On January 28th, 1596, the now deceased Sir Francis Drake was lowered into the water off
the coast of Panama. He’d come back to the same region where he’d made his first independent
voyage, this time to again mess with the Spanish, capture as much loot as possible,
and give England a strategic foothold in the Americas on the narrow strip of land
that divided the Atlantic and Pacific. He had just burned the town there,
Nombre de Dios, to the ground. It was a short-lived victory. The controversial
pirate-turned-national-hero was taken out not by a bullet or by sword, but by dysentery. His
watery grave nor his treasure have ever been found. Welcome back to Nutty History. Today,
we’re exploring the secret voyages of Sir Francis Drake, England’s most famous pirate.
Sir Francis Drake terrorized the Spanish throughout the Atlantic and the Americas…to
the point where they gave him the nickname “El Draque”, Spanish for “The Dragon”. King
Philip II of Spain put out a huge reward for the notorious privateer, dead or alive, a
reward that amounted to over 8 million in today’s dollars. Over the course of his 30 years at sea,
Drake reportedly sank more than 25 Spanish ships, looted massive amounts of gold, silver, and jewels
amounting to $510,000,000 USD today, possibly even more we don't know about. He helped the British
begin to assert naval dominance in their budding rivalry with Spain and Portugal as they expanded
their empire across the globe. Drake came from humble beginnings. Born on a farm in Plymouth,
England around 1540, he began apprenticing and sailing along the English coast under captain
William Hawkins when he was just thirteen. From 1660 to 1668, Drake sailed under William’s cousin,
John Hawkins. Spain and Portugal pretty much had a monopoly on the servant trade and Hawkins wanted
the British to get in on it. He and Drake became the first English servant traders, a troublesome
milestone, to say the least. Hawkins made a dark, dirty fortune. However, Queen Elizabeth I didn’t
want to risk war with Spain or Portugal, so she asked him to stop. Instead of stopping,
Hawkins covertly sent a captain named John Lovell in his place. Drake sailed with him a few times
on these illegal, under-the-table voyages, still not yet a captain. Three years later, in 1571,
Drake, now fairly wealthy from trading in the servant trade, set out for Panama on his ship,
the Swan. The isthmus of Panama, where the Panama Canal now cuts through, separates the Atlantic and
the Pacific by just 50 miles of land. It was a key spot for Spanish trade, a place where all
the gold and riches pillaged from the crumbling Incan empire in Peru, Chile and Ecuador were
transported by mule trains – basically lines of mules hitched up together – from the Pacific to
the Atlantic and then off to Spain, a kingdom growing richer by the day back then. On a small
ship called a pinnace, parts of which he brought across the Atlantic and then assembled in Panama,
Drake and twenty men began pillaging Spanish ships in the area, mostly along the Chagres River,
which flowed from the Atlantic down into central Panama. They found a great hideout in a small,
protected cove about 90 miles east of Nombre de Dios, the main Spanish port where all the gold and
other riches were loaded onto ships and sent over to Spain. Drake was so successful that a Spanish
official wrote to King Philip, complaining that, “They are so fully in control of the coast of
Nombre de Dios, Cartagena, Tolu, Santa Maria, and Cabo de la Vela, that traffic dares not sail from
Santo Domingo thither, and trade and commerce are diminishing.” When Drake and his men piled
up all the plunder they could manage to store on their ships, they headed back to England.
He landed in Plymouth uncertain of his future because his escapades in the New World hadn’t
been sanctioned by the Crown, he was basically a rogue pirate, and there was a chance that the
British government could turn him over to Spanish authorities in order to avoid possible conflict
with the world’s leading maritime power at the time. But when they saw how much loot Drake and
his crew came back with, England basically said, “yes, please, can we have another?”
So, in May 1572, Drake set sail again for Panama, this time with two ships and 72 men, and this time
with the official consent of the Crown. Word of his exploits in the New World had begun to spread
throughout England, and there were people lining up around the block hoping for a chance to be part
of the crew. In July, Drake and his men arrived outside Nombre de Dios having the pinnacle boats
assembled in a secluded cove, and in the middle of the night, he raided the town, knowing that
it was chock full of Incan gold, silver, and jewels. However, during the raid the English
captain was hit in the leg by a bullet. His men, fearing the imminent death of their leader,
abandoned the assault and retreated to safety. Drake ended up recovering, but with the element of
surprise lost and his lust for Spanish pillaging very much intact, he had to get creative.
Drake ended up making friends with a group of cimarrones – African servants who escaped from
the Spanish and had banded together outside the Spanish held towns in Panama. Also joining Drake
was a French privateer named Guillaume Le Testu, a French privateer who had been searching for Drake
in the New World. Le Testu was a protestant. Just a few months earlier, 10,000 French protestants
had been given capital punishment in four days by the Spanish Catholic ruling party,
and Le Testu wanted revenge. Eventually, in March of 1573, cimarrone scouts came back with word that
there was a massive mule train set to arrive in Nombre de Dias. Drake, his men, Le Testu’s men,
and their cimarrone allies hid in wait along the route, their pinnacle boats waiting along the
Rio Francisco, and ambushed the mule train. They easily overpowered the Spanish guards, who fled
to Nombre de Dias. Drake was left in possession of 190 mules, each with somewhere around 300 pounds
of pure silver equating to 57,000 pounds of silver and they also captured 1,320 lbs of gold. The
silver alone was worth $16,436,520 today in U.S dollars. It was perhaps the most profitable raid
of Drake’s career. After sharing some of it with Le Testu, who was wounded in the ambush, Drake
was left with a head-spinning amount of loot. In total it amounted to almost a quarter of the
British Crown’s entire revenue for the year. Drake called it quits in Panama after that, for a while
at least, and sailed back to England, arriving in August 1573. Le Testu, still recovering from
his wounds, decided to stay a bit longer, a bad decision however as he was eventually caught by
the Spanish and made an example of. Drake came back to England at a weird time. Spanish and
British relations were strained, to say the least, and coming back with a boatload of stolen Spanish
loot, wasn’t a good look. The Queen knew this, and although she was appreciative for the extra income
Drake had just provided, she suggested he lay low for a while. As a result, not much is known about
the privateer-slash-pirate-slash-captain’s whereabouts over the next couple years. But
then he turns up in July 1575 in an attack on Rathlin Island, a small island off the coast
of Ireland. The Earl of Essex had ordered the attack, which was then occupied by a group of
Scots and Irish. It had a small fort, but it was mostly inhabited by civilians. During the attack,
over 200 soldiers and over 400 non-combatants were taken out, though according to records, Drake and
his ships didn’t take part in this horrible act, but were instead tasked with making sure no help
could be given to the Scots and Irish from the mainland. Two years later, Sir Francis Drake would
become the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe and go on to become an English celebrity.
We don’t have time to get into his journey around the world, so stay tuned for more!
Who’s your favorite pirate from the history books ? Let us know in the comments below. As always
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