drake has a brilliant plan he's aware that there are many escaped African slaves in the woods around Nombre de Dios and outside of Panama City

38:47because remember there is this ongoing traffic of kidnapped Africans from West Africa who are being shipped into the Spanish colonies as slaves and some of them have managed to escape in fact there are so many of them that it's becoming a major problem for the Spanish a Spanish judge of the high court in Panama wrote to King Philip as follows quote the matter which in this kingdom most demands remedial action is the problem of dispersing the Cimarons black outlaws

39:18in rebellion in its mountainous unpopulated interior they are numerous and such as their daring and audacity they come forth upon the roads leading from this city to that of Nombre de Dios kill travelers and steal what these have with them if it be clothing and wine so far they have not taken money they threaten to burn these two towns and induce others to leave their owners as they do every day unquote so essentially the Spanish governor is saying look

39:48these escaped slaves are becoming highway robbers they're not taking money for obvious reasons really what are you going to do with it if you're living as an outlaw in the forest who are you going to buy things from you can't show your face but they're taking physical things they can use and they're providing an incentive for other slaves to escape their masters and join these outlaws so Francis Drake is aware of these Sumeron black outlaws and he thinks well the enemy of my enemy

40:18is my friend these escaped black slaves hate the Spanish for obvious reasons so perhaps they'll be willing to help Francis Drake as it turned out Drake was entirely correct in this assessment and it was from these black outlaws that he received information about where and when the next treasure train would be arriving so imagine Drake and his men sweating as they're waiting in the forest concealed on either side of the road waiting for this long train of

40:49mules to come through there's something like 200 mules coming down in a long line and so much silver that it's enough to make a man dizzy or even drunk thinking about it and drunk was exactly what one of Drake's soldiers was he'd been working up his liquid courage a little bit too enthusiastically and so this fool jumped out onto the road and gave the attack signal too soon which allowed the Spanish mule driver at the front to sound

41:20the alarm to turn that train around and flee so Drake and his men have done all this work for nothing they are zero for two with no treasure to show for it Drake didn't know it yet but his fortunes were about to improve so he and his men are back on their ships hanging around somewhere off the coast of Panama trying to come up with a new plan when Drake encounters a French ship now remember we're in the Spanish main right now so French ships aren't supposed to be there any more

41:50than English ships are so Drake is very curious about this French captain and his ship who comes right over and the two captains have a conversation this Frenchman is a Huguenot so he's a Protestant from France and he briefs Drake on the latest persecution of Protestants over there it happens to be the same Bartholomew's day massacre go look it up if you're interested but it's a very bloody event so Drake and this captain immediately find common ground as Protestants in their fight against Catholics

42:21and they decide that they're going to collaborate on the next attack on the Spanish just as before Drake gets the black outlaws these escaped slaves to provide intelligence about when the next mule train is coming through and this time Drake and his new French allies are going to lie in wait and attack this treasure train so again it's like 200 mules coming through carrying 300 pounds of silver each and this time the attack is successful so Drake

42:52and his pirates seize the treasure train the Spanish guards flee back to the city going to get reinforcements and this leaves Drake and his men with more silver than they can possibly carry so they hit on the plan of burying some of it with a plan to come back and retrieve it later and then carrying as much silver as they can possibly handle they hightail it back to their ships of course the Spanish aren't far behind them so very quickly they're being pursued by Spanish soldiers and the French

43:23captain falls behind and is killed he's beheaded so Drake and the remainder of his men make it back to the ships they realize by the next day that returning for the silver they buried would be futile since the Spanish have already discovered it and so they decide to turn around and sail for home making off with the silver they already have Drake receives

43:50dead they had been gone for something like 15 months at this point but the significance of this voyage wasn't just the money they brought back it was the proof that the Spanish were vulnerable and that treasure could successfully be seized and carried away from the Spanish colonies so this brings Francis Drake to the Queen's own personal attention so after paying the Queen her cut Drake divides the proceeds of their haul between his English sailors and his French allies and the result

