Was Sir Francis Drake Just In It For Revenge?

about children, and that is true for this pirate. By the way, in cases where records were well kept, talking hundreds of years ago, they often don't exist anymore. But based on records late in this person's life, it is estimated that Francis Drake was born between fifteen forty and

fifteen forty three in England. We do know that Drake was the eldest of as many as five and possibly as many as well siblings, and we know that he was born to Marry Millway and Edmund Drake, who was a tenant farmer on the estate of Lord Francis Russell, the second Earl of Bedford. Drake was raised by relatives, the Hawkins family in Plymouth, England. They worked as merchants, and they also worked as privateers, and they were Drake's first taste of piracy. Their vessels tild trade routes along

the French coast, seizing merchant ships. Drake went to the sea with his family around the time he turned about eighteen. Ish Elizabethan historian John Stowe wrote of Drake that he was quote of low stature, of strong limb, round headed, brown hair, full bearded, his eyes round, large and clear,

well favored face, and of a cheerful countenance. In his adult life, Francis Drake was a politician, a naval officer, a sea captain, an English explorer, and the second person to circumnavigate the globe, another now familiar horror that comes up this season. He was also one of the first illegal traders of enslaved people from West Africa, and he

engaged in it for years. In the early fifteen sixties along with his cousin John Hawkins, the two kidnapped and brought these enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, where they would sell them to local plantation owners. By fifteen sixty eight, Drake was commanding his own illegal slave trading ship because their activities were illegal under Spanish law. The Spanish government sent a fleet of ships to intervene.

During this attack, much of Drake's crew was captured and killed. Drake, who remained unharmed, escaped. The incident, as we'll see, left him with a good deal of contempt for King Philip the Second, the King of Spain, Drake considered to be a lifelong enemy. A few years later, in fifteen seventy and fifteen seventy one, Drake made two profitable voyages to the West Indies. Immediately after in fo he commanded two vessels on an expedition to plunder Spanish ports in the Caribbean.

He returned to England with a great deal of Spanish treasure. So Drake was a pirate in disguise as a privateer, right, So, there are actually a few terms that we all use when we talk about pirates. Pirates. Of course, buccaneers, corsairs and privateers are also in that mix, and they're used

pretty interchangeably, but they shouldn't be. Pirates is by far the most general way to talk about those who engage in illegal activities such as robbing, kidnapping and murdering, and pretty much everything else tyrannical you can think of happening on the seas. It's kind of the umbrella term. Yes, yes,

it is the buccaneers and the corsairs. So buccaneer is another name for pirate, but it's the name for pirates who specifically operated from ports in the West Indies and specifically the Caribbean and the Pacific coast of Central America in the six hundreds. Course, hairs weren't much different, but they committed acts of piracy in the Mediterranean during the Ottoman Empire. But if you happened to have a license from a government that sanctioned that sort of behavior, then

you have become a privateer. You're a pirate with papers. You've heard us refer to them before as a letter of mark, and that made your actions legit. And Francis Drake was a pirate with papers. Privateers. Privateers were individuals who supplied and manned their own private vessels and who were commissioned by a government to carry out various things, actually,

but primarily two things. Privateers stole cargo and everything really that they could find from trading vessels and settlements along popular trade routes, all in the name of said government. But privateers were also commissioned as warships, and that meant capturing other vessels, stealing, fighting in wars, and fighting for their prizes. A privateers loot was known as a prize.

Hiring privateers came with risk, but commissioning them also meant that governments could supplement their own navies with additional private militia, so to bring the act of privateering close to home for people living anywhere near me or Maria. The United States commissioned privateers to boost its military powers recently is the War of eighteen twelve. Not only did it boost the country's naval protection, it also was a pretty lucrative endeavor.

That's because the US government taxed privateering prizes as much as that is so high, that's so amazing. That's a racket, right, even if you don't need them for the naval benefit, you just want to tax their moot. So it's actually really slippery slope here. Commissioning pirates didn't always work in

the government's favor. Yes, they were working under commission but that didn't mean some privateers didn't make a few extracurricular stops along the way to say, raid and loot vessels along coastlines that weren't at all associated with the rival government that they were supposed to be fighting. In other words, they were engaging in piracy. This is the handy thing

of not being connected to everyone all the time. You can't gonna go do your own fake as long as you land back and forward or or less having achieved your goals. Sometimes, and fairly often, it seems a commission was kept quiet and maybe even never formalized. Although there was sometimes no letter of mark, there would be an agreement of some sort between government and pirate, and that's another example of how the line between pirate and privateer

is a bit smudged. So it was because of Drake's successful and lucrative expeditions to the West Indies that he caught the attention of the Queen of England, who in fifty two commissioned him to plunder Spanish ports in the Caribbean. Starting to sound familiar, and he did, and he returned with tons of Peruvian gold and silver. After the raid, Drake and his crew continued raiding the Portuguese coastline and capturing treasure ships, and he was now also gaining quite

a reputation as a successful privateer. But then Drake disappears for a few years, with no real record of him on the seas between fifteen seventy three and fifteen seventy seven. This coincides with the years that Queen Elizabeth and King Philip the Second of Spain had agreed on a temporary truce that meant that the Queen could no longer support

