In 1572, Drake embarked on his first major independent enterprise. He planned an attack on the Isthmus of Panama, known to the Spanish as Tierra Firme and the English as the Spanish Main. This was the point at which the silver and gold treasure of Peru had to be landed and sent overland to the Caribbean Sea, where galleons from Spain would pick it up at the town of Nombre de Dios. Drake left Plymouth on 24 May 1572, with a crew of 73 men in two small vessels, the Pascha (70 tons) and the Swan (25 tons), to capture Nombre de Dios.

Drake’s first raid was late in July 1572. Drake formed an alliance with the Cimarrons. Drake and his men captured the town and its treasure. When his men noticed that Drake was bleeding profusely from a wound, they insisted on withdrawing to save his life and left the treasure. Drake stayed in the area for almost a year, raiding Spanish shipping and attempting to capture a treasure shipment.

The most celebrated of Drake’s adventures along the Spanish Main was his capture of the Spanish Silver Train at Nombre de Dios in March 1573. He raided the waters around Darien (in modern Panama) with a crew including many French privateers including Guillaume Le Testu, a French buccaneer, and African slaves (Maroons) who had escaped the Spanish. One of these men was Diego, who under Drake became a free man was also a capable ship builder.[1] Drake tracked the Silver Train to the nearby port of Nombre de Dios. After their attack on the richly laden mule train, Drake and his party found that they had captured around 20 tons of silver and gold. They buried much of the treasure, as it was too much for their party to carry, and made off with a fortune in gold.[2][3] (An account of this may have given rise to subsequent stories of pirates and buried treasure). Wounded, Le Testu was captured and later beheaded. The small band of adventurers dragged as much gold and silver as they could carry back across some 18 miles of jungle-covered mountains to where they had left the raiding boats. When they got to the coast, the boats were gone. Drake and his men, downhearted, exhausted and hungry, had nowhere to go and the Spanish were not far behind.

At this point, Drake rallied his men, buried the treasure on the beach, and built a raft to sail with two volunteers ten miles along the surf-lashed coast to where they had left the flagship. When Drake finally reached its deck, his men were alarmed at his bedraggled appearance. Fearing the worst, they asked him how the raid had gone. Drake could not resist a joke and teased them by looking downhearted. Then he laughed, pulled a necklace of Spanish gold from around his neck and said “Our voyage is made, lads!” By 9 August 1573, he had returned to Plymouth.

It was during this expedition that Drake climbed a high tree in the central mountains of the Isthmus of Panama and thus became the first Englishman to see the Pacific Ocean. He remarked as he saw it that he hoped one day an Englishman would be able to sail it – which he would do years later as part of his circumnavigation of the world.[4]

When Drake returned to Plymouth after the raids, the government signed a temporary truce with King Philip II of Spain and so was unable to acknowledge Drake’s accomplishment officially. Drake was considered a hero in England and a pirate in Spain for his raids.[5]

Sourced from: Wikipedia

REFERENCES:

1. Kaufmann, Miranda. “The Untold Story of How an Escaped Slave Helped Sir Francis Drake Circumnavigate the Globe”. History. Retrieved 12 May 2020.
2. David Marley (2008). Wars of the Americas: A Chronology of Armed Conflict in the Western Hemisphere, 1492 to the Present. ABC-CLIO. pp. 103–104. ISBN 978-1-59884-100-8.
3. Angus Konstam (20 December 2011). The Great Expedition: Sir Francis Drake on the Spanish Main 1585–86. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 29. ISBN 978-1-78096-233-7.
4. Cummins 1997, p. 287
5. Cummins 1997, p. 273

With the success of the Panama isthmus raid in 1577, Elizabeth I of England sent Drake to start an expedition against the Spanish along the Pacific coast of the Americas. Drake used the plans that Sir Richard Grenville had received the patent for in 1574 from Elizabeth, which was rescinded a year later after protests from Philip of Spain. Diego was once again employed under Drake; his fluency in Spanish and English would make him a useful interpreter when Spaniards or Spanish-speaking Portuguese were captured. He was employed as Drake’s servant and was paid wages, just like the rest of the crew.[1] Drake and the fleet set out from Plymouth on 15 November 1577, but bad weather threatened him and his fleet. They were forced to take refuge in Falmouth, Cornwall, from where they returned to Plymouth for repair.[2]

After this major setback, Drake set sail again on 13 December aboard Pelican with four other ships and 164 men. He soon added a sixth ship, Mary (formerly Santa Maria), a Portuguese merchant ship that had been captured off the coast of Africa near the Cape Verde Islands. He also added its captain, Nuno da Silva, a man with considerable experience navigating in South American waters.