44:21of this is that he's a very wealthy man Drake's successes inspired other English captains to attempt similar things but piracy was a very risky business as we've already seen Drake's French captain ally lost his life in this last raid Drake's own brother was killed in his initial attack of the port of Nombre de Dios and other English captains who attempted such things including one of Drake's former shipmates

44:52a man called John Oxenham often paid a very high price so John Oxenham succeeded in sailing English ships into the Pacific he succeeded in seizing Spanish treasure but he didn't succeed in making off with it because Oxenham's ships were quickly surrounded by pursuing Spanish he and his men were taken prisoner and every last one of them were hanged as pirates and Drake's own nephew sometime later

45:22was taken prisoner by the Spanish and never returned home again so while Drake's successes suggest that raiding Spanish treasure was easy pickings Drake had gotten rich but many others had died trying given given given the high risks of the piracy business and the fact that Drake had just accumulated a massive personal fortune on his last voyage maybe it was time to call it a day maybe it was time to avoid any further risks and

45:52find a new passion perhaps it was time for Drake to turn his years of naval experience to the benefit of expanding human knowledge and the field of exploration this new project of a voyage that will circumnavigate the globe will surely contribute to these noble goals right wrong Drake is about to undertake a voyage to circumnavigate the globe and it will put his name into the history books but make no mistake about it this voyage was all about

The Circumnavigation Voyage

46:23piracy so the year is now 1577 it's five years after Drake's last successful treasure raiding pirate mission and he's now in talks with Elizabeth the first queen of England about how to damage Spanish interests in the new world and of course Francis Drake has a bold new plan officially the plan is for Francis Drake to sail around the world something that had only been done relatively recently by a Portuguese Catholic called

46:54Ferdinand Magellan who'd been sailing in the pay of the Spanish now Magellan himself didn't quite make it all the way around he died in the Philippines before quite making it home but some of his men completed the rest of the journey only 18 of the 270 men who had initially set out nevertheless it had been an amazing feat and if Drake could replicate this and perhaps establish new trading routes for England along the way that

47:24would be incredibly beneficial but that was just the official description of Drake's mission unofficially the Queen of England was ready to begin a guerrilla war against the Spanish and that was why she was enlisting Francis Drake the real purpose of his trip was to damage the Spanish where it hurt in their financial purse strings in the treasure that they were taking from the new world back to Europe the plan was to sail across the Atlantic to

47:55sail around the bottom of South America and then for Drake to go up the Pacific coast of South America attacking Spanish colonial possessions where they least expected to be vulnerable now this raises the question why would Elizabeth of England be interested in antagonizing Philip II of Spain Spain was a much wealthier and more powerful country than England at this time and it would seem that by doing things that are designed to aggravate the Spanish that

48:26Elizabeth was inviting war so why would she do something like this the reason is that Elizabeth had very sound reasons for interfering with Spanish projects in Europe remember Elizabeth I is a Protestant she's the leader of a Protestant England and to the Spanish and other Catholics she's a heretic queen the Spanish are currently involved in a very costly war in the Netherlands which is a territory that they control so there are these Dutch rebels

48:57who happen to be Protestant who are rising up against the Spanish and the Spanish are busy funding armies to try and quash these rebels Elizabeth is worried that if the Spanish win that war that's going to free up their attention and their resources to focus on the English so she has every reason to keep the Spanish tied up fighting in the Netherlands for as long as possible in order to accomplish this Elizabeth is doing two things first of all she's sending covert assistants

49:27to the Dutch rebels to assist them in their fight against the Spanish and secondly she's enlisting Francis Drake in this secret mission to hit the Spanish where it hurts which is in their bank account so if Drake can seize more treasure from the new world and prevent that from reaching the Spanish that's going to interfere with their ability to fund and pay for the armies they're using in the Netherlands Queen Elizabeth is hoping that by using Francis Drake she has plausible deniability

