In 1586, thanks in part to Drake’s relentless privateering, King Philip II began assembling the famed Spanish Armada for an invasion of England. Desperate to beat his old enemy to the punch, Drake set sail the following spring and launched a preemptive strike on the Spanish mainland at the port of Cadiz. After catching the town by surprise, he and a small fleet spent two days occupying its harbor and bombarding, burning or pillaging everything in sight. The Cadiz raid succeeded in destroying between 30 and 40 ships and several thousand tons of supplies, and Drake later continued his reign of terror by harassing the Portuguese coastline and capturing a treasure ship off the Azores. All told, his “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard,” as he jokingly called it, may have delayed the Armada’s launch by over a year. Drake would later serve as the vice admiral of the English fleet that helped scatter the Spanish invasion in the summer of 1588.
He began his career as a slave trader.
Drake went to sea as a young man, but his first major expeditions came in the 1560s, when he joined a cousin named John Hawkins on some of Britain’s earliest slave trading voyages to West Africa. The pair usually procured their human cargo by attacking native villages or attacking Portuguese slave ships. They would then transport the slaves to the Spanish Caribbean and sell them off to local plantations—an action that was illegal under Spanish law. During one of these slaving expeditions in 1568, a flotilla of Spanish ships ambushed Drake and Hawkins at the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulúa, destroying four of their vessels and killing or capturing many of their crew. Drake escaped unharmed, but the defeat left him with a seething hatred for Spain and its king, Philip II.
On April 4, 1581, a few months after he completed a daring circumnavigation of the globe, the British navigator Francis Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I during a ceremony aboard his flagship Golden Hind. Drake’s round-the-world voyage was a high point in a career that saw him serve as everything from a naval commander and explorer to a statesman and civil engineer, but he was best known as Britain’s most feared “Sea Dog”—the nickname for the ruthless privateers who preyed on Spanish shipping in the New World. Explore ten fascinating facts about Queen Elizabeth’s favorite pirate.
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