Francis Drake (Part 1)

Dan tells swashbuckling tales of Francis Drake on the Spanish Main. Francis Drake was England's first imperial warrior forged in the crucible of the 16th-century naval engagements against Spain. This episode covers Drake's early life, his transformation from a passionate Protestant to a relentless scourge of the Spanish, and his legendary feats of seamanship as he led England's first successful circumnavigation of the globe. Dan narrates Drake's audacious attacks on Spanish treasure fleets and his daring circumnavigation that not only enriched England but also laid the foundation for its future naval dominance. This is Part 1 of 2. Written by Dan Snow and edited by Dougal Patmore. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:04Speaker 02

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• 1:47Speaker 02

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• 2:01Dan Snow?

  It was treachery. It was brazen. The English force was fighting for its life against those who had just sworn that they meant it no harm.

• 2:16Dan Snow?

  Cannonballs smashed through, timbers weakened by nearly a year at sea. Rigs that had already been worn out, torn by Caribbean storms, were shredded by enemy shot.

• 2:34Dan Snow?

  Men were cut down. They were hacked through with swords. Some leapt into the sea to escape. English ships sank or surrendered. The Spanish had promised them safe passage. The English, despite that, had been on their guard. A Spanish promise here meant less than a year. The norms of European war didn't seem to apply here, across the line, on the infamous Spanish Main.

• 3:11Dan Snow?

  That stretch of the American mainland, from modern-day Venezuela right up into the United States. The Spanish Main. A place of opportunity, slavery, conquest, danger, wealth and glory.

• 3:36Dan Snow?

  It was the 23rd of September 1568, and in San Juan de Lúa, on the coast of Mexico, England was locked in its first imperial battle in the New World. Although it wasn't really the English state, it was a private consortium. English, certainly. Merchants, they styled themselves as. Pirates, according to the Spanish.

• 4:07Dan Snow?

  The English were led by John Hawkins, who was now on his quarter-deck roaring at his gunners to fire and reload, while he sipped beer from a silver cup. Around him, his squadron was taken or destroyed. He would extract one ship from the wreckage. He would live to tell the tale, just. And apart from his, only one other vessel made it out of that Spanish harbour and managed to limp back across the Atlantic. It was captained by one of Hawkins's cousins, a young, unknown man, given his first command by his relative. His name was Francis Drake. And that dark day changed him.

• 5:00Dan Snow?

  Drake had always been a passionate Protestant, but he'd hitherto had a fairly abstract dislike of Catholicism and the Pope and the greatest Catholic power of the day, Spain. But now that crystallised into something very different: a particular, violent loathing, an unquenchable desire for revenge, a sudden coalescing of his life's purpose: to punish the Spanish who'd gone back on their word, to avenge the deaths of his friends, the humiliation of his family, the torture and enslavement of his former crewmates. England's first imperial sea battle forged England's first imperial warrior:

• 5:44Dan Snow?

  totem and ultimately martyr. Francis Drake. Arguably, England's greatest sailor, against some pretty stiff competition there. He was born decades before, but he was relaunched that day in Mexico. For the next 30 years, he waged a personal war against the most powerful man on earth: the King of Spain. A war that took him around the world, that saw him lay waste to cities, explore shorelines unknown to Europeans, capture fabulous prizes, singe the King of Spain's beard, and defeat the greatest armada that had ever sailed to that point in history.

• 6:31Dan Snow?

  This podcast, as you might have guessed by now, is the story of Drake, the piratical founder of England's naval tradition, the religious zealot. You are listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and this is part one of my story of Drake. From ship's boy to Gloriana's favourite. Enjoy.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  T minus ten.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till they resperse in black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 7:16Dan Snow?

  Drake was born where the river Tay tumbles, cascades down off the wild uplands of Dartmoor, and starts to proceed in a more placid fashion through the gentle, rich lands of the Tayvee Valley. This is the land of Devon. Good soil, green, so green, drenched by the rains that crash into it off the Atlantic. Nowhere in Devon is very far from the sea. They're all mariners in the West Country. The Drake family had lived there, well, by four generations. Solid yeoman farmers, not grand, but comfortable with a few acres, able to employ a few hands for the farm at harvest.

• 8:01Dan Snow?

  We don't know exactly when, but in 1538, or 39, or 40, Edmund Drake had his first son. They called him Francis. He and his wife would go on to have 12 sons that we know of. Some of them will pop up in this tale. Drake's life was shaped by their religious earthquake that was gripping England at the time.

• 8:26Dan Snow?

  It was the Reformation. It started with Henry VIII's decision to break with Rome. It intensified in the reign of his son Edward VI, as a more radical form of Protestantism was imposed. That many Cornishmen were not having this upheaval, not having this change, and there was a West Country uprising. The Drakes, though, were committed to this new religion, so they appeared to have had to flee their home, although there might be something to do with the fact their father may well have been a highway robber. Anyway, the revolt, the West Country revolt, was put down by Drake's landlord, the Protestant Lord Russell, using a load of Italian mercenaries. The Drakes fled to Kent. They lived on the foreshore of another beautiful river, the River Medway.

• 9:08Dan Snow?

  Quite possibly they lived in an old hulk, an old ship's hull now turned into a cottage. His dad became a preacher of the new Protestant faith, and his father's religion shaped Drake. He was a passionate believer, he was an evangelical. And as well as his prayers and his religious belief, I think it was here, on the Medway, that Drake got his introduction to the sea. He watched ships sailing and rowing up the Thames to London. He would have listened to sailors' tales. He would have paddled in discarded little open boats with his brothers and his mates, maybe stepped a branch as a mast, hung some old rags on it, some sacking to make a sail. Somewhere on the Medway, the river where Nelson would later join the Royal Navy, I'm

• 9:51Dan Snow?

  convinced that Francis Drake commanded his first crew, a bunch of kids exploring the shallows. Faith and the sea, that was Drake. Edward VI died prematurely, diving as a teenager, and his older half-sister Mary came to the throne. Well, she was a Catholic, and she threatened to marry the hero of Catholic Europe, Philip of Spain, son of the ruler of the most powerful empire in the world, a global empire in which the sun never set. England's Protestants were furious. Foreign faith, foreign rule. For people like the Drakes, this was intolerable. The men of Kent launched a rebellion. Well, a few thousand of them did, anyway.

• 10:35Dan Snow?

  They marched on London, where they were soundly beaten. We don't know any details about the Drakes. Did his father join the rebellion? Did he march on London, or did he at least shout prayers and promises of absolution as the rebels tramped up the London Road? Did young Francis and his mates run alongside the column? Gazing up at these rebels, these men with their bill hooks and the odd musket, going off to fight for England and Protestantism.

• 11:02Dan Snow?

  An English prayer book? An English queen? Rather than the one in the pocket of Spain? Well, we don't know. But what we do know is that when the clampdown came, when agents of Mary's regime arrived, they burned members of Drake's church or nearby churches for their Protestantism. When people were forced to flee to Holland, Drake remembered. That religious violence of his youth produced a deeply religious man. He was an obvious committed Protestant. He would pray for hours. His crews had regular and strict religious observance. He tried to convert shipmates, one on one, and his letters are shot through with evangelical language, with prayer.

• 11:47Dan Snow?

  Throughout his voyages all around the world, he kept with him a book written by John Fox, infamous book, The History of the Protestant Martyrs Killed by Mary's Regime. Drake was a religious extremist. He remembered the crimes of Mary's Catholic servants, and he would take the most terrible revenge on her faith.

• 12:09Dan Snow?

  That revenge would come by sea was also determined by his childhood. When Mary was succeeded by her Protestant sister Elizabeth Tudor, old man Drake was back in fashion. He became vicar of a parish on the River Medway. But there wasn't much to sustain his sons, and they were nearly all apprenticed to mariners. So he, like his brothers, spent the next few years at sea. He spent the next few years learning the ropes. Now, my friends, my listeners, let me tell you. If you can sail in the Thames estuary, the North Sea, along the Dutch coast, you can sail anywhere in the world. In fact, it will be a pleasure. Just open a chart, do me a favor, open a chart today. It looks like someone spilt their coffee on it. Coastline so fractured that your eye can't really take in their coherence.

• 12:54Dan Snow?

  It's quite difficult to know what is coast and what is foreshore, what is mud flat and sandbank and reef. And those banks run in great jagged, parallel lines, like wolverines just slash the chart. And that's before we've talked about the tide which howls in and out of the Thames estuary four times a day, a conveyor belt if you're on it, whizzing you towards the capital, an unstoppable force if you're unlucky enough to be against it. The only course, the wisest course, to drop your anchor, sit on the forecastle and light a pipe, get to chatting and wait for the tide to change, which is literally the entire plot of the novel Heart of Darkness. But anyway, what about the weather, you ask? Well, the weather, friends, is foul, and that's in the summer.