49:58so she has this official mission Francis Drake is just going to explore and perhaps find some new trading opportunities for England when actually his sole purpose is to rob the Spanish and to do so in a space where they've not yet encountered any piracy so so far Francis Drake has concentrated his activities in the Spanish Maine or the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean but now he's going to go around the bottom of South America and come up on the west side the

50:29Pacific side which the Spanish haven't had any trouble on and are not going to be expecting him and when the Spanish complain about what Francis Drake is doing Elizabeth is just going to shrug and say oh that's terrible piracy is awful we absolutely don't support any pirates here and in this way she can hopefully distance herself from the actions that she's deliberately designing here so Drake's grand voyage the one that puts his name into explorer history books is

51:00going to last from late 1577 into 1580 it will be the ultimate test of his abilities as a mariner and as a leader Drake begins with five ships and about 160 men the first leg of the journey will be to sail across the Atlantic and then south down toward the bottom of South America and here he has to make it around the tip the very infamous Cape Horn Cape Horn has been the bane of sailors for generations

51:30because of its fierce winds storms and icebergs that have cut loose from the coastal ice of Antarctica and are going upwards now Francis Drake is hoping to use a cheat code for the problem of Cape Horn and that cheat code is known as the Straits of Magellan so it's a 570 kilometer long very narrow passage that actually cuts across the bottom of South America a bit north of Cape Horn and the genius of that is that you don't have

52:00to go around the outside edge of the continent where the Pacific Ocean smashes into the Atlantic Ocean with icebergs floating into the mix so that's a ship eating collision zone and Francis Drake is anxious to avoid that but the Straits of Magellan are no picnic either they're better than Cape Horn but they're still very dangerous and they're not well known particularly to English mariners Francis Drake does make it through the Straits of Magellan being the first

52:30Englishman to do so and he does it in record time getting through that passage in 14 days which is quite astonishing when you compare it to the length of between 37 days or 4 months that other captains had taken to cross that same straight before him

52:51and by the time Francis Drake emerges from the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific he's lost four of his five ships one is lost at sea another one goes up in flames one had to be scuttled and one was so badly battered that it turned around and went back to England as if all that wasn't enough Francis Drake has had months of drama with another one of the officers who's along for the ride on this voyage and essentially this guy questions some of Drake's opinions

53:22or plans and Drake has zero tolerance for this so things escalate between the two men and before long Drake is actually accusing him of witchcraft he's putting about a rumor amongst the crew that this particular officer whose last name is Doughty has actually summoned up some of the storms that they've been experiencing through black magic and is also guilty of treason of divulging some of the details of the secret mission of their expedition to officials back in England who weren't supposed to know about it

53:53essentially Drake is using anything he can as an accusation against this man in order to get him killed so after all of this has happened Drake is left with one ship which is now called the Golden Hind and some 80 men aboard Drake convenes a trial at sea he condemns this officer Doughty as being guilty of insubordination and treachery and he demands that he be executed curiously enough the place where this execution of Doughty occurs

54:24is not far from the spot where Ferdinand Magellan some six decades earlier had executed some mutineers so it seems that the passage through the was a very grueling experience that took its toll on the men who made that journey after all this Francis Drake is finally in the Pacific Ocean but he only has one ship the Golden Hind and some 80 men aboard with just this one ship he sails up the western coast of South America

54:54to attack Spanish colonies where he's least expected this is where Drake is going to seize all the treasure that will make this entire expedition worthwhile from

Seizing the Spanish Treasure

55:05December 1578 to April 1579 Drake goes on an absolute spree he's raiding port cities he's attacking ships he gets word of a major Spanish treasure ship that's heading up towards Panama and he follows that ship for some 500 miles stopping here and there to seize other ships wherever possible he did finally capture the treasure ship that had been carrying loot from Lima to Panama and it had so much