Drake in the revenge business. During that time, other than some reports of his sailing and pillaging and one account that he may have taken part in the Rathlin Island massacre and Gerland, he just kind of disappears for a little bit. We're going to take a break for a word from our sponsor. When we return, we'll talk about Drake's famous expedition to circumnavigate the globe. Welcome back to Criminalia.

Let's talk more about how much Francis Drake disliked the Spaniards. Ah, Yes, Sir, Drake to England was an adventurer and he was a war hero. He was celebrated by many. Not all of his peers felt that way, though many found him unreliable and self seeking. Plus, he was a politician who had pirate manners. For example, naval commander Sir Richard Grenville and the navigator and explorer Sir Martin Frobisher both outwardly and

immensely disliked him. Drake, for his part, didn't really seem to care about that he was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, but actually, as we mentioned at the top of the show, the second person to make that journey and return home alive. The first recorded explorer to do so was Ferdinand Magellan, whose expedition sailed from Spain in fifteen nineteen and returned in fifteen twenty two. So

Magellan was commissioned as well. He was commissioned by Spain to take an exploratory journey to find the East Indies, which at the time was also nicknamed the Spice Islands. Today this reference is the area that covers a wide region in South and Southeast Asia. Drake's commission was not quite the same as Magellan's. He sailed as captain of the Golden Hind, an English galleon, on a voyage that

lasted from fifteen seventy seven through fifty. He was secretly commissioned by Queen Elizabeth, the first of England to lead an expedition which would take him around South America through the streets of Magellan in search of new lands. He was also to explore the northwestern coast of North America, but his real objective, under agreement with the Queen, was to raid and loot Spanish colonies, shipping ports and trading vessels along the coast of Chili and Peru, and any

others that he found along the way. He set sail on this multi tiered mission in December, off with five vessels. We know that among his men were John Winter, commander of one of the vessels, and Officer Thomas Dodie. While there isn't much information at all about Winter, we do know that Drake and Dodie were hostile toward each other, and it suggested that that might have been politically motivated, whatever the real reason for their friction. Note, Drake accused

Dotie of planning a mutiny and had him arrested. Dodie had a brief trial, which some sources say was probably also an illegal trial, and he was convicted and he was beheaded. There are two two ways to navigate around the southern tip of South America. One route is how ferdmand Magellan did it, and that is now known as

the Strait of Magellan. You'll also see that as the Straits of Magellan and the Straight of Magellan is a three d fifty mile narrows at the southern tip of South America, and it connects the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. This was a hugely popular route, consider that the Panama Canal, which connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean, would not be constructed until about three hundred fifty years later. But as it turns out, Drake actually

didn't take the same route as Magellan. Well, I mean he did at first, so this is what happened. After sixteen days passing through the Strait of Magellan, Drake and his crew were forced south by storms. Drake's ship was the only one to survive and to go on to complete the expedition, but he wouldn't do so through the Strait of Magellan. Drake wrote, we quote God, by a contrary wind and in tolerable tempest, seemed to set himself

against us. The option for sailing between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans other than the Straight of Magellan at this time was known to be difficult to navigate. That's since become known as the Drake Passage, and it takes you through the southernmost tip of South America through a collection of islands known as the Tierra del Fuego, and the point farthest south on that archipelago is what we know as Cape Horn, and that is where Drake crossed to

the Pacific Ocean. Like the Straight of Magellan, the passage opened up significant new trade routes. It was shorter than sailing the Straight of Magellan, but it also came at a bigger risk. In March of fIF seventy nine, during his time circumnavigating the globe, Drake seized perhaps his biggest greatest prize. His presence in the Pacific Ocean was a surprise to the Spanish, and their colonies weren't equipped to

defend themselves. Drake helped himself and the ground to a sizeable bit of treasure, and then he continued to trawl the coast of Chili, raiding stores and ports and pillaging gold as he sailed north. When he came to the harbor at Lima, Peru, the people there found themselves defenseless, but they had something worth trading. And that was good information to share, and so they told him about a

treasure ship that was heading towards Panama. Not one to miss a lucrative opportunity, Drake set out for the vessel and overtook it. The ship, the Nuestra Senora de la Conception, was carrying dozens of treasure chests. It was and is still considered Drake's biggest haul. The ship's captain had said also did not expect to meet an enemy in the Pacific, and had assumed Drake's vessel was actually just a friendly