• 13:38Dan Snow?

  The relentless pumping of that great British southwesterly interspersed with howling, screaming gales out to the German sea that brings sleet and snow and cold that will paralyze your fingers as you struggle to make reefing lines fast. Endless mist and cloud. Drake would have learned to feel his way along the coast with his lead line. He'd have watched for telltale wavelets, odd little eddies in the water that marked places of danger on deeper channels. It was one hell of an apprenticeship. Drake was good. And we know that because the mariner he was apprenticed to came to look on him like a son. And when he died, he left his ship to Drake.

• 14:18Dan Snow?

  And the first thing Francis Drake did was go home, out of the Medway, along the coast of Kent, around the foreland, back into the English Channel, back to the green rolling hills, the West Country. I think I've always found those West Country folk have a homing beacon on them, like salmon. And once he was safely and snugly back in Plymouth, he met up with his seafaring cousins, the Hawkins boys. They're more like seafaring aristocracy. Their father, William, had been one of the most notable West Country seafarers. He'd become a favourite of Henry VIII, in fact. He appears to have been the first Englishman to sail to West Africa and then across to Brazil in the 1520s and 30s.

• 15:01Dan Snow?

  He'd even brought home an African king to be presented to Henry at Whitehall Palace. He'd become mayor and member of parliament for Plymouth. And when he died, he left his sons a small fleet of vessels. And William Hawkins really...

• 15:17Dan Snow?

  Epitomises the revolution that occurred in the previous fifty years. England's place in the world, like Portugal's, had been transformed. In fourteen ninety, little old England was sitting on the very edge of the known world, just part of an archipelago in the Atlantic, right on the edge. But thirty years later, it was clear to England that there was a new world out there to the West. Rather than being on the edge of something, England was in the middle. And the hottest place to be in England in this new paradigm was in the west of England, where good natural harbours had ready access to the sea lanes, south and west. You don't want to be in the Medway, you don't want to be in Rochester, or East Anglia,

• 16:00Dan Snow?

  or Norfolk anymore. No, no, you want to be in the west. You want to look west, young man. You want to look west at the opportunities there. And that's exactly what Hawkins did and exactly what Drake would do. Hawkins had been like that smallholding farmer who finds himself in the middle of a freshly discovered gold field. He'd picked up a shovel, and Drake would do the same. Drake put himself right in the heart of the action, in Plymouth alongside the Hawkins boys. He served on one voyage, trading to northern Spain. He obviously impressed them because they enrolled him for another voyage, and this one was altogether different. The Hawkins lads wanted to follow the course their father had set and head for the new

• 16:41Dan Snow?

  world. There was a glittering prize. The Spanish had been looking for spices in the Orient, in the Indies. Columbus had not found the Indies, or much in the way of spices, but he had found the Americas, the islands of the Caribbean. And later expeditions, following in his footsteps, arrived at Florida, and Mexico, and Panama, and Colombia, and much else besides. And this territory was all claimed by Spain and rapidly turned into a massive plantation. First, local people, and then Africans, were enslaved and forced to work the land, producing sugar in particular. Alongside a climate and soil that was perfect for sugar cultivation, the Spanish had then found silver.

• 17:27Dan Snow?

  When the Spanish had conquered the Inca Empire, pushing into South America, they'd found Mont Potosi in Bolivia. Now, the Spanish know that mountain as Chirico de Potosi, the rich mountain Potosi. And it was indeed rich. In fact, it was the richest source of silver in the history of mankind. Every year, that silver was mined, it was shipped up the coast, up the Pacific coast to Panama. Then it was taken on pack animals across the Ithmus of Panama and loaded onto a Spanish fleet which carried it back to Europe. It was one of the grandest, most ambitious natural resource asset strips in history to that point.

• 18:08Dan Snow?

  Tens of millions of ducats' worth of silver were flowing across the Atlantic to Spain. And that was the fuel which powered the Spanish crown, the rottweiler of the Roman faith, as it engaged in its unyielding mission to bring the lost Protestant sheep back to Rome. But the extraordinary thing about this vast empire, this imperial project, was that it was being run by a sort of handful of Spanish officials in largely undefended settlements scattered all over the Americas. Santo Domingo and Hispaniola, for example. It depended on its defence on around 200 part-time Europeans that settled there, backed

• 18:47Dan Snow?

  up by a bevy of unenthusiastic enslaved Africans and indigenous men who were supposedly reinforcing them. The Spanish were aware of this weakness. They were aware that a few European captains from other nations were starting to probe into this new world to trade, but also commit acts of piracy. And they tried sending a fleet, a sort of guard fleet, but some of them were lost en route and the area was so vast and the pirates they were trying to catch were so few and nimble that it was just an impossible task for those lumbering warships to track them down. There was something about this new world, there was something about the Spanish main which made it different, made it separate from Europe. And as Hawkins and Drake were preparing for their expedition, I think there was a sense that the rules didn't really apply.

• 19:32Dan Snow?

  There was a line drawn down the middle of the Atlantic, an imaginary line, obviously, drawn by the Pope to divide the world between Spain and Portugal. Now Hawkins believed that once you crossed the line, the niceties of European diplomacy didn't count for anything. It was a free-for-all. Even when your sovereigns had buried the hatchets in Europe and were playing nice, the expression went that there was no peace beyond the line. It was, in some senses, a wild west. And in the mid 1560s, Hawkins crossed the line twice. He had the terrible distinction of being the first Englishman to take enslaved Africans to the Americas. He transported them in order to sell them to Spanish plantations, which weren't supposed

• 20:14Dan Snow?

  to trade with the Brits in this Spanish monopoly zone, but whose appetite for enslaved Africans, whose greed overcame their obedience to Spanish regulations. In 1566, Queen Elizabeth forbade Hawkins from crossing the Atlantic again, so instead he sent his fleet and stayed behind himself. So technically, he had obeyed her sovereign. He sent three little ships, and aboard them was Francis Drake. And this would be quite an apprenticeship. It was just one long voyage of piracy and mayhem. They'd captured Portuguese ships off Africa, stole their cargo of enslaved people, and sailed to the Caribbean. They attempted to sell them to Spanish planters whilst also capturing more Spanish ships. Then they sailed back to Plymouth just under a year later.

• 20:58Dan Snow?

  They had enraged the Spanish and Portuguese. They had not quite hit the jackpot. It hadn't worked quite as well as they'd hoped, but Drake had learned a lot. He'd learned what to do, and more importantly than that, as a young man, he'd learned what not to do. He didn't spend long ashore because Hawkins was footing out another expedition, this time six ships. Now, classic Queen Elizabeth, she was pursuing détente with the Spanish at that point, so she was trying to play nice with the Spanish. But she quietly contributed two warships to the expedition, so she came in as a secret investor, and it became, therefore, a public-private partnership, you could say. She promised the Spanish ambassador that Hawkins was not going to cross the line. No, no, he was heading to trade elsewhere. She was very naughty, because John Hawkins was planning to do exactly that.

• 21:43Dan Snow?

  He would command one of Elizabeth's warships, the Jesus of Lubeck, and Drake would be one of his principal officers aboard. They set sail in October 1567. Unsurprisingly, at that time of year, they were scattered by a savage gale in Biscay. You're going to hear about a lot of gales in this episode, but this did seem to be a bad one. Hawkins, at one point, summoned the crew because there was nothing left to do but pray for the safety of the ship. All hope was lost. As the ship twisted, the stress on the hull meant the planks were prized apart and water spouted through. Pumps were manned 24 hours a day, but the prayers and the pumps worked.

• 22:20Dan Snow?

  They arrived at Canary Islands and they put in to repair and replenish. And Hawkins at this point breaks up a jewel which had burst out between two members of his crew. There was a full sword fight on the ship between two members of the crew. And he was wounded as he broke up this fight. He spared the lives of the men responsible. Even though he was wounded, he put to sea because the Spanish authorities looked to be sort of manoeuvring to spring a trap. And so Hawkins left the Canary Islands, Spanish possessions, and headed to West Africa. He seized Africans from villages. He also committed acts of piracy against Portuguese slaving vessels. Portugal was at peace at the time, we should say, so that was just straightforwardly criminal. And one of those vessels that he seized, well, he gave command of it to Francis Drake, his cousin.

• 23:05Dan Snow?

