Voyages and Discovery

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Francis Drake

Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral (Tavistock, Devonshire, England,1540 – at sea, off Portobelo, Panamå 27 January 1596), was an English sea captain, privateer (a pirate working for a government), navigator, slaver, a renowned pirate, and politician of the Elizabethan Age: Queen Elizabeth I awarded Drake a knighthood in 1581. It was in 1572 that he embarked on his first major independent enterprise. He planned an attack on the Panama isthmus, known to the Spanish as Tierra Firme and the English as the Spanish Main. This was the point at which the silver and gold treasure of Peru had to be landed and sent overland to the Caribbean Sea, where galleons from Spain would pick it up at the town of Nombre de Dios. He left Plymouth on May 24, 1572, with a crew of 73 men in two small vessels, the Pascha (70 tons) and the Swan (25 tons), to capture Nombre de Dios. His first raid there came in July, 1572. Drake and his men captured the town and its treasure. However, his men noticed that Drake was bleeding profusely from a wound and they insisted on withdrawing to save his life, leaving the treasure. He remained in the vicinity of the isthmus for almost a year, raiding Spanish shipping and attempting to capture a treasure shipment. In 1573, he joined up with a French buccaneer, Guillaume Le Testu, in an attack on a richly-laden mule train. This raid succeeded beyond any of their wildest dreams and Drake and his companions found that they had captured around 20 tons of silver and gold. It was far too much for the few men to carry off and so much of the treasure was buried (which may have given rise to all subsequent stories of pirates and buried treasures). Le Testu was wounded, captured and later beheaded. The small band of adventurers dragged as much gold and silver as they could carry back across some 18 miles of jungle-covered mountains to where they had left their small raiding boats. However, when they got there, their boats had vanished. Drake and his men, downhearted, exhausted and hungry, now had nowhere to go and the Spanish were not far behind.


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