Spanish ship. But Drake was of course not friendly and took not just the booty but also the captain as a prisoner. Drake continued to sail north. It's believed he may have gone as far north as Vancouver Island, and that he was probably searching for the Northwest Passage, which is the route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans but

through the Arctic Ocean. In fifteen seventy nine, he spent some time in what is now the San Francisco Bay area, preparing and overhauling his ship for the continuing voyage, and claiming the area for the Queen of England. Later that year, he sailed to the northernmost of the Indonesian islands, what he would have called the East Indies. In the Philippines, he did something a little different, not so much with the pillaging, but instead he bought spices. He purchased something.

We're going to take a break now for a word from our sponsor. But when we're back we'll talk about how and when Francis Drake became Sir Francis Drake. Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about how we heard that Francis Drake sold his soul to the devil. Drake's voyages circumnavigating the globe, as well as journeys closer to home, were intended to help England build one of the foremost

empires in the quote New World. And he did make a fortune for both himself and for the Crown, regardless of what anyone else, such as say, maybe the King of Spain felt about his acts of piracy, Queen Elizabeth, looked the other way. When he arrived back in England, his ship was loaded with gold and silver, chests of rare porcelains from China, spices, silks, and now a whole lot of loot from Spain. King Philip the Second complained about Drake's piracy, but the Queen was so pleased she

just dismissed him. She knighted Drake aboard his ship on April four. So a little side note about a story that's often relayed as part of Drake's legend. It is commonly said that he introduced potatoes to England upon his return from circumnavigating the globe. Don't give him all the credit there, That's not true at all. They were likely introduced by the Spanish, and likely a decade before Drake's journey. Ah the Spanish, I know, right. So speaking of the Spanish.

While England celebrated Drake, Spain considered him any legal trader of enslaved people and a cold blooded pirate. And they weren't wrong. Drake was a pirate. But if you remember, he was also a politician. In the early fifteen eighties, he served as the Mayor of Plymouth and as a member of Parliament. But in five he returned to his ship to you know it, raid Spanish settlements in the Caribbean.

This time under his commission, he commanded a fleet of about twenty five ships and anywhere between one sixty four and twenty three hundred men. His objective was to target what is president day Florida, present day Dominican Republic, present day Columbia, and the present day Cape very day Island. He did. He did all of that, and he left with enormous wealth. It said that King Philip the Second of Spain at one point that's so tired of all this that he offered a bounty of twenty thousand ducats

for Drake's head. In fifteen eighty six, the king began preparing to invade England. This was when the Spanish Armada was formed. Drake had a bad reputation for quite a long time, and in fifty seven he was the one to deal the first blow, launching a preemptive strike on the Spanish port of Cadiz where the ships were being gathered. Catching the Spanish off guard, Drake's crew pillaged and burned the coastline. The raid destroyed between thirty and forty Spanish vessels,

and the crew looted tons of supplies. Jokingly, Drake called it his quote, singing of the King of Spain's beard. Soon after, Drake was second in command under Admiral Charles Howard. In his role as an officer in the Royal Navy, not as a pirate, and not as a privateer. Drake led the English to victory over the Spanish Armada, and

he basked in that victory and that praise. There was a rumor among Spaniards, and especially sailors who fought in the Spanish Armada against Drake, that he had supernatural powers, and that perhaps those powers came from the devil. Maybe he practiced witchcraft. Another part of his legend suggests that he had a mirror, a magic mirror that allowed him to spy on all of the ships sailing the seas. Calling Drake quote a devil and no man, they nicknamed

him El Drac or the Dragon. Lord Burghley, who was Queen Elizabeth's primary minister, had never approved of Drake or his methods, but even he conceded quote, Sir Francis Drake is a fearful man. To the King of Spain. In early Queen Elizabeth the First commissioned him for one last voyage against the Spanish in the West Indies. Drake took the contract, but the expedition ended in failure. This time,

the Spanish successfully defended themselves against his English fleet. This, though, is where our story about Pirate Francis Drake, the most famous sailor of Elizabethan Age, comes to an end. In fifteen, Drake contracted dysentery and died of a fever. He was buried wearing full armor and in a lead coffin at sea off the coast of Panama. Although divers have continued