  In fact, it was a French ship that he seized and he made Drake its skipper. In Sierra Leone, they went on a raid with an African tribe to assault a rival tribe. There was a savage battle. Women and children were massacred, they were drowned, some of them were even eaten. But the English reward for taking part in that raid was 250 enslaved people. And that was enough to bring Hawkins's holds up to full for the Middle Passage, the infamous Middle Passage, the Atlantic Crossing. The Middle Passage was an unimaginable torment for the men, women and children that were locked together in the hulls of those ships. The majority of enslaved people would die if the ships meant contrary winds or disease spread between the narrow decks.

• 23:50Dan Snow?

  We don't know how many Africans died on this particular journey, but certainly Hawkins was keen to sell those survivors when he reached South America. He explained his appearance in South America on well-being-blown-off course, which is extremely unlikely, but he told the governor of Rio de la Hacha, which is just on the modern border between Colombia and Venezuela, now that he was here, did he want to buy any slaves? The Spanish had been reminded of their duty. It had been reinforced to them that they were not to trade with the English, and so the governor refused. Hawkins responded by occupying the town, burning parts of it, and making several threats to the Spanish until they agreed reluctantly to pay for his slaves and make him leave.

• 24:33Dan Snow?

  He repeated the same formula elsewhere, a mixed success. By early August, he decided that he had a reasonable amount of Spanish gold in his hulls, and he headed home with Drake and the rest of his crews. Sailed into a violent storm as they tried to get on the edge of Cuba out in the Atlantic. And for a week, most of those ships were driven west into the Gulf of Mexico. It was unknown territory. The ships were in a terrible state. There was so much seawater that got in through the leaky planks of Hawkins's ship that there were fish swimming around in the hold. In desperate need of a harbour, they simply stopped a Spanish ship and asked for where the nearest one was.

• 25:15Dan Snow?

  They were told the only one really available was San Juan de Lúa, just on the coast by the Mexican city of Veracruz. The English limped into San Juan. Now foolishly, the local Spanish officials rode out to welcome them. They assumed it was a big Spanish fleet bringing the new governor to Veracruz. Hawkins welcomed them politely aboard, said he was here to make some repairs, which he was happy to pay for, but that these Spanish officials would be his hostages until the work was done. The English entered the harbour and got to work. Two days later, though, things got ominous. That Spanish fleet that they'd been waiting for did actually arrive. Hawkins was now outgunned and outnumbered. He acted fast.

• 25:59Dan Snow?

  He sent cannon ashore to a small island which controlled the mouth of the harbour. So the Spanish fleet couldn't get into the harbour without Hawkins's permission. Very embarrassing. A few days negotiations took place, and the Spanish needed to enter that port. They need to find the safety of harbour. Otherwise, if they're anchored off, they can be scattered by the wind and they risk being wrecked on the shore. So they cut a deal with the English. Hawkins was prepared to let them into the harbour as long as they behaved themselves. They agreed to let Hawkins finish his work, and Hawkins allowed the Spanish ships to enter. They came into the harbour, then dug mooring up side by side with the English ships. Very cosy, very snug, very friendly. In fact, there was quite a lot of fraternisation that took place, although I doubt Drake participated in it.

• 26:41Dan Snow?

  But for the Spanish, this was a bitter pill to swallow. They started to secretly squeeze soldiers onto their ship, and they planned for a stunning surprise attack that would take the English ships, destroy them and punish these Lutheran interlopers. On September the 23rd, the Spanish launched that attack.

• 27:03Dan Snow?

  Englishmen found themselves thrust into their first big battle outside Europe. The dawn of the age of empire, it wouldn't be their last. Rowing boats suddenly appeared, they were bringing hordes of Spanish troops to swarm aboard English ships. One of them, the Minion, was particularly vulnerable. Hawkins saw what was happening and roared, "God and Saint George, upon these traitorous villains, and rescue the Minion, I trust in God, the day shall be ours." Inspired by that kind of robust leadership, they did drive back the Spanish boarders, all the ships tried to put to sea. The Spanish had seized the guns ashore, they'd seized the cannons ashore, and they turned them on the English ships. And meanwhile, the English ran out what cannons they had left on board, and blasting any

• 27:48Dan Snow?

  Spanish targets they could see down the barrel. That English fire appeared to be quite accurate, they managed to sink the Spanish flagship in the shallow water, the crew jumped overboard to safety. The next Spanish warship took an unlucky shot to its powder magazine and exploded. The English then sank one of the unarmed merchant ships that had come in with the Spanish. In return, though, especially the smaller English ships were being battered by the cannon ashore. The Angel sank, the Swallow, the Opus Dei, and one of the Portuguese prizes they'd picked up in West Africa, they were all forced to surrender. Drake got lucky, and that's not the last time you're gonna hear me talk about luck in this podcast. He was right on the end of the line, so he was able to throw off his warps, get rid

• 28:33Dan Snow?

  of his ropes, and make it out first. But Drake's ship had no cannon aboard, so he could only watch as his cousin Hawkins was smashed by shot from all sides. Hawkins stood there encouraging his men, as you heard in the introduction, he ordered beer to be brought for him in a silver cup, he projected calm, at one stage it was shot out of his hand, and he roared not to worry, it was a good omen. If that was a good omen, I wouldn't wanna see a bad one, because his fleet was being destroyed. His ship, which hadn't been in great shape before, remember, was now shot through, and he ordered Drake and another ship to come alongside and rescue his men, and critically, his treasure. There was a breakdown of order. Things got chaotic, as the Spanish sent a flaming vessel, a fire ship, an old hulk piled

• 29:17Dan Snow?

  with fuel, that deliberately set on fire and floated towards the English. Hawkins dashed below, he told his Spanish hostages that they were free to go, he'd kept his side of the bargain, and then he leapt off the rail, off his flagship, onto the deck of another ship. Only two English ships limped out of the harbour. And at that point, it seems that a stiff breeze blew up. And that encouraged Drake to abandon his cousin, his commanding officer. And he decided to set out for England by himself. Hawkins later said bitterly that Drake had forsook us in our great misery. It's impossible to know what happened. Maybe Drake did lose his nerve, maybe he bolted, or maybe scattered by the wind, he decided his duty lay in just getting his men home, getting his ship home.

• 30:02Dan Snow?

  And sure enough, his damaged little ship limped into Plymouth four months later, in January 1569. On Hawkins's ship, there was terrible suffering. Some of the crew begged to be put ashore to take their chances with the Spanish and the indigenous peoples, rather than endure a trip home in the overcrowded, damaged ship. The crews of the other ships in the squadron, they faced a terrible fate. They were murdered, or they were rounded up. Some of those prisoners died in Spanish prisons. Others lived out their days as galley slaves, pulling on oars for His Most Catholic Majesty. Hawkins remarkably managed to reach Cornwall in late January, just after Drake. He told Queen Elizabeth Courtia, who inquired, that if he'd written a book about his misfortunes,

• 30:47Dan Snow?

  it would be as big as the Bible. The battle at San Juan de Lúa enraged Drake. He felt personally betrayed. He felt for his friends and shipmates, who now lay in shallow graves on the Spanish main or chained to the thwarts of Spanish galleys. He was probably feeling a little bit insecure about his own less than glorious role. And in that moment, he reinvented himself. He evolved from a sort of buccaneering merchant into a one-man war machine. Francis Drake would have his revenge. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. More on Francis Drake after this.

• 31:36Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

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• 33:24Speaker 06

  What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 34:19Dan Snow?

  In early 1569, a short, stocky, hardscrabble West Countryman went to court for the first time. He was Francis Drake, and he'd been sent by John Hawkins, his cousin, to describe the fate of the expedition to the West Indies and lobby for a robust government response. He must have cut it an aggressive and uncompromising figure. And his words fell on deaf ears because the government at that time was currently in the mood to de-escalate. No action was taken. Drake and his West Country comrades took away a very simple lesson: if they wanted vengeance, they'd have to take it themselves. While he was planning that vengeance, he did obviously have a little bit of spare time because he managed to get married. He married one Mary Newman. They got married in 1569, they'd been married for 12 years.

• 35:02Dan Snow?

  But Drake could be at sea for most of them, and probably for that reason, they had no children. There would be no Drake Dynasty. The following year, 1570, he left his married life behind. He made his first move. He sailed back to the Caribbean. This time, interestingly, not even pretending to trade. So this idea that maybe you could pick up enslaved people, sell them in the Caribbean, and trade as you would with Spain itself, well, that had now been jettisoned. This was war. Drake would be the first Englishman to raid Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. This was straightforward piracy. He crossed the line in more than one sense. He had seen opportunity in the lightly defended West Indies on the Spanish Main. He meant to exploit it.

• 35:46Dan Snow?

