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What Was Sir Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation?
Sir Francis Drake‘s circumnavigation was an English voyage from December 1577 to September 1580 that became the second expedition to sail around the world after Magellan’s. Backed quietly by Elizabeth I, Drake left Plymouth with five ships, raided Spanish settlements along the Pacific coast of the Americas, claimed an unidentified harbor on the California coast for England, crossed the Pacific, and returned through the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope with one ship and a hold full of plundered silver.
After Drake’s return, publicity about the voyage was kept muted while the fate of the treasure was settled. Spain had a witness list; England had a queen who needed plausible deniability. The surviving record is assembled from Spanish depositions taken in Panama and Mexico and now held in archives in Seville and Mexico City, from English narratives published years after the event, and, for a time, from a brass plate once hailed as Drake’s own and later exposed as a forgery. What follows traces the route as the evidence allows and holds open the questions where two reconstructions still fit, within the broader landscape of historical and archaeological mysteries.
The 1577-1580 Voyage in Outline
Drake sailed from Plymouth on 13 December 1577 with five ships and roughly 164 men. The flagship was the Pelican, a 100-150 ton galleon that he renamed Golden Hind mid-voyage in honor of his patron Sir Christopher Hatton, whose crest carried a golden deer. The stated destination, given to most of the crew and to the wider public, was Alexandria. The real plan, set out in a draft that the historian Eva Taylor turned up around 1930, sent him through the Strait of Magellan into the South Sea, as the Pacific was then called. No written commission from the Queen was ever produced, even when one was demanded at a trial during the voyage [1].
Atlantic Crossing and the Strait
The fleet crossed the Atlantic by way of the Cape Verde Islands, where Drake captured a Portuguese ship called the Santa Maria and pressed its pilot, Nuño da Silva, into service. Da Silva’s later deposition to the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico City became one of the most detailed surviving sources for the early voyage. The fleet wintered at Port San Julian in Patagonia, where Drake had Thomas Doughty, a gentleman-adventurer who had clashed with him for months, tried and beheaded. The charges ranged from slander to betraying the voyage’s plans, and Drake had earlier called Doughty “a coniurer and witche”. The surplus ships were abandoned or broken up, and in August 1578 the remaining three entered the Strait of Magellan. They emerged into the Pacific after only sixteen days, a remarkably swift passage in the southern winter.
Pacific Storm and the Lost Companions
Storms scattered the fleet immediately after the strait. The Marigold went down with all hands. The Elizabeth, under John Wynter, turned back through the strait and reached England in June 1579, well before Drake. The Golden Hind was driven far to the south, to around 55° to 57°. The 1628 narrative The World Encompassed, compiled from the notes of the chaplain Francis Fletcher, records that beyond the southernmost cape “the Atlanticke Ocean and the South Sea, meete in a most large and free scope.” Which cape Drake actually reached is still disputed [2].
Raids Along the Spanish Pacific
From late 1578 Drake worked north along a coast no English ship had ever raided. Spanish ports from Valparaiso to the Mexican port of Guatulco assumed their Pacific frontier was safe and were not garrisoned for a hostile European warship.
Valparaiso, Tarapaca, and Arica
At Valparaiso on 5 December 1578 Drake seized a ship carrying wine and at least 25,000 pesos in gold; she had served as Mendaña’s flagship on his voyage to the Solomon Islands. At Tarapaca his men found a Spaniard asleep beside thirteen bars of silver; at Arica they took 57 bars of silver from small ships lying unguarded in the harbor. The surprise was complete: the first warning sent from Chile reached Callao, the port of Lima, thirteen days after Drake did [3].
The Capture of the Cacafuego
On 1 March 1579, off Cape San Francisco near present-day Ecuador, the Golden Hind caught the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepcion, nicknamed the Cacafuego. After a brief exchange the ship surrendered, and Drake’s crew transferred the cargo over six days at sea: 26 tons of silver, 80 pounds of gold, 13 chests of coined reales, jewels, and the captain’s stores. Her master and pilot, San Juan de Antón, gave a sworn deposition to the royal court at Panama ten days after his release; together with his clerk’s testimony, it gives a vivid picture of the Golden Hind and her crew at sea [4]. The English valued the haul at about 360,000 pesos.