to search, his exact resting place remains unknown. Historian John Stowe wrote of Drake that quote, he was more skillful in all points of navigation than any He was also of a per pricked memory, great observation, eloquent by nature. In brief, he was as famous in Europe and America as Timberlane in Asia and Africa. So there's a little story I thought would be fun to share before Holly

shares this episodes libations. So part of Drake's legend includes a story about how, among so many other things he is credited for and that we've talked about, he may also have been the first mixologist. But surely this is with apologies to the American bartender named Jerry Thomas, who wrote the first cocktail book and is widely considered to be the father of American mixology. But let's go back

to Drake's drink. His drink was intended to help cure a sickness that was among his crewmen, and it combined mint, lime, tree bark rum, which were all popular in medicinal uses, with cane sugar, which I can only imagine is to help the medicine go down. He called it ldre, and as it's told, it did cure his crew I'm not going to cure anything in the groggery. I'm not surprised. I don't think any of what I'm looking for cures, Like I mean, I'll try, uh, you know, it'll cure

your lack of delightful beverage maybe, but nothing actually medicinal. So, in thinking about this, this is one of those things where like I'm a little bit of a ten year old and I just fixate on one phrase and then I can't stop thinking about it, and that becomes what the drink is about, even though it's not that important to the bigger story. So this drink is called the Golden Hind. Now for a little bit of context about

that name. The Golden Hind is a female red deer that's an actual animal, and the reason that his ship was named that was because it was part of the crest of his patron, Sir Christopher Hatton, So that's why it was called that. But I just got to thinking about golden libations and things that would be yummy in that arena um that has nothing to do with deer. I just wanted to make sure we have the context of that moniker. So the Golden hind is actually really easy.

It's kind of based on a Collins formula, which is one that I play with a lot. If if you followed along, you'll notice there are many Collins variations in my hat because I love it and it's a classic for a reason. So this starts with one and a half ounces of vodka, like a nice clean whatever, like the least flavored vodka, and then it is three quarters of an ounce of honey syrup. Resist the temptation to just put honey straight in because it sometimes won't dissolve

effectively it's too thick. So what you want to do first is combine one part honey to one part water and let that dissolve, and that's your honey syrup that you're going to use for drinks. So three quarters of an ounce of that and then three quarters of an

ounce of lemon juice. And then just to get with a little extra golden tone, you're gonna sprinkle a tiny amount, like a little baby pinch, a scant pinch of tumeric into it, and I would put that all in a cocktail shaker without ice, shake it like the Dickens, because the reason I say a tiny, tiny amount of tumeric is that that doesn't, in my experience, incorporate into liquid as well as I would like. And you can have kind of a grainy texture if you put more than

just a tiny bit in there. But if you do put just a tiny bit in there, you won't get as much greediness and it will make it a beautiful golden color. So you're gonna shaky, shaky, shaky, shaky, shak shaky, shaky, shaky ticket You'll thank you shaking it too much. Keep shaking because you really want to incorporate as much of that tumeric as you can. Uh. And then you're gonna just strain that over ice, which will also help get

out any of the greeniness. Top it with a club soda or if you want to sweeten it, do a light gingerile. Super easy. It makes you look like you're like a fancy mixologist, and really you're just you're just working out a habit. It's a great it's a great, easy drink. It also shares a little bit of d n a of course, of the bee's knees without doing the gin and also adding that bubbly component to it,

so yummy nummies in our tummies. If you want to do the non alcoholic version and do a little mock tail here, I would skip the vodka and the lemon juice and just do a low sugar lemonade, add that honey syrup to it in the same amount, So at that point you're gonna do like I would say, two to three ounces of lemonade, still do the three quarter of an ounce of honey syrup, add that little sprinkle of tumeric, shake a shake, shake, and then still top it with club soda urgent rail and it's just a

pretty golden, very yummy beautiful. I always like a drink that's is pretty to look at, it is as it is to sip. This has a really nice color to it, that is the golden Hind. I feel like I should also mention that if you are curious what the Golden Hind looked like. There are an number of replicas of it that you can go visit that are kind of like museum pieces in England in various locations, and you

can see pictures of those online. Absolutely beautiful. Some of them are actually like sea worthy, like could go out of ports if they were not sitting there waiting for visitors. Lovely, the Golden High, The Golden High. You can think of piracy and red Deer while you drink it, uh, and as you drink it, please know that we appreciate you uh spending this time with us, sharing our cocktail mania and our love of piracy, or at least our love

of discussing piracy. We hope that you will come back and do this again next week with us, because we have more pirates a common Thanks so much. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,