  He was going to enrich himself, and he was going to make the Spanish weep. The raid did not go that well. You might even say it was a bit of a failure. As we all know, success is forged in failure. And he later rebadged that raid as a reconnaissance mission. Now, I'm sure he actually wished there hadn't just been reconnaissance. I bet he wished he'd sail home with a hull full of treasure, but it was not to be on this occasion. But as a reconnaissance, it did prove invaluable because he made an important discovery. He found the Achilles' heel of Philip's empire, or the jugular, or some other metaphor that I'm reaching for. He certainly found the weak point, the weak point of the Death Star, the choke point. He learned that all the riches of Spain's South American empire, particularly the silver mined from that rich mountain in Bolivia,

• 36:31Dan Snow?

  rather than sailing all the way around the south of South America, it was shipped north along the South American coast to Panama, where it's moved across the land, across the isthmus, on the backs of mules. The route went through thick tropical jungle. The Spanish had assumed its remoteness was its protection. But what if it wasn't? What if it was a vulnerability? Drake convinced enough backers to invest in sending him once again to the Spanish main, this time for a very specific attempt on that narrow artery of the Spanish empire. He arrived in early 1571. Now, things were a little bit complicated. The Spanish were on their guard because there was a French pirate in the area, actually trying to have a go at the same target.

• 37:12Dan Snow?

  As he was sizing up the situation, Drake captured a couple of Spanish ships, which he looted. In the gutted hull of one, he left a note: "Done by the English, who are well disposed if there be no cause to the contrary. If there be cause, we will be devils rather than men." It was quite the warning. He was certainly rather devilish over the next few weeks and months. He terrorised the whole coast between Panama and Colombia. He captured ships, he looted them, he burned, he sank them. And now we know, for the first time, a report of this belligerent Englishman, this nuisance, arrived on the desk of the King of Spain. Drake was beginning to make a name for himself, but it was only the beginning.

• 37:54Dan Snow?

  This expedition, interestingly, it made far more money than Hawkins's attempts to trade. So Drake and others started to believe that piracy, or direct action, was the way ahead. The Spanish would come to wish that they'd let the Englishman buy and sell goods on the open market. The alternative was much, much worse.

• 38:16Dan Snow?

  In spring 1572, Drake sailed again. He had with him two small ships and only 73 men, and I find this so fascinating. These are the tiny numbers that helped to shape the destiny of global empires at this dawn of the European age. Drake was in his early 30s, but I think hardly a man aboard the expedition apart from him would have been over 30 years old. He made good time across the Atlantic, he refilled his water cars in the sweet mountain streams of Dominica, and he arrived in Panama by July 1572. First thing he did was build a sturdy stockade ashore, and he set about building smaller boats so he could conduct inshore raids in shallower waters. He led a daring night time raid on the settlement of Nombret de Dios, relying on dash and surprise to overwhelm the Spanish defenders.

• 39:01Dan Snow?

  This is the settlement on the Gulf of Mexico side of Panama. In a chaotic night action, he got hit in the leg by a bullet, but he managed to drive the Spanish defenders out of town. They broke into the governor's house, they found a pile of silver bars about 70 foot in length, 12 foot high, each weighing 40 pounds. But then he got greedy. He left men to guard this pile of silver, and he made for the town treasure house, hoping there'd be gold and jewels in there. And as his force moved down, there was a massive thunderstorm and all their gunpowder was rendered useless. And as they began to smash down the treasure house door, men realised that Drake was growing faint, he was covered in blood, he was about to pass out, and they immediately scooped

• 39:43Dan Snow?

  him up and retreated, leaving the treasure house and all the silver they'd already captured, leaving it all behind. So you get a sense of how much they rated their talismanic captain. Without him, there's little point in carrying all the silver off, there was no way they were going to get home safely. Far better to abandon the treasure and make sure Drake was safe. The Spanish governor then sent Drake a message saying, "Get well soon, what are your intentions? And do you need anything to continue your voyage, i.e. please, please leave us alone?" And Drake's reply is simply awesome. He wrote, "He wanted nothing but some of that special commodity which that country yielded, treasure, to content himself and his company. And therefore he advised the governor to hold open his eyes, for before he departed,

• 40:27Dan Snow?

  if God lent him life and leave, he meant to reap some of their harvest, which they get out of the earth and send into Spain all the trouble of the earth." The governor, no doubt, quaked when he got that reply. The town tried to defend itself, they erected a battery, they built some better defenses, and so it was now a harder nut to crack. Which compelled Drake to come up with another plan. He couldn't assume now that he could capture the town when the treasure arrived from over the Ithmus. So he came up with a daring plan to seize it before it reached the town. He would ambush the treasure on the narrow track in the jungles of Panama as it passed on mules from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. No one had ever attempted it before. He was able to attempt it because he got help from a very unexpected, unlikely quarter.

• 41:12Dan Snow?

  Living in those jungles, bitter enemies of the Spanish was a community of Africans. Formerly enslaved people who'd escaped and now waged war on their erstwhile captors. Drake had stumbled into these people and he'd actually recruited a former enslaved called Diego, who now became his close confidant. And Diego promised to forge an alliance between Drake and these outlaw Africans. They proved willing, and Drake, who'd once been a slave trader, don't forget, suddenly, well, he appears to develop this respect for these new allies. He built a fort on the Gulf coast, and he called it Fort Diego after this invaluable ally. For the next few months Drake waited for news that the treasure was being brought

• 41:55Dan Snow?

  up the Pacific coast and was making its journey across the Ithmus of Panama. It was a hard time for Drake. They ran low on supplies. Drake's younger brother was killed trying to board a Spanish ship. Another of Drake's brothers died in a yellow fever outbreak that killed something like, well, as much as half the expedition. But in early 1573, these Cimarronis, these escaped Africans, brought the news that Drake had been waiting for. The treasure had arrived on the Pacific coast and there were plans to bring it across to the Gulf coast. It was time. They set off into the thick jungle. Four Cimarronese broke trail, twelve actors scouts as an advance party. Then came the sweating Englishmen, about eighteen of them, accompanied by two more Africans.

• 42:40Dan Snow?

  And there was a rearguard of twelve Africans that followed on behind. The Africans had phenomenal bushcraft. They were able to build shelters every day to camp under, made from palm tree wood frames covered with plantain leaves. After a week of hacking through the jungle, Drake came to a viewpoint. The Africans had cut steps into an enormous tree, and from the top of that tree Drake could stare out at the Pacific and then twist round and look at the Caribbean. It was another turning point in Drake's life. Right there and then, in that tree, he beseeched the Almighty to give him life and leave to sail an English ship on that sea. He was hit by his destiny in the branch of that tree, but his destiny would have to

• 43:25Dan Snow?

  wait because he had more urgent matters at hand. The Cimarronese gathered intelligence, and once they were about a day's march on the Pacific coast, Drake heard that a convoy was about to set off. The timing was perfect. He set up an ambush, half his men in long grass, fifty metres from the road, the other half mirroring them on the other side. They waited for half an hour and then heard the mules approach. You can imagine the tension. But suddenly they heard the noise of hooves galloping in from the other direction, coming from the Caribbean side. What was going on? Well, what had happened is an Englishman had had too much to drink. His name was Robert Pike. He'd been swilling down spirits, give him some courage, and he appears to have got a little too encouraged.

• 44:07Dan Snow?

  He'd crawled up too close to the track, and when a solitary rider had come from the direction of the Caribbean, he'd come from the wrong direction, Robert Pike had risen up and roared at him, and the rider had galloped on and was able to warn the convoy. The mules turned round. They'd escaped the trap, but for some reason they did send two horses loaded with silver along the track so the English wouldn't suspect that they'd been discovered. Drake now had to make some quick decisions. He realised that the Spanish knew was here. He led his men in a headlong charge down the path towards the Caribbean to the safety of his ships. They stormed a village, they stole lots of food and valuables, and they staggered to the coast to meet their comrades. The Cimarronese ended up carrying those Englishmen that were too weak to go on.

• 44:51Dan Snow?

  And interestingly, when they arrived back at the coast, they arrived back at their ships. Many of the enslaved Africans opted to join those ships' crews. They wanted to serve under Drake, rather than stay and risk the punitive expeditions launched by the Spanish. Now Drake had failed, all thanks to Robert Pike, but he was determined to make another attempt on the Isthmus. This time, he wouldn't trek all the way through the jungle. He'd make it closer to the coast. He hoped that the Spanish would think he'd given up and gone home. He received help from another rather unlikely source at this point. There was a veteran French privateer, Guillaume Le Testud, in the area. And so they hooked up and agreed that it would be an Anglo-French-African attack. On the 1st of April, the Cimarronis reported that there was another mule train back on the trail.