After passing the coast of Portuguese Brazil, Drake’s fleet suffered great attrition after storms twice scattered the fleet; so on 13 May Drake put in to a bay and anchored off Cape Tres Puntas in the San Jorge Gulf. Another storm blew up and the fleet once more were forced to run for the open sea. When the Swan became separated from the rest of the fleet during a severe storm, Drake became convinced that Doughty was practising witchcraft and became somewhat of a bad superstition amongst the crew.[6]

On 17 May the fleet anchored in Deseado in order for the other ships to catch up, and over the next few days the fleet was brought together except the Swan under Doughty. They turned up the following day to meet a seething Drake where they had another quarrel, the former accusing him of witchcraft which he vehemently denied. Decisions were made regarding the fleet – Drake realised the need to condense his force due to losses sustained from disease and storms from the Atlantic crossing. The decision was made to scuttle Swan – the resultant loss of his command enraged Doughty. He confronted Drake who promptly lost his temper, struck Doughty and ordered him bound to the mast. It was decided that the ex Spanish Christopher was no longer needed so was burned, and so only the rigging and ironwork was kept.[7]

Drake’s fleet suffered great attrition; having scuttled both Christopher and the flyboat Swan due to loss of men on the Atlantic crossing. He made landfall at the gloomy bay of San Julian, in what is now Argentina. Ferdinand Magellan had called here half a century earlier, where he put to death some mutineers. Drake’s men saw weathered and bleached skeletons on the grim Spanish gibbets. The crew discovered that Mary had rotting timbers, so they burned the ship. Drake decided to remain the winter in San Julian before attempting the Strait of Magellan.[3]

Execution of Thomas Doughty

On his voyage to interfere with Spanish treasure fleets, Drake had several quarrels with his co-commander Thomas Doughty and on 3 June 1578, accused him of witchcraft and charged him with mutiny and treason in a shipboard trial.[4] Drake claimed to have a (never presented) commission from the Queen to carry out such acts and denied Doughty a trial in England. The main pieces of evidence against Doughty were the testimony of the ship’s carpenter, Edward Bright, who after the trial was promoted to master of the ship Marigold, and Doughty’s admission of telling Lord Burghley, a vocal opponent of agitating the Spanish, of the intent of the voyage. Drake consented to his request of Communion and dined with him, of which Francis Fletcher had this strange account:

And after this holy repast, they dined also at the same table together, as cheerfully, in sobriety, as ever in their lives they had done aforetime, each cheering up the other, and taking their leave, by drinking each to other, as if some journey only had been in hand.[5]

Drake had Thomas Doughty beheaded on 2 July 1578. When the ship’s chaplain Francis Fletcher in a sermon suggested that the woes of the voyage in January 1580 were connected to the unjust demise of Doughty, Drake chained the clergyman to a hatch cover and pronounced him excommunicated.

Sourced from: Wikipedia/Francis Drake

1. Kaufmann, Miranda. “The Untold Story of How an Escaped Slave Helped Sir Francis Drake Circumnavigate the Globe”. History. Retrieved 12 May 2020.
2. Sugden 2012, p. 130
3. Kelsey 2000, p. 104
4. Coote, p.133
5. Barrow, John (1843). The Life, Voyages, and Exploits of Admiral Sir Francis Drake. J. Murray. p. 102. Retrieved 20 June 2020.

Sourced from: Wikipedia/Circumnavigation

6. Poole, Reginald Lane; Hunt, William, eds. (1911). The Political History of England: The history of England from the accession of Edward VI to the death of Elizabeth, 1547-1603. Longmans, Green & Company. p. 319.

7. Purves, David Laing (1874). The English Circumnavigators: The Most Remarkable Voyages Round the World by English Sailors. William P. Nimmo. p. 53.

Megellan Straight (1578)

The three remaining ships of his convoy departed for the Magellan Strait at the southern tip of South America. A few weeks later (September 1578) Drake made it to the Pacific, but violent storms destroyed one of the three ships, the Marigold (captained by John Thomas) in the strait and caused another, the Elizabeth captained by John Wynter, to return to England, leaving only the Pelican. After this passage, the Pelican was pushed south and discovered an island that Drake called Elizabeth Island.

Drake, like navigators before him, probably reached a latitude of 55°S (according to astronomical data quoted in Hakluyt’s The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation of 1589) along the Chilean coast.[1] In the Magellan Strait Francis and his men engaged in skirmish with local indigenous people, becoming the first Europeans to kill indigenous peoples in southern Patagonia.[2] During the stay in the strait, crew members discovered that an infusion made of the bark of Drimys winteri could be used as remedy against scurvy. Captain Wynter ordered the collection of great amounts of bark – hence the scientific name.[2]