The California Anchorage and the Plate of Brass
After Cape San Francisco Drake sailed north with a hold so full he had to ballast against further weather. Sometime in June 1579 he made landfall on a North American Pacific shore he called Nova Albion, careened the Golden Hind for repairs, and stayed for thirty-six days. Where exactly that anchorage was is the most stubborn geographical puzzle of the entire voyage.
How Far North Did He Sail?
The 1628 narrative says Drake reached 48° N before the cold drove him back south, while an account printed by Richard Hakluyt gives 43°; the sources, in the historian O. H. K. Spate’s words, are “confused and confusing.” None of the surviving English narratives is Drake’s own record of the voyage, which he presented to the Queen. Spate placed the first landfall, on 5 June 1579, somewhere above 42° N. Harry Kelsey, in his 1998 biography Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate, went much further, arguing that Drake never reached the “New Albion” traditionally placed on the northern California coast and that his landfall more likely lay in Baja California [5]. The matter is unsettled and the surviving record makes it hard to settle.
Where Was Nova Albion?
For most of the twentieth century the leading candidate for Nova Albion was Drake’s Bay on the Point Reyes peninsula in California, north of San Francisco. The 1628 description mentions “white bancks and cliffes,” which match the pale cliffs of Drake’s Bay. Rival sites have been argued from San Francisco Bay itself to Oregon and British Columbia. In 2012 the US Secretary of the Interior designated the Drakes Bay area a National Historic Landmark, naming a cove there as the most likely landing site, but advocates of other sites remain unconvinced, and digging around the bay has turned up far more traces of a Spanish galleon wrecked there in 1595 than anything tied with confidence to Drake’s camp.
The Plate of Brass
In 1936 a shop clerk named Beryle Shinn found a brass plate near San Quentin in Marin County, California, inscribed with a claim of possession dated 17 June 1579 and bearing Drake’s name. Herbert Bolton of the University of California, Berkeley, hailed it as “one of the world’s long-lost treasures” and declared it authentic. In 1977, tests commissioned by Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, with samples analyzed at Oxford and at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, showed that the plate was made of modern rolled brass, most probably of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. In 2003 four historians, writing in California History, traced the plate to a practical joke on Bolton led by G. Ezra Dane, a fellow member of the E Clampus Vitus historical fraternity, that escaped its makers’ control [6]. The forgery remains at the Bancroft Library.
The Pacific Crossing and Return
In late July 1579 Drake left the California coast, sailed for 68 days without sight of land, and reached the Moluccas in early November. At Ternate, Sultan Babullah welcomed him and offered to reserve his island’s trade for the English, but nothing was put in writing, and Drake sailed on after a few days with about six tons of cloves. The Golden Hind struck a reef off Celebes in January 1580 and was refloated only after jettisoning guns, stores and three tons of cloves, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in June 1580, and reached Plymouth on 26 September 1580. Before entering port, Drake asked fishermen in the Channel who was on the throne and whether England was at peace.
What Did the Voyage Actually Achieve?
The registered bullion came to about £307,000, and the historian O. H. K. Spate judged that the whole haul must have exceeded £600,000. The Crown itself seems to have received around £300,000, more than a year’s Exchequer receipts. John Maynard Keynes later wrote that Elizabeth paid off her entire foreign debt from the proceeds and invested about £42,000 in the Levant Company. Drake was knighted on the deck of the Golden Hind at Deptford on 4 April 1581. Spain considered him a pirate. When Philip II’s ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, protested, Elizabeth replied that the Spaniards had unjustly barred English trade and that Drake would answer at law if anything were proved against him.
The Spanish Crown’s Reading
From Madrid the voyage was a piracy followed by a diplomatic insult. Spanish documents call him Francisco Draque, Lope de Vega made him the subject of his 1598 epic poem La Dragontea, and the depositions taken after his raids record them in close detail. Historians still disagree about where privateering ended and piracy began: O. H. K. Spate called the seizure of a Portuguese merchant ship off the Cape Verde Islands “naked piracy,” while the naval historian Michael Lewis described Drake as “gradually becoming the unofficial weapon of the crown” [7].
The English State’s Reading
From London the voyage was an act of strategic depth. No written commission from the Queen was ever produced. Drake’s own record of the voyage went to the Queen, and publicity stayed muted while the fate of the treasure was decided. The narratives that reached print came years later: the accounts in Richard Hakluyt’s collections and, in 1628, The World Encompassed, compiled by Drake’s nephew from Fletcher’s notes, with passages that reflected badly on his uncle left out or modified [8]. The framing was state secret first and national triumph later, in that order.