• 45:35Dan Snow?

  Drake staked out another ambush, this time much closer to the Gulf Coast. They only went a few miles inland and got ready alongside the path before it entered the Spanish settlement on the Gulf Coast. This time, the attack went like clockwork. Perhaps they'd left Robert Pike back with the supplies. They certainly should have done. The Spanish infantry, the guards of the convoy, they just panicked. They ran, although one shot the French privateer, the French pirate, in the stomach. Drake's men quickly secured the mules. Now, the mule drivers were enslaved Africans. They hated the Spanish so much. They quickly told Drake not to mess about with the silver, but they said there was gold, and they showed them exactly where it was packed. So Drake and his men loaded up all the gold, but had

• 46:15Dan Snow?

  to bury most of the silver. They buried 15 tonnes of silver. They carried out 100,000 pesos of gold on their backs, which was equal to about 40,000 English pounds. That's 20% of Queen Elizabeth's annual revenue. With all that gold on their backs, they made their escape through the jungle. A terrible storm stopped them in their tracks that night, but two days later, they were able to arrive back at the coast, the rendezvous point, where they hoped to see their ship, sitting neatly at anchor. Instead, they saw Spanish vessels searching for them off the coast. A drunk Frenchman had been captured and given up their rendezvous point. So Drake was now trapped between the Spanish ships and the armed Spanish groups that would no doubt be combing the jungle, searching for them.

• 47:00Dan Snow?

  At this point Drake really shows astonishing resolve. He ordered a basic raft to be built and he put to sea with three other men, just on a sort of log raft. They hoped they could creep along the coast, find the English ships and then bring them to chase the Spanish ships off. He gave a brief speech before he left. He said, "God willing, we're back to get them in spite of all the Spaniards in the Indies." And then he set off on what was essentially a suicide mission, through shark-infested waters on a few logs and branches lashed together. And Drake got lucky, because not far along the coast, after a very short journey in fact, he stumbled on the English fleet. The Spanish ships moreover had moved on, they'd continued their search elsewhere. And so he was able to get aboard his English ships, go back, collect his men and the treasure

• 47:45Dan Snow?

  from the jungly shore. And then snuck back into the jungle to retrieve what they'd buried. Sadly for them, the Spanish had found most of it, and they'd also found the wounded French pirate and executed him. But Drake did manage to find a few more silver bars squirreled away underground. With the gold and a little bit of silver safely in his ships' holds, he decided to sail back to England. He arrived on the 9th of August 1573, in Plymouth. Well over a year had passed. Most of the 73 men who'd sailed with him were dead, including two of his brothers. But he had a very cosmopolitan crew, a hold full of Spanish treasure, and he'd seen the Pacific. Drake's dreams of the Pacific though, well, they would have to wait, because Elizabeth

• 48:28Dan Snow?

  was still trying to de-escalate the tensions with Spain. He would not get the official backing for another expedition. Not yet. He'd become like an attack dog. Elizabeth determined the length of his chain, and for the moment she decided to shorten it. So instead of crossing the Atlantic one more time, he joined the English war effort in Ireland. He helped the Earl of Essex and his subordinate military commander, John Norris, to reduce the rebel fortress on Rathlin Island, off the coast of Northern Ireland. He landed supplies and siege guns, and then he swept the sea clear of help coming from Scotland. Now Drake wasn't present when Norris did besiege and capture the castle, massacring nearly every single one of its defenders. It was not the most glorious interlude for Drake, but it did give him the chance to

• 49:11Dan Snow?

  meet some very well-connected people at court, people like the Earl of Essex, one of Elizabeth's favourites. And it's with these new contacts that Drake started to put his plan in place, to sail further than any English skipper had ever taken a crew before. The idea that you could take a crew into the Pacific was astonishingly ambitious. No English ship had ever left the Atlantic before, and we should say in this period going to the Pacific meant not going round Cape Horn, because that hadn't been discovered yet, it meant penetrating through the Straits of Magellan, which are sort of inland passage. But it was so difficult, so challenging, that even the Spanish who discovered it, even they didn't use that route very often. It's a nightmare, it's 300 miles long, at times it's only as wide as a medium-sized

• 49:56Dan Snow?

  river, it's deeply inhospitable landscape, fjord-like valleys which send the wind shrieking down in uncertain and even contrary directions. It's entirely uncharted, it's truly a sort of terrible gauntlet through which to run in order to enter the Pacific. It had been discovered by Magellan on a Spanish expedition in 1590 and 1520, but only a handful of subsequent expeditions had even attempted to round the tip of South America. Magellan's ships, and then one that sailed in 1525, had to endure savage conditions, icy cold, damaged the vessels which left them weakened as they struck out into the Pacific.

• 50:36Dan Snow?

  And that meant of 12 ships that pushed through the Magellan Straits, only one ever returned to Spain. It was a terrifying prospect. And Drake thought he had to run this gauntlet, because he didn't know that if you went further south, you went round Cape Horn, which in fact is an island, and then there's plenty of sea room to the south, there's the Southern Ocean to the south. Drake and everybody else believed that the Magellan Straits was the only way through into the Pacific, the rest was the gigantic southern continent yet to be explored. So that gives you a sense, doesn't it, that Drake was sailing into waters that the English simply had no knowledge of, no experience of, at all.

• 51:18Dan Snow?

  The truth is that the English were, embarrassingly, far behind the Spanish and the Portuguese, and dare I say, even the French when it came to blue water sailing, distant oceans. It's a very different business to moving along a coast when you're sailing in open ocean, you require a different set of skills. No original work on ocean navigation appeared in the English language until 1581, so there was no manual in English. But for Drake, the gamble was worth it. Drake had learned how those Spanish ships, full of treasure, just travelled up and down the Pacific coast of Central America. With no real protection, he realised that an English ship let loose in the undefended Pacific would be like a fox in a hen coop, a wolf in a sheepfold.

• 52:03Dan Snow?

  Now Drake wouldn't be the first Englishman to enter the Pacific. In fact, one of his comrades sailed out in 1576 to Panama, copying Drake's idea. He crossed the Isthmus and then built himself a small boat and he terrorised Spanish shipping in the Pacific briefly before heading back across the Isthmus. However, he was hunted down and captured and the entire expedition ended up dying in Spanish prisons of neglect or being executed. So Drake hoped to be the first person to sail an English ship into the Pacific and lead an English expedition to success in that mighty ocean. Drake started his planning, telling everyone that this was, on paper, a trading mission. The story's put about that he was going to head to Egypt, the Middle East, but in private he had some more realistic conversations.

• 52:48Dan Snow?

  Drake needed backers and he found them through his new grand friends. The Earl of Essex, for example, he passed a letter to Francis Walsingham, one of Elizabeth's key advisers, always known as Elizabeth the First Spymaster. And he was known to be bearish when it came to attacking Catholic powers. Drake thought that his suggestion might fall on receptive ears. And Walsingham was keen, because Walsingham realised instantly that this felt like England's chance to really get in the game. If Drake was able to get through the Straits of Magellan, get into the Pacific, do some exploring, find lands in South America not yet claimed by Spain, befriend local princes, find spices, all that classic 16th century stuff, this was England's chance.

• 53:30Dan Snow?

  Walsingham became one of the key investors and he seems to have introduced Drake to several other important people, high officials in Elizabeth's government, even Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's favourite, on-off boyfriend, platonic, obviously, and others like Christopher Hutton, captain of the Queen's Guard, and another of her particular favourites. It's a very interesting clue here that Drake's investors were definitely in the government, navy, national security lobby. They were not merchants. So from the beginning, really, this was always a strategic mission. This was not a trading jolly. Walsingham and Dudley, well, they were the war party in Elizabeth's court. They wanted to take the

• 54:13Dan Snow?

  fight to Spain. They want to fight Spain anywhere, frankly, around the world, everywhere. And these investors also knew there was another strand of this expedition, and it was one so secret it could not be written down. It was so inflammatory that, as Drake said, if Elizabeth sadly died and was succeeded by her Catholic cousin and heir, Mary, Queen of Scots, such a plan in writing would be their death sentence. And that plan was to go on the greatest raid in history, a tear across the world to set it alight. Drake would bring fire and sword to Spain on a buccaneering sweep across four continents.

• 54:56Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. Keep listening for more on Francis Drake.

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• 56:38Dan Snow?