55:36treasure on board that it took some six days to load it all off that ship and onto Drake's golden hide and what happened to the officers and the men of that ship while all this treasure is being pirated well Drake's men locked them all inside their cabins until the pirating was complete and then set them all free with their newly emptied ship so from a pirating point of view this has been a very successful voyage the golden hide is absolutely

56:06loaded with treasure and now they just have to get it back home to England the only problem is that home is a very long ways away and any number of things could intervene between now and there to prevent them from reaching it Drake continues quite a ways north apparently ending up somewhere off the coast of Oregon before turning around and landing somewhere near San Francisco although there's a lot of dispute amongst historians about where exactly is the spot in North America

56:37where Drake goes ashore we don't have certainty about this but we do have records from Drake's men of his interaction with Native peoples there which appeared to have been very peaceful this is probably because the Natives really had no idea what Drake was saying when he was claiming them and their lands as the permanent property of the Queen of England if they had understood that then perhaps Francis Drake would have met a fate similar to that of Ferdinand Magellan who was killed by some natives in the Philippines while

57:07he was busy renaming their land after King Philip of Spain Drake's plan now is to continue sailing west toward Asia and then go south around the bottom of Africa and finally up towards England but this is a far less certain operation for Francis Drake remember that the Spanish have a lot more experience sailing from Spain to the Pacific and back again South America is after all part of the half of the world that they regard as their personal property but for the English

57:42made this journey and so they don't have the benefit of the experience and the charts and the stories that the average Spanish captain would have access to in an area without GPS or even particularly reliable maps it was very important to have knowledge of where the shallow reefs were that might wreck a ship where the currents ran when the storms came through and also the details of the coast where you could shelter a ship or where there were dangers that could wreck your ship Francis

58:12Drake is busy seizing charts and interviewing people for information on the Spanish ships that he's busy pirating and some men are willing to talk to him about naval navigation and some are not one of Drake's most crucial assistants was a Portuguese navigator by the name of Nuno da Silva and this man was a pilot who was working on board a Portuguese ship what's a pilot you'd like to know well a naval pilot is someone local to

58:43the area who's taken on board a ship because he has intimate knowledge of the details of the coast in that local area so Nuno da Silva was this sort of a guy he had excellent navigational expertise and when Drake finds him on board a Portuguese ship that he's pirating he takes Nuno as well because his brains are at least as valuable as the treasure he could lay hands on but not everyone was willing to collaborate Francis Drake encountered another man on board a Spanish ship who

59:14was familiar with the navigation to get to the Philippines and of course Drake wanted this man to help him navigate through those waters but this navigator resolutely refused so Drake tried bribery he said we'll pay you lots of money if you help us no and then Drake tried a little bit of torture essentially hanging this man up for hours until he lost consciousness but still he flatly refused to help so Drake got absolutely no assistance from this man Drake wasn't

59:44initially sure which route he would take home but he does end up crossing the Pacific toward the Philippines sailing around the Moluccas or the Spice Islands and then heading through Java in Indonesia he goes around the bottom of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope which is another notorious boat eating zone where two oceans are crashing together so he makes it through the Cape of Good Hope and he sails up the western coast of the African continent before doing the final leg north to England this part

1:00:15of the journey would of course have been familiar because you remember that those early voyages of John Hawkins that Francis Drake was part of involved sailing from England to West Africa to pick up slaves before heading over to the Spanish Maine you can imagine Francis Drake breathing a sigh of relief on this leg of the journey finally having some sense of certainty that he knew exactly where he was and how to get where he wanted to go with all of that treasure he arrives back home in April of 1579 with

1:00:46a treasure that is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling essentially it was millions of dollars in today's money although the exact amount that Francis Drake brought back was never officially recorded because for political reasons that would be sensitive information now when Drake arrives he receives an official message of displeasure from Queen of England she is rebuking him for the piracy that he's been engaged in and the problems that he's been causing but once he actually gets