Despite popular lore, it seems unlikely that Drake reached Cape Horn or the eponymous Drake Passage,[1] because his descriptions do not fit the first and his shipmates denied having seen an open sea.[citation needed] Historian Mateo Martinic, who examined his travels, credits Drake with the discovery of the “southern end of the Americas and the oceanic space south of it”.[3] The first report of his discovery of an open channel south of Tierra del Fuego was written after the 1618 publication of the voyage of Willem Schouten and Jacob le Maire around Cape Horn in 1616.[4]

Sourced from: Wikipedia

1. Wagner, Henry R., Sir Francis Drake’s Voyage Around the World: Its Aims and Achievements, Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2006, ISBN 1-4286-2255-1.
2. Martinic, Mateo (1977). Historia del Estrecho de Magallanes (in Spanish). Santiago: Andrés Bello. pp. 67–68.
3. Martinic B., Mateo (2019). “Entre el mito y la realidad. La situación de la misteriosa Isla Elizabeth de Francis Drake” [Between myth and reality. The situation of the mysterious Elizabeth Island of Francis Drake]. Magallania (in Spanish). 47 (1): 5–14. doi:10.4067/S0718-22442019000100005. Retrieved 21 December 2019.
4. Kelsey, Harry, Sir Francis Drake; The Queen’s Pirate, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998, ISBN 0-300-07182-5.

On December 5 he viewed the small Spanish settlement of Valparaíso, a coastal town with a number of houses and a church. He made an assault on the town and plundered what he could find, such as valuable art treasures and the church silver. Its harbour contained a ship which proved the most valuable as it was full of Chilean wine, 25,000 pesos in gold and with charts of the South American coast. Drake’s sack of Valparaíso gave origin to the legend about Cueva del Pirata.[1]

In Valparaíso, Chile, folklore associates a cave known as Cueva del Pirata (lit. “Cave of the Pirate”) with Francis Drake. A legend says that when Drake sacked the port he became disappointed over the scant plunder. Drake proceeded to enter the churches in fury to sack them and urinate on the goblets.[4] However he still found the plunder to be not worth enough to take it on board his galleon, hiding it in the cave.[4] Another version the legend says a treasure was left in the cave because the plunder had been more than he could take on board.[4] Together with the treasure Drake would have left a man chained or a sentry to wait for them to return, which they did not.[4] The treasure is said to still be there, but those who approach it drown.[4]

Drake left and carried on Northwards up the coast. He sailed into the remote Salada Bay near Copiapó where he was able to careen his ship and assembled the Golden Hinde’s pinnace. Whilst here Drake attempted to wait for the Elizabeth to appear which would’ve given sufficient strength to attack Panama, the next target. When it became apparent that Elizabeth wasn’t going to turn up, Drake sailed off once the pinnace had been completed.[2]

Just before they got to Callao a Spanish coaster laden with 25,000 pesos of Peruvian gold, amounting in value to 37,000 ducats of Spanish money (about £7m by modern standards) was intercepted and captured; from the prisoners information was gained bearing news that a number of treasure ships were heading in the area. As a result, Drake entered Callao which was the harbour for Lima on 13 February. The English took the town with ease and in the harbour lay a dozen vessels which Drake ordered ransacked and run aground. They then questioned the inhabitants from whom they learnt that a large treasure galleon called Nuestra Señora de la Concepción which would come to be called the Cacafuego, had recently departed North West towards Panama bearing a valuable cargo of silver with its final destination of Manila. The following day an excited Drake rushed off in pursuit with the recently built pinnace and headed to the direction where the Spanish treasure galleon was most likely to be intercepted.[3]

Sourced from:  Wikipedia/Circumnavigation

REFERENCES:

1.  Montecino Aguirre, Sonia (2015). Mitos de Chile: Enciclopedia de seres, apariciones y encantos (in Spanish). Catalonia. pp. 196–197. ISBN 978-956-324-375-8.
2. Spate 2004, p. 251
3. Marley 2008, p. 64

Sourced from: Wikipedia/Francis Drake

REFERENCES:

4. Montecino Aguirre, Sonia (2015). Mitos de Chile: Enciclopedia de seres, apariciones y encantos (in Spanish). Catalonia. pp. 196–197, 269. ISBN 978-956-324-375-8.

Further north in Chile a tale says that because Drake feared falling prisoner to the Spanish he buried his treasure near Arica, these being one of many Chilean stories about entierros (“burrowings”).[1]

The treasure in or near Arica is supposed to be of 800 bars of silver, 123 bars of gold and 500,000 silver coins that once belonged to King of Spain. If you go to the cemetery in Arica you will find the supposed tomb of Sir Francis Drake.[2]

Sourced from: Wikipedia

REFRENCES: 

1. Montecino Aguirre, Sonia (2015). Mitos de Chile: Enciclopedia de seres, apariciones y encantos (in Spanish). Catalonia. pp. 196–197, 269. ISBN 978-956-324-375-8.

Sourced from: Southamerica.cl

2. http://www.southamerica.cl/Chile/Arica.htm