  Exploration, trade, and war with Spain. A powerful combination. It won him key backers. He had the money. He just needed one more thing. He did need the permission of Queen Elizabeth herself. And luckily for Drake, Elizabeth in 1576 was rather angry at Spain. Like great swathes of Asia and the Americas and bits of Africa, Philip also ruled over European empire. Much of what is now the Netherlands and Belgium were part of this Spanish empire. But it was a part of the Spanish empire in the grip of rebellion, a Protestant rebellion. In 1576, Philip had an army in the Netherlands that was brutally crushing Protestant rebels.

• 57:22Dan Snow?

  And it was said that Philip's rather bellicose, rather warlike commander had boasted that once he finished with these low-country Lutherans, he would turn his veterans on Anne Boleyn's bastard in London. Elizabeth decided to adjust her aggression setting. She looked at her armoury and she selected her weapon. A stocky evangelical swashbuckler from Devon. She chose Drake. Elizabeth's attack dog was about to be taken off the leash.

• 57:54Dan Snow?

  Drake was introduced into her regal presence. He said he was struck by her bearing and manner, the ease with which she exercised her power. "Drake," she said, "so it is that I would gladly be revenged on the King of Spain for diverse injuries that I have received." She listened to his advice. He suggested an attack upon shipping on the west coast of America. Elizabeth was convinced, and so she contributed a thousand crowns to the venture. But in that classic Elizabeth way, nothing was written down. Plausible deniability. Drake carried no letter from his sovereign. If he was captured, he'd be executed as a common pirate. Elizabeth would disavow him.

• 58:37Dan Snow?

  He would be tortured and mutilated and quartered on some distant baking shore. And Elizabeth would shrug him off and shrug off the complaints of the Spanish ambassador. The secret that she had sent him there would die with Drake. That was the deal. He built himself a ship, the Pelican. Extra planks sheathed the outside of the hull through a juice rot. She had eighteen brass and iron guns. You can see Drake's experience in this construction. This would become the most famous ship in English history, but under its rebranded name, the Golden Hind. She was small. I'm always shocked by how tiny she was.

• 59:20Dan Snow?

  Eighty foot long, 150 tonnes or so in weight, nothing. Alongside her, Drake took the Elizabeth of eighty tonnes, the Marigold of thirty tonnes, the Swan fifty tonnes, the Benedict of fifteen tonnes, a little thing commanded by Drake's former carpenter. There were recruited 160 men, who were told that they were going on a trading expedition to the Mediterranean. This would lead to future problems. Now unfortunately for Drake, one of the investors insisted on coming along, the gentleman Thomas Doughty. Drake took another brother. He took a nephew, he took a nephew of Hawkins's, and he took his friend from the Ithmus of Panama, the formerly enslaved African, Diego.

• 1:00:00Dan Snow?

  He took beer and cheese and wine and biscuit and oatmeal and dried fish. He took musical instruments. He took an account of Magellan's voyage. He took his Protestant Martyrs' Book, of course. He took some very, very primitive world maps. And of course, he took a good supply of weapons and ammunition. They sail out of Plymouth Sound on the fifteenth of November, 1577. The start of the longest voyage to that point in human history. Well, it was the start, except a huge storm blew them straight back into Cornwall. Not surprising for November. They set off again on the thirteenth of December and they managed to get through Biscay without the jaws of hell opening for a change. By late December, they were running down the coast of Africa.

• 1:00:43Dan Snow?

  And although many of the crew by this day were asking where they were going, Drake was in his happy place. He was capturing Spanish and Portuguese ships. He was emptying their holes. He was looting. Now, very luckily, the most valuable bit of treasure he got his hands on was a Portuguese pilot, an expert mariner, who could show him how to cross the Atlantic to Brazil. But there was trouble. Drake had trouble, and that trouble was human, obviously. Not only were the crew grumbling about the destination of this expedition, having assumed they were off to the Mediterranean, but one of the investors, the gentleman, Doughty, was starting to fall out with Drake. There are many different accounts, but what's clear is that Doughty had ideas above his station. In fact, he may have been plotting mutiny. He may have fancied himself as leader of this expedition.

• 1:01:27Dan Snow?

  And Drake sort of demoted him and kept a close eye on him. I guess it's worth stopping here to talk about Drake as a leader of men at sea. He was superb. His example has been emulated for generations. He always played his part in the running of the ship. As he put it, "He would haul and draw alongside the seamen. He would pull ropes, he would furl sail." We hear on a later voyage, for example, that Drake waded through the shallows, carrying fresh water from a well on shore to the ship during a replenishment run ashore. He shared the men's burdens with them. However, he also insisted on respect. He also insisted on little rituals that emphasized that he was in command. He never let a man talk to him bareheaded, for example,

• 1:02:11Dan Snow?

  unless he told them they were able to remove their hats. He did punish transgressions. He took a leading role in religious services. He presided over dinner with his officers. No one was allowed to sit down until he did. There was such a fascinating blend of formality and "roll your sleeves up" comradeship aboard these tiny vessels. Everyone had to work together, and yet rigid discipline was also necessary. The vast majority of his men, I think, seemed very happy. We have an interesting account from a Spanish prisoner who was taken a few months later. And the prisoner writes, "I endeavored to find out if the general was well-beloved, and everyone told me that they adored him." They spent sixty days at sea, striking out across the Atlantic. They saw Brazil on the 5th of April, 1578.

• 1:02:56Dan Snow?

  And he edged his way along the coast of Brazil, just feeling his way. No doubt using those skills he developed, feeling his way along the coast of North Kent as a child. His men were definitely shooting him quizzical looks as to why he wasn't really that interested in gathering trade goods. He wasn't just filling up his ships with the famous lumber of Brazil and heading back home. They began to suspect he had different motivations. And perhaps related to that, here on this unknown coast, trouble flared up again. Doughty seems to have... Well, actually, he seems to have been a leader of a sort of clique of gentlemen on the expedition. Now, they didn't want to haul on ropes. They didn't want to make and stow sailors, was the custom of everyone at sea under Drake. They expected the best food. They questioned Drake's authority. And things bubble over.

• 1:03:42Dan Snow?

  Drake ended up punching him and tying him to the mainmast. By contrast, and surprisingly, Drake's relations with indigenous peoples were far better. He ordered everyone to treat them with respect and kindness. He left offerings on sticks and then retreated so as not to intimidate. When one indigenous person stole the cap off his head with peals of laughter and then ran off, Drake ordered his men to stand down, to let it go. He realized that these people were a source of food, help, advice, and, in the future, trading partners, possibly even loyal subjects of Queen Elizabeth. This was a far more enlightened attitude than many other European explorers at the time. By the time they reached the very southern tip of South America, Drake ordered the Little Swan, the ship, to be broken up for parts.

• 1:04:27Dan Snow?

  Doughty had been on the Swan. He refused to leave and go another ship. Drake had him hoisted off by block and tackle. He warned the new crew not to listen to a word Doughty said, “But follow him, follow Drake’s rules, for he was about to make them richer than they imagined.” On the 20th of June, so mid-winter in the southern hemisphere, Drake sailed into a natural harbour just north of the Magellan Straits. No English ship had ever been this far south. And still there, amazingly still there, were the wooden gallows on which Magellan had hanged a crewman 58 years before. Magellan also, a stickler for discipline, knowing there had to be order for them to survive this unprecedented journey.

• 1:05:09Dan Snow?

  And those gallows weren’t the only bad omen. They went ashore and they had an unusually hostile contact with some indigenous peoples. Two of Drake’s men were shot dead by arrows. Drake himself had to rally his men. He coaxed a wet firearm into life and shot one of them, allowing him and his surviving men to reach safety. Onboard the ship, the situation with Doughty had reached a point of no return. Drake summoned him and announced he’d be put on trial. But Doughty was a lawyer, and this would not be easy. He asked to see Drake’s commission from the Queen. He knew Drake had none. But Drake pressed on. A jury was sworn in and they heard evidence of Doughty’s treachery. Doughty kept casting doubt on the proceedings,

• 1:05:54Dan Snow?

  leading Drake to say, “I have not to do with you crafty lawyers, nor do I care for the law, but I know what I will do.” Doughty was found guilty. He begged to be sent home with on the smaller ships, but Drake felt he couldn’t weaken the expedition and he certainly didn’t want to have a bitter enemy slandering him in Whitehall while he was away. Doughty had to die. Strangely, it was rather amicable in the end. They dined together. They took the sacrament together. And Doughty gave a little speech in which he wished good fortune on the voyage and good health to the Queen. He even found it himself to praise Drake. Then Doughty went under the axe. It was the gentleman’s death. Drake held up his severed head and shouted, “This is the end of traitors!”

• 1:06:41Dan Snow?

  Now he had to hope that this removal of the bad apple would help the expedition heal.

• 1:06:47Dan Snow?