1:01:16into the palace and has an audience with the Queen in private she's completely delighted the amount of money that he's brought back is an enormous reward for everyone who's invested in this voyage and that includes the Queen the figure that it probably worked out to was something like 47 pounds of return for every one pound invested so that's a pretty handsome return by any measure Elizabeth is delighted her bank account is greatly enriched the Spanish bank account

1:01:47is missing a good deal of money and she's been able to do all of this without actually declaring a war which of course would be very hazardous and very expensive six months after Francis Drake arrives what

1:02:02amount of time she gives him a knighthood now a knighthood in the 1500s for someone who wasn't born into an aristocratic family was pretty much unheard of this is an incredible honor and in private Queen Elizabeth refers to Francis Drake as my pirate with this amount of success under his belt it's no surprise that Drake goes on to make several more similar voyages in the 1580s all of these are designed to take money from the Spanish and to bring it back to England

1:02:32enriching the Queen Drake himself and all his other investors and this money that Francis Drake is bringing back to England is being used by Queen Elizabeth to actually fund Protestant rebels in the Netherlands against Spain because that war is still going on and so the political and religious dimension of this is very much part of where these pirate proceeds are going so Drake is definitely a pirate but he's a very strange sort of pirate apparently some of his favorite

1:03:03oaths were if God wills and by God's faith so if you were expecting oaths like shiver me timbers or even blue blistering barnacles Francis Drake is not your guy he's deeply religious and so on every voyage he's not only taking Fox's Book of Martyrs where he can remind himself of the bloody torments of Protestants at the hands of Catholics but he's also bringing a book of Psalms and he has daily devotions on board ship for the men on his

1:03:33crew these are not optional by the way everyone is expected to attend to sing these psalms and to listen as daily devotions are read so this is a very strange sort of pirate ship it's not exactly the sort of scene that you would expect on the Black Pearl under the leadership of Johnny

Enemies and Alliances

1:03:50Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean one thing that you could say about Francis Drake for certain is that he's daring he's the sort of man who's willing to try doing things that no one else has managed to do yet whether that's raiding Spanish treasure trains near Panama or being the first English captain to go through the Straits of Magellan or circumnavigating the globe to attack the Spanish along the Pacific coast again and again Drake is first to do things that many others will want to do after him

1:04:21but personally he has a very severe record of complete intolerance for anyone questioning his plans or ideas at sea so you might have heard that in many cases pirate ships operated a little bit more like a republic that there was less of a power hierarchy between the captain and the crew and there was a little more democracy that may be true of other types of pirates and we're going to talk about some of them later in this series but it certainly wasn't true of Francis Drake who

1:04:53when he was at sea was a

1:05:00which could be anything from punishment in some cases even to death in others but ships discipline aside Francis Drake doesn't have a big record for killing lots of people now undoubtedly there were some casualties during periods when he was engaged in hand to hand combat fighting on land or on sea to seize treasure but once people had surrendered Drake wasn't much of a one for making anyone walk the plank or just hanging people wholesale so Francis Drake's record on this score by

1:05:32pirate standards is pretty good mostly there were a couple of notable exceptions however one example of Francis Drake being absolutely ruthless occurred during his attack on the city of Santo Domingo so Santo Domingo is currently the capital of the Dominican Republic but at the time it was in the Spanish colony of Hispaniola in this case Drake wasn't just seizing treasure from ships he was now in the business of invading port cities and then demanding a ransom to prevent him from destroying those cities so

1:06:02that's the kind of operation that Drake is conducting in this story so Drake and his men have occupied the city of Santo Domingo they're busy pillaging it grabbing whatever they can that is valuable the Spanish officials have fled the city and from some distance they're now sending messages back and forth to Drake negotiating with him what is the ransom price for Drake to go away and not destroy the city so that they can come back it's during these negotiations that Francis Drake sends a messenger boy to the Spanish and it just so happens that

