The Devon Privateer Who Sailed Around the World in 1577-1580, Captured a Spanish Treasure Ship Off Peru, and Was Knighted Aboard His Own Vessel by Elizabeth I

Francis Drake (c. 1540-1596) had been raiding Spanish treasure fleets in the Caribbean since 1568 in a series of officially-deniable but Crown-supported privateering voyages. The 1577 expedition was the first of his voyages whose specific objective was to attack Spanish shipping on the Pacific coast — a geographical area no English captain had previously reached.

The fleet that left Plymouth on 13 December 1577 comprised five ships, principally the 100-ton Pelican (later renamed the Golden Hind) under Drake’s personal command. The expedition had been funded privately, with Elizabeth I as a silent investor; the official cover story was a trading voyage to North Africa.

Crossing

Drake crossed the Atlantic to Brazil and worked south along the coast through 1578. At Patagonia in late June 1578 he tried and executed his co-commander Thomas Doughty for what Drake called mutinous conspiracy. The execution was controversial — Doughty was a well-connected courtier with family reach at court — and was one of the reasons the expedition’s detailed narrative was suppressed after Drake’s return.

Drake passed through the Strait of Magellan in August-September 1578. He emerged into the Pacific, was driven south by a storm to approximately 56° S latitude, and discovered that the South American continent did not extend further south. The discovery demonstrated that Tierra del Fuego was an island and that there was an open ocean route around its southern tip — the passage now known as the Drake Passage.

Of the five ships that had left Plymouth, only the Golden Hind made it into the Pacific. One had been lost in the Atlantic; one had been abandoned at Patagonia; one had been wrecked in the Strait; one had been blown back into the Atlantic during the post-Magellan storm and had eventually returned to England without continuing the Pacific phase.

The Cacafuego

Drake worked north up the west coast of South America through autumn 1578 and spring 1579, raiding Spanish coastal settlements and shipping at Valparaiso, Callao, and other Spanish ports. The Spanish Pacific defences had been designed around the assumption that no European naval threat could reach the Pacific — there were almost no coastal fortifications, and Spanish treasure fleets sailed unescorted.

On 1 March 1579 Drake captured the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción — popularly called the Cacafuego (“Fireshitter”) for her reputation as a heavily-armed defender. She was on her routine route from Lima to Panama with the Peruvian silver shipment. The capture took about six hours.

The Cacafuego’s cargo included approximately 26 tons of silver bullion, 80 pounds of gold, and quantities of jewels and coined money. The total contemporary value was approximately £400,000 — equivalent to about half the annual revenue of the English Crown.

The return

Drake had a choice after the Cacafuego capture. The conventional return route — back through the Strait of Magellan — was blocked by the Spanish naval response the capture would provoke. The alternative was to continue west across the Pacific to the Spice Islands, then return via the Cape of Good Hope on the Portuguese trade route.

Drake chose the Pacific crossing. He sailed north along the California coast to approximately 38° N (near modern San Francisco), where he landed and claimed the territory for Elizabeth I as Nova Albion in June 1579. The claim had no subsequent legal significance — England did not colonise California for the next three centuries — but it produced the first formal English diplomatic-territorial claim in the Pacific.

He crossed the Pacific in summer 1579, traded for cloves at the Spice Islands, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in June 1580, and reached Plymouth on 26 September 1580. He had been at sea for two years, nine months, and 13 days.

The knighthood

Elizabeth I was in a difficult diplomatic position. The Cacafuego capture had been large-scale piracy against the Spanish Crown, with which England was at nominal peace. The Spanish ambassador was formally demanding restitution of the bullion and Drake’s execution.

She compromised. The bullion was confiscated to the royal treasury, with Drake receiving a generous share that made him wealthy for the rest of his life. The diplomatic restitution was refused.

Elizabeth visited the Golden Hind at Deptford on 4 April 1581. She had Drake kneel on the Golden Hind’s quarterdeck. She knighted him in the public presence of the Spanish ambassador. The knighthood was the public diplomatic confirmation that the English Crown was endorsing what Drake had done.

What followed

Drake’s subsequent career included the 1585-1586 raid on Cartagena, the 1587 raid on Cadiz that delayed the Spanish Armada by a year (the “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard”), and the 1588 vice-admiralty of the English fleet that defeated the Armada itself. He died of dysentery off Portobelo, Panama, on 28 January 1596 during a final unsuccessful Caribbean expedition, aged about 55. He was buried at sea in a lead coffin off the Panamanian coast. The coffin has not been recovered despite multiple modern dives.

The Golden Hind was preserved as a display vessel at Deptford from 1580 until approximately 1660, when she gradually decayed and was broken up. A timber chair made from her surviving structural elements was presented to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 1668 and is still there.