  And on August 11th Drake growled at the preacher that he would give the sermon that day. His words are recorded: "My masters, I am a very bad orator, for my bringing up hath not been in learning. But let any man take good notice of what I shall say, and let him write it down; for I will speak nothing but I will answer for it in England, yea, and before Her Majesty." He called for unity in the face of dangers that lay ahead. He impressed upon them what amounted to a social revolution, a demand that birth should not carry privileges in this service, that no one could be passengers. "Thus it is, my masters, that we are very far from our country and friends;

• 1:07:29Dan Snow?

  we are compassed in on every side with our enemies; therefore we are not to make small reckoning of a man, for we cannot have another man if we would give for him ten thousand pounds." It's all a bit Shakespeare, a band of brothers, in Henry V. "Wherefore we must have these mutinies and discords that are grown amongst us redressed; for by the life of God it doth take my wits from me to think on it. Here is such controversy between the sailors and the gentlemen, and such stomaching between the gentlemen and sailors, that it doth make me mad to hear it. But, my masters, I must have it left; for I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman.

• 1:08:08Dan Snow?

  What let us show ourselves all to be of a company, and let us not give occasion to rejoice and decay at our overthrow? I would know him that would refuse to set his hand to a rope, but I know there's not any such here. And as gentlemen are very necessary for government's sake in the voyage, so I have shipped them for that. And though I know sailors to be the most envious people of the world, and so unruly without government, yet may not I be without them." He then pulled the classic trick: he invited anyone who wanted to to step forward and head home. Not one man stepped forward. He finished on a patriotic note: "If the voyage failed, it would be a great blot to our whole country forever,

• 1:08:49Dan Snow?

  and a triumph for Spain and Portugal; and again the like would never be attempted." His men chastened, inspired, got to work. They prepared the flotilla. They burned the ship Mary, they distributed our crew and supplies. And then the Pelican, Elizabeth, and Marigold sailed out to sea on the 17th of August. At the entrance to the straits of Magellan, there are grey cliffs. They just plunge straight down into the ocean and they're known as the Cape of Virgins. It was a suitable place to gather the ship's companies, to salute the Virgin Queen, have a little religious ceremony, obviously. And then in an interesting move, he renamed the Pelican, he called it the Golden Hind. There's that name, finally.

• 1:09:33Dan Snow?

  He made that particular decision because one of his investors, Sir Christopher Hatton, well, his family crest was a hind, a female deer, and Doughty had been a servant of Hatton's. So here's Drake saying, yes, sorry I had to kill Doughty, your sort of agent on board. But Hatton, I'm still very keen to retain your confidence. I'm still loyal to you. Then they waited for a northeast wind and when it came, they rode it into the jaws of the strait. Like I said, there are violent squalls of wind that fly off the peaks in any and every direction, there are whirlpools and in some places, there are shoals in those straits that threaten to tear out the hull. In others, there's underwater canyons and abyss beneath the ships that make it impossible to drop an anchor. Remarkably, they made it.

• 1:10:16Dan Snow?

  I mean superb pilotage and seamanship. Fourteen days they got through. It had taken Magellan thirty-seven. It had taken one other Spanish expedition, one hundred and twenty days. They were the first English fleet to enter the Pacific. But there was no time to celebrate. Because hardly they entered the Pacific, that most peaceful of oceans, they were smashed by a terrible storm. One of the captains simply wrote, it was the worst he'd ever encountered. They were driven south into the Southern Ocean. They were forced back to shore. Then when they'd found safe haven, they were snatched from it and thrown back out into the sea. There were howling winds, there were mountainous seas. Sometimes they were so close to uncharted, iron-hard shores of South America, they could

• 1:11:01Dan Snow?

  see the spume of waves crashing on the unforgiving rocks. Other times, they were swept totally out of sight of land, uncertain where they were. And I've sailed in storms and it does two things to you. It destroys your vessel. You just watch as weak points are prized open. The wind and the water will find those cracks and widen them. You watch as fittings and fixtures are slowly forced out of the deck. Ropes age before your eyes. And the second thing that storms do is they destroy you. You can't eat or sleep. You're exhausted, you're soaking, you're terrified, and finally, you're hopeless. You give up.

• 1:11:45Dan Snow?

  Drake's fleet was pushed right to the edge and beyond it, really. Towards the end of September, Marigold went down with all hands. Some of Drake's men claimed to have heard the baleful cries the sailors their vessel founded. It was too much for the crew of the Elizabeth in October in what the captain described as fog and outrageous weather. They crept back into the Magellan Strait and tried to recover for a couple of weeks. Then, when they got underway, the decision was made not to head back into the Pacific, but to go east into the Atlantic, home. In retrospect, everyone blamed each other for this fateful decision. But that left Drake on the only English vessel in the mighty Pacific Ocean.

• 1:12:29Dan Snow?

  Now, one advantage of spending so much time being smashed by the winds in the Southern Ocean was that he discovered that the Magellan Strait was not the only passage into the Pacific. He discovered the wide open sea beyond. He worked out that Cape Horn was, in fact, an island. And he may well have been the first person in history to spot Cape Horn, but he certainly established that it was an ocean passage south, a passage that still bears his name to this day. In fact, during this traumatic time, Drake claimed two islands beyond the Magellan Strait. He claimed them for England, thus becoming the first overseas possessions claimed for England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. An unlikely couple of islands to be the genesis of England's empire. He called them the Elizabeth Islands, in fact.

• 1:13:13Dan Snow?

  He landed on one of them, he lay down and claimed that this was further south than any European had ever been before.

• 1:13:20Dan Snow?

  At the very end of October, that wind finally subsided. Finally, that wind veered round to the south and blew Drake north. His crew prostrate, exhausted, riddled with scurvy, his ship battered. They put in for water at a place called Mocha in Chile, and the locals seemed to have taken them for hated Spaniards and attacked them. Every member of Drake's landing party was wounded, two of them mortally wounded. Drake sustained two head injuries, he'd been shot by an arrow in the face. But he decided not to punish them with a broadside from his ship's cannon because he wanted them to be able to distinguish between the English and the Spanish who'd inflicted such cruelty upon them.

• 1:14:02Dan Snow?

  Drake had survived, just. Men's bodies had failed, their minds had broken. One ship had sunk, another abandoned him. His fleet of three was now winnowed to one. But now, well, now Drake was in the game. He now had vitamin C coursing through his veins. The symptoms of scurvy retreated, the wind was at their back. There was a totally undefended Spanish coast under their lee. This is what they came for.

• 1:14:32Dan Snow?

  It all started in Valparaiso, the port of Santiago, Chile, on the 5th of December 1578. A strange ship entered the harbour. The Spanish welcomed it, there were no foreigners in the Pacific. It came alongside a Spanish ship, and an Englishman vaulted the bulwark and punched the first Spaniard he saw. That was the extent of the violence that day. The rest was looting. Drake took the ship, he took the town, and he emptied both. Twenty-five thousand pesos of gold was found, silver was stolen from the church, wine and food ransacked. And the following day he left, like locusts. The English had come to the Pacific.

• 1:15:14Dan Snow?

  They had to move fast, they wanted to stay ahead of the news of their arrival, they wanted to stay ahead of Spain's retaliation. In February 1579, they arrived at Arica. This was the port from which the silver from Mount Potosi was shipped up to Panama. Drake was disappointed the only captain won ship with 37 bars of silver in its hold. He decided he had to keep going north. He managed to capture pilots who knew the coast well, he had a key advantage now. And he heard it was a galleon richly laden with silver only a few days ahead of him, heading for Panama. It was called the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción. He arrived in Calau. He discovered 30 ships in the harbour there, that's the port of Lima in modern Peru.

• 1:15:57Dan Snow?

  He searched them all one by one, he found no treasure, but he cut all of their anchor cables. He cut down the mast of the biggest ship so no one could follow him, chase him, or overtake him. He continued to hunt for that big, silver-laden galleon. He captured another couple of ships as he moved up the coast, he tortured members of the crew to make them reveal where the gold was hidden, that's not his finest hour. He freed enslaved Africans on the ships and he offered them the chance to join his crew at the same rate of pay as the English sailors. And still, he scoured the ocean. He offered a gold chain as a prize for whoever saw the Spanish galleon first. And at noon on the 1st of March, young John Drake, his nephew, sitting at the masthead, saw a sail.

• 1:16:40Dan Snow?

  He called down to the deck below. Drake altered course and headed for the ship. Now, the Spanish ship had no idea there was an enemy in the area. Drake deliberately slowed the golden hind down so that he wouldn't look like he was in a rush. He wouldn't overtake the Spanish ship, sail crowded on, instead it would be a leisurely pace, it wouldn't alarm anybody. It took nine hours to come up with the Spaniard.