1:06:33this particular messenger boy is black now this is a really interesting thing about Francis Drake because if you think about it he begins as someone who's on board the voyages of John Hawkins which are essentially slaving voyages but at this point in his career Francis Drake has now been collaborating for years with escaped black African slaves and so he's at a point where he no longer regards these people as cargo or as items to be bought and sold they are incredibly valuable

1:07:03allies

1:07:07him intelligence who have fed him and his men and sometimes they're people that he himself has rescued off of ships where he's pirated the treasure the cargo whatever was on them so this black boy is in Francis Drake's service and Francis Drake is sending him to the Spanish with a message so the boy arrives carrying the flag of an envoy and the Spanish who receive him don't respond well one of these Spanish dignitaries actually grabs a lance and

1:07:37drives it through the body of this boy now we don't know exactly why he does this it may be that he recognized the boy perhaps he was a slave who had escaped from that city earlier or maybe he was even a slave who had been owned by this particular Spanish nobleman and so he's viewing this as revenge on someone

1:08:03the boy body the boy staggers off he doesn't die immediately he makes it back to Drake collapses in a heap and then dies when Francis Drake sees what has been done to his messenger boy he gets up and he's absolutely furious and so immediately he goes to where there are some Spanish prisoners that his men are holding captive and some of them are being held inside a church in the city so he

1:08:33but they happen to be prisoners under Drake's control and so he demands that these men immediately be brought out that a scaffold be erected so that it's visible to the Spanish from where they are camped and these men are going to be hung in full view of the Spanish then Drake sends a message back to the Spanish and he says I will repeat this I will hang two of my Spanish prisoners every day until you either hand over the guy who killed my messenger boy or punish him yourself it

1:09:04doesn't take very long for the Spanish to figure out that Drake is very serious and they didn't wait they actually hung the lance murderer who was among them so the Spaniard who had driven the lance through the black messenger boy is hung now of course this was still a very bad day for those two Dominican monks who hadn't done anything but who were going to pay with their lives for being in Drake's custody at a point when he was very angry and it probably wasn't an accident that of all the prisoners Drake had access to he picked the

1:09:35Dominicans to die first remember Drake is still very much on team Protestant and has a resolute hatred of Catholics and there are some reports that suggest that these Dominicans had perhaps criticized a sermon a Protestant sermon given by a minister who was on Drake's crew so perhaps that already attracted his attention as religious enemies but in any case these men were innocent and they paid with their lives on this occasion for being in the wrong place

1:10:05at the wrong time but religious politics aside Francis Drake wasn't always horrible to individual Catholics either and there's another incredible story of his dealings with a Spaniard which show a very different side to Francis Drake and which I feel in order to do the man justice I have to tell you about so Drake has taken another Spanish colonial city it's Cartagena and just as in the last story of Santo Domingo he and his men have occupied the city and they're holding it for ransom

1:10:36so essentially they're setting prices on buildings and houses and saying if you would like to have your property back if you don't want us to burn it to the ground then you need to pay us this money so that's the setup and Francis Drake has taken up residence in one of the most beautiful most expensive houses in that city and the owner of that house a guy named Alonso Bravo is stuck with playing host to this pirate captain this Englishman Drake has told Alonso Bravo that the ransom amount

1:11:06for this house is going to be 5,000 ducats so it's a very expensive fee that is going to have to be paid for the house to be handed back to its owner unharmed so Alonso Bravo is in the house with Francis Drake he's negotiating about how he's going to get this money and so on but his wife has already fled the city she fled the city ahead of the arrival of the English pirates and Alonso Bravo receives word that his wife is very ill and so he asks Francis Drake for permission to leave the house to leave the city and

