Contributions
Born into a modest Devon family, Francis Drake learned the sea on small vessels before becoming the most feared of Elizabethan sailors. Between 1577 and 1580, aboard the Golden Hind, he completed the first circumnavigation of the globe by an Englishman — the second in history after Magellan — returning with a fabulous treasure seized from the Spanish in the Pacific. Elizabeth I knighted him on the deck of his own ship at Deptford in 1581. A privateer as much as an explorer, he harried the ports and fleets of Philip II without respite: his 1587 raid on Cádiz, where he destroyed dozens of vessels, delayed the planned invasion by a year — a feat the English summed up as "singeing the King of Spain's beard." As vice-admiral against the Spanish Armada in 1588 he played a decisive part in the Spanish rout. The Spanish called him El Draque, "the Dragon," half man, half demon.
Significance
Drake is the embodiment of Elizabethan maritime audacity — that of a poor island kingdom daring to defy the first power in the world upon the oceans. His circumnavigation, beyond the feat of seamanship, was a political and financial coup: the treasure he brought back is said to have covered a considerable share of the Crown's expenditure and financed the first companies of long-distance trade. By proving the Spanish fleet vulnerable, he freed the English imagination and opened the way to the country's maritime expansion. His role against the Armada made him a national hero for centuries. Yet the figure has its shadow, which modern history no longer hides: Drake was also a ruthless plunderer and one of the first Englishmen to engage in the slave trade, alongside his kinsman John Hawkins. His glory fed on privateering, ransoms and violence. He died of dysentery in 1596 off Portobelo, on a last failed Caribbean expedition, and his body was committed to the sea in a lead coffin — a sailor's end for the man who had made Philip II's empire tremble.
Influence
Drake brought England into the age of great oceanic navigation and inspired generations of sailors and privateers. His circumnavigation and his victory over the Armada forged the myth of English naval supremacy that drove later expansion, and his example fed patriotic literature and the imagery of the sea down to the Victorian age. He had been formed by his kinsman John Hawkins, pioneer of the Atlantic voyages and of the slave trade, and in the practical school of the Devon seamen; the ambition of Elizabeth I and her councillors, who encouraged privateering against Spain, directed and financed his ventures.
Anecdote
In April 1587, launched against the port of Cádiz to strike the fleet Philip II was gathering, Drake wrote from his ship off Cape Sagres a letter to Secretary of State Francis Walsingham. In it he defended the spirit of perseverance that drove him, insisting that every great matter must have a beginning, but that only the thorough completion of the work yields true glory. The sentence, authenticated in his dispatches, has become one of the most quoted mottoes of the Elizabethan age.