• 1:17:05Dan Snow?

  As he came alongside, he roared, "Englishmen, strike sail!" And then he shouted that unless they surrendered, he would send them to the ocean floor. The Spanish captain had no cannon on board, he had a few old firearms, but still he refused to haul down his flag. He was defiant, so Drake fired a broadside at him that brought the treasure ship's mizzen mast down and sent its crew scuttling below. The Englishmen swarmed aboard, the ship was theirs. Drake played the gallant host, he embraced the Spanish captain, he entertained him in his cabin, and allowed him to stay there. As for the next few days, Drake transferred the cargo from the Spanish ship into his own hold. No Englishman had ever taken a prize this valuable before.

• 1:17:50Dan Snow?

  More than a hundred and twenty thousand pounds, around half the annual revenue of Queen Elizabeth. There may have been a bit more on there besides, but Drake's accounting got a little hazy. Drake left the Spanish crew with gifts, and he gave them a letter, interestingly, protecting them from being robbed again by the other two English ships that Drake sort of hoped against hope might still be floating in the Pacific. He signed this letter to his subordinate captains, "From your sorrowful captain, whose heart is heavy for you." He then continued, he continued up the coast plundering, taking ships. On the whole, he treated their crews reasonably well. He would give them a handful of coins and set them on their way. When one Spaniard challenged Drake, he explained his motivation. "You will say this man who steals by day and prays by night in public is a devil,"

• 1:18:34Dan Snow?

  said Drake. "But it pained him to plunder the property of ordinary Spaniards. I would not wish to take anything except what belongs to King Philip. I'm not going to stop until I collect two millions which my cousin John Hawkins lost at San Juan de Luer." He worked throughout the coast of Mexico, sacking various towns, but his thoughts were now turned to getting home. Big question, should he retrace his footsteps and risk meeting Spanish forces in the Straits of Magellan or be intercepted in the West Indies? Or should he continue north, look for the Northwest Passage over the top of what is today Canada? Or should he contemplate an extraordinary journey across the Pacific and go back via the East Indies?

• 1:19:18Dan Snow?

  Drake headed north. We think he got about as far as the Canadian border before the weather froze, the fogs closed in, it became clear that the Northwest Passage was a lot further north than people speculated, and it was certain frozen death to risk trying to find it. Drake's experience in the Southern Ocean had not greatly enamored it to him. I don't think he wanted to take his crew and his little ship and his treasure back through those waters, and so he took the only decision left open to him, and that is to sail back to Britain by circumnavigating the globe. He sailed back down the west coast of North America, having gone further north than any European before, and somewhere in Northern California on June the 17th, he found a harbour that he'd been looking for, somewhere he could lay the ship up and do some repairs, probably just north of San

• 1:20:01Dan Snow?

  Francisco Bay as we know it today. Here, they had a very remarkable series of encounters with the indigenous population, and Drake went to great lengths to express friendship. The English crew and the indigenous people mingled together. Drake appears to have gone through some kind of crowning ceremony, and he took from it that all these people wished England to be their sovereign. They were, according to Drake, freely conferring their lands on the English, so he politely claimed this territory as New Albion. Northern California was England's first possession in North America. He set up a little post with a plate bearing his name and the date. Drake repaired his ship, he scraped the bottom, got the weed and the barnacles off it, he put tension back into the rig, he replaced the spars

• 1:20:46Dan Snow?

  and the planks. All the time, he kept relations with the local people cordial. In fact, when they sailed out that harbour, the inhabitants exhibited great distress, they lit huge bonfires on the hilltops, which the men could see burning in line with their wake. But ahead of Drake now lay another astonishing challenge: crossing the world's largest ocean, never before attempted by an English ship or English skipper. To be absolutely fair here, I don't think they'd have been able to make this voyage had they not captured vital piloted information and charts from a Spanish ship. I think it was that that gave him the confidence to undertake this journey, and he set out. They were at sea, they saw their out of sight of land for 68 days.

• 1:21:29Dan Snow?

  But following the Spanish instructions, they arrived in Micronesia. They had a small skirmish with some Polynesians who came out to trade with them in dugout canoes. They kept sailing, they reached the Philippines, what we now call Indonesia. Now, this, this was the legendary land of spices that had fired European dreams and driven countless mariners to their death. And now, finally, finally, here was an English ship for the first time, right in the heart of the Spice Islands. He was sort of eastern New Guinea, west of Sulawesi, in the heart of what we now call Indonesia. And he got lucky, because there were some local rulers there that were quite keen to welcome another European power, who they thought might protect them from the Portuguese.

• 1:22:10Dan Snow?

  Drake was given a splendid reception, he was given lots of support and supplies he needed to get his ship and crew seaworthy. He loaded six tonnes of cloves into his hold. The local ruler waved goodbye to Drake and optimistically hoped that Drake would return with a fleet of ships to hold back the Portuguese in the area. He sailed through waters strewn with islands that he hadn't got the first clue about. I suppose unsurprisingly, on the night of the 9th of January, the ship's company heard and felt the noise they feared above everything else. Much worse than an enemy broadside. They heard the scraping, tearing, shearing noise of their beloved wooden planks on a reef.

• 1:22:55Dan Snow?

  Drake instantly called for divine help, as he was wont to do, but he also took more practical steps. He launched a small boat with an anchor and a very long rope. The idea is you drop the anchor off the stern, then you haul yourself, you pull on that rope to kind of haul the ship off the reef. Problem is, that when they came to drop the anchor, they discovered the seabed was hundreds of metres deep. The reef just rose up sharply out of nothing. That was one tried and tested technique that wouldn't work. Agonisingly, he made the decision to try and lighten the ship. He threw three tonnes of cloves and other supplies overboard, and two precious cannon. Perhaps that worked, or perhaps they were saved by his prayers, by divine intervention. Because at four o'clock in the afternoon of the second day, the wind shifted, it blew from the opposite direction.

• 1:23:39Dan Snow?

  And they set the sails, they caught that wind, and the ship was shoved off the reef like a reluctant walrus entering the water. He repaired his ship, and he took a novel route west, rather than go north of Java, where neither Portuguese were waiting. He sailed south of Java, and thus usefully proved it was not part of the great southern continent. He stopped in Java to replenish supplies, and then he set out across the Indian Ocean. He was at sea for two months, when he spotted the African coast, he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed up West Africa, all the time trying to avoid the Portuguese, who had toeholds along that coast. By the time he reached Sierra Leone, the water ration for the crew was one pint between

• 1:24:21Dan Snow?

  three people per day. But they'd done it, they'd got to West Africa, a part of the world they knew. They continued north, and on the 26th of September 1580, the heavily laden ship arrived at the entrance of Plymouth Sound. Drake had done it, and not only he'd sailed around the world, he'd done it in a lot more style than Magellan, who'd lost his life in a skirmish in the Pacific, but his ship and crew were in much better state than Magellan's when it arrived back in Spain. In fact, Drake did it in a lot more style than the next British expedition, which wouldn't be for another 150 years after him. Commodore Anson would take a British fleet around the world in the 18th century, but it suffered terribly. Drake had lost very few of his

• 1:25:05Dan Snow?

  men to scurvy, the scourge which annihilated those other expeditions. His care of his men, I think, was centuries before its time. He'd sailed further than Dagama, Columbus, or Magellan. With all the crisscrossing, he sailed about one and two-thirds times around the equator. And that was a man who'd never left the Atlantic before. This simply, folks, one of the greatest acts of leadership, navigation, and seamanship of all time. First thing Drake did as he entered Plymouth Sound was hail some fishermen, and his first question highlights what must have been a terrible concern gnawing at him: "Was Queen Elizabeth alive?" If Catholic Mary Queen of Scots was now on the throne, Drake would

• 1:25:45Dan Snow?

  be hanged as a pirate the minute he stepped foot on shore, he knew that as a fact, the fishermen replied. "The Queen lived." Drake could relax.

• 1:25:57Dan Snow?

  In fact, Drake would do more than relax. He would reap the rewards. He would become richer than his wildest dreams. He would become a hero in England. In fact, across Pruston Europe. He became a phenomenon. But Drake was not finished. He'd only really just got started. Which is why, friends, as this episode comes to an end, fear not, for there is episode two following after this. A story of survival and leadership and luck and war, which you are not going to want to miss. So please, listen to my next episode. It'll be out in a few days' time. Please subscribe so it will drop automatically into your feed. Thank you for listening, everyone, to this astonishing story. It gets better next time. See you.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

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• 1:27:46Speaker 02

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• 1:27:54Dan Snow?

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