1:11:38to go visit his sick wife now obviously this is the sort of situation where Alonso Bravo could just be making up a story and then decide to flee to the hills and never come back again and Francis Drake is fully aware of this but Alonso Bravo gives his word as a man of honor this is what he's doing and he's going to come back and Francis Drake accepts his word and gives permission so Alonso Bravo goes off to visit his wife and he comes back turns out she's even sicker than he had expected so he repeats this request

1:12:09a few more times going to visit his wife for longer periods because she's very sick indeed and Francis Drake permits it tragically Alonso Bravo's wife dies and he returns to Francis Drake reports that his wife is dead and asks for permission to bury her body Alonso Bravo wants to bury his wife at a Franciscan monastery a Catholic institution in the city of Cartagena and this is one of the many buildings that Francis Drake and his men control and they're busy putting ransom price

1:12:39tags on if you want this building back you need to pay this money otherwise we're going to destroy it so Francis Drake permits the burial of Alonso Bravo's wife and he doesn't just say that's okay he shows up and attends the funeral he allows the Spanish to take down the English flag which is currently flying over the town to show that they control it to raise the Spanish flag to fire a gun volley in honor of the dead woman and Drake is there paying his respects to

1:13:09the wife of this Spaniard who's a Catholic I should note by the way

1:13:19Alonso Bravo and his wife and the residents of this town and the Franciscan monastery these are all Catholics so here you have this fiercely violently Protestant pirate Francis Drake standing there respectfully while this Catholic service is going on it's a rare moment and Drake goes even further he actually promises Alonso Bravo that he's not going to desecrate the resting place of his wife so this Franciscan monastery was going to be held for a very

1:13:49high ransom price in other words if the price isn't paid we destroy the monastery that would disturb the resting place of this dead woman but because she's now been buried there Drake promises the grieving husband we're not going to destroy the monastery I'm going to reduce the price on this to some tiny nominal fee so that there's no issue with being paid and we're not going to disturb the resting place of your wife this is a remarkable story because it demonstrates a human connection between two men who were very

1:14:19much on the opposite sides of the religious and political wars that were being fought all over Europe Drake respects Alonso Bravo as a man of honor as a man who gave his word and respected it when he could have run

1:14:39going through because Drake himself had lost his wife several years earlier so Francis Drake has had an incredible run as a pirate his circumnavigation voyage was 1577 to 1580 but he was busy raiding the Spanish Maine before that and he goes on raiding it repeatedly well after that so by the time we get to 1588

The Spanish Armada

1:15:01Queen Elizabeth has been on the English throne for about 30 years and the King of Spain is getting really quite fed up with this pirate problem he's no longer very convinced by Queen Elizabeth's sympathetic noises when he makes complaints about the loss of treasure to pirates and the destruction of Spanish ships so by the time we get to 1588 the King of Spain has become convinced that he needs to teach this heretic queen a lesson and deal with the English directly

1:15:321588 is the year that he sends the famous Spanish Armada with the mission of invading England so some 130 ships and 30,000 men embark toward the English coast as the English are preparing to meet the Spanish Armada England's most famous pirate and seaman is front and center Sir Francis Drake has invaluable experience about attacking Spanish ships and so he's going to be very much involved in the defensive plans that

1:16:02are now underway there's just one little problem they can't really make Francis Drake Lord High Admiral of the English Navy because even though he's been knighted he's a man of very humble origins and to give him that rank would put him above some of the most aristocratic most highly ranked nobles in England and that's not going to fly so they have to find some other suitably noble guy to put into the post of Lord High Admiral and they put Francis Drake as second

1:16:33in command so he's going to be the brains of the operation but somebody else is going to have the higher rank on paper now I could easily do an entire episode on the Spanish Armada we just don't have time to do all that detail today for today's purpose I'll briefly

1:16:57longer distances at the Spanish ships and the Spanish for their part are trying to close the distance with the English and attack by boarding these ships there's about a week of running battles which ultimately is resolved in favor of the English mostly because bad weather and logistical problems interfere with the Spanish plans the Spanish fleet gets completely hammered by storms and their invasion plan is a dismal failure of the 130 ships that set out in Spain's glorious armada

1:17:28only about 40 of them actually make it home but I have to include this one humorous note about Francis Drake who remember is the second in command under the Lord High Admiral of the English defenses against this invasion but true to his pirate roots he just can't pass up the opportunity to seize a Spanish treasure ship so apparently there's Spanish ship that's sailing with the armada it has a lot of money on board for paying Spanish troops it becomes damaged

1:17:58and is separated from the fleet and Drake just can't resist going out and nabbing that ship and raiding all the treasure off of it even though that's not what he's supposed to be doing in his new post he simply can't resist so the Spanish armada has been defeated England has been saved Drake is once again something of a hero and he goes back to doing what he does his final voyage comes

Final Voyage and Legacy

1:18:24in 1595 at this point he's in his 50s once again he's going to go back to his old stomping grounds in the Spanish main he's going to be attacking Spanish treasure trains as they are massing near Panama City to be loaded onto ships going back to Spain and he's going and getting financial investment from people in London to outfit this voyage same as always the problem is that at this point Drake is a victim of his own success he has had so many decades of successfully attacking Spanish

1:18:55colonies and taking stuff that the Spanish have had to improve their defenses and prepare much better for the arrival of Drake and people like him so when Drake shows up this time he doesn't find easy pickings there's no quick hit and run grab the treasure and go to be had in fact Drake and his men face fierce fighting everywhere that they show up to make matters worse disease breaks out amongst Drake's men and given the

1:19:25tight living quarters on board ship once you have disease it tends to spread very rapidly the disease in this case was dysentery although people at the time referred to it as the bloody flux it's a highly infectious disease which leads to prolific rounds of bloody diarrhea as fluids pass from the capillaries to the intestines now if you want to imagine for a moment sailors with uncontrollable bloody diarrhea on board ship you can see how this is going to spread very very quickly the massive fluid loss

1:19:56that you would suffer if you are infected by this would lead to dehydration shock and then your kidneys shutting down or heart attack Francis Drake himself succumbs to this disease after all no one on board ship is safe and so he's suffering from all of these symptoms and they're getting progressively worse it's at four o'clock in the morning on January the 7th the early days of 1596

1:20:25and what he wants is for these men to help him put on his armor and this is because Drake feels that his end is near that he's about to die and he wants to die like a soldier with his armor on so his men help him they suit him up he lays down at his bed and within an hour he breathes his last his men of course bury him at sea a fitting end for a man who spent so much of his life upon it now the Spanish of course are celebrating the death of one

1:20:56of their most persistent and successful enemies the Spanish called him el Drake which translates as the dragon and given all the burning and the stealing of treasure that he did that seems quite appropriate but some of the Spanish who had personal encounters with Drake also

1:21:17that men who had encountered Drake themselves had when they looked at his memory Don Pedro a Spanish commander who had surrendered his ship to Drake wrote that Drake's quote noble and generous carriage toward the vanquished had been oft experienced by his foes unquote so in other words if you surrendered to Drake you could expect to be treated with a certain degree of respect Drake was even praised by one Spanish poet as quote a captain of glittering memory

1:21:48unquote and that's really quite remarkable when you think about it when people on the other side people who are on the enemy side have good things to say about you Francis Drake set an example that inspired many in England to take to the seas and this transformed England from a small country with not much of a navy to speak of to ultimately what would become a maritime superpower establishing dominance over the seas that would last for centuries that's quite a legacy for a

1:22:19pirate coming soon on Villains and Virgins podcast are even more stories of pirates very different from this one a huge thank you to those of you who support this podcast on Patreon and make this possible and keep your eyes open for this month's special bonus episode on Julius Caesar Pompey the Great and the Pirates of the Mediterranean thank you so much for being with me today and I will see you in the next episode