What the Record Will Not Tell Us
Several questions remain genuinely open after four centuries of scholarship: the exact route between the Strait of Magellan and Valparaiso; the latitude reached on the North American coast; the location of the Nova Albion anchorage; the precise contents of the Cacafuego prize, since both sides had reasons to misreport; and the fate of the record Drake presented to the Queen. The voyage made Drake a national hero and forced cartographers across Europe to rewrite the western edge of their world maps, but it left a documentary record that requires, for any specific claim, naming the source and naming what would settle the question if better evidence ever surfaced.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation take place?
The voyage left Plymouth on 13 December 1577 and returned on 26 September 1580, a round trip of nearly two years and ten months. Drake was the second commander to circumnavigate the globe, after Magellan’s expedition completed its voyage in 1522 under Juan Sebastian Elcano.
How many ships and men returned?
One ship returned. The Golden Hind reached Plymouth with around 56 to 59 men out of the roughly 164 who had set out, although crew numbers across the voyage shifted with desertions, prizes, and casualties. The Elizabeth had returned separately the previous year. Two other ships were broken up in Patagonia, and the Marigold was lost in the Pacific.
What was the Cacafuego?
The Cacafuego was the nickname of the Nuestra Señora de la Concepcion, a Spanish treasure ship sailing from Lima to Panama, captured by Drake on 1 March 1579 off the coast of present-day Ecuador. The single prize yielded around 26 tons of silver, gold bars, and coined reales, valued by the English at about 360,000 pesos.
Did Drake claim part of California for England?
According to the 1628 narrative The World Encompassed, Drake landed on the North American Pacific coast in June 1579, named the territory Nova Albion, and claimed it for Elizabeth I. In 2012 the United States designated the Drakes Bay area of Point Reyes, California, a National Historic Landmark as the most likely site, but advocates of other locations, from San Francisco Bay to Oregon, still dispute it.
Is the Plate of Brass real?
No. The plate produced in 1936 and authenticated by Herbert Bolton was conclusively shown in 1977 to be a modern forgery, made from rolled brass that did not exist in the sixteenth century. Subsequent research suggests it began as a private joke among members of the California historical fraternity E Clampus Vitus, intended for Bolton, that escaped into the public record.
How rich did the voyage make Elizabeth I?
Estimates vary, but the historian O. H. K. Spate put the Crown’s receipts at around £300,000, more than a year’s Exchequer revenue. John Maynard Keynes later wrote that Elizabeth paid off England’s foreign debt from the proceeds and invested about £42,000 in the Levant Company, from whose profits the East India Company grew. The full sums were never known.
Why was the voyage kept secret?
England and Spain were not formally at war in 1577. Open acknowledgment of state-sponsored raiding on Spanish Pacific shipping would have triggered a diplomatic crisis Elizabeth was not yet ready to face. The voyage was given out as a trading venture to Alexandria; no written commission from the Queen was ever produced; and publicity about the voyage was muted after Drake’s return.
Where can the voyage be studied today?
The Archivo General de Indias in Seville holds many of the Spanish documents on the voyage, and Mexico’s national archives hold the Inquisition’s papers on the pilot Nuño da Silva; Zelia Nuttall translated many of them in New Light on Drake (1914). The forged Plate of Brass is at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley. Harry Kelsey’s Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (1998) is a full-length scholarly biography, though some of its arguments are disputed.
Sources
- Richard Hakluyt, The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, reprinted in W. S. W. Vaux (ed.), The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, Hakluyt Society, 1854. archive.org; O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (The Pacific since Magellan, vol. 1), ANU Press, 1979, ch. 9. press-files.anu.edu.au
- Sir Francis Drake (comp.), The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, 1628, collected out of the notes of Francis Fletcher; ed. W. S. W. Vaux, Hakluyt Society, 1854. archive.org; O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake, ANU Press, 1979, ch. 9. press-files.anu.edu.au
- O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake, ANU Press, 1979, ch. 9, “The shores of silver”. press-files.anu.edu.au; Richard Hakluyt, The Famous Voyage, in W. S. W. Vaux (ed.), Hakluyt Society, 1854. archive.org
- Zelia Nuttall (ed.), New Light on Drake: A Collection of Documents Relating to His Voyage of Circumnavigation, 1577-1580, Hakluyt Society, 1914, part IV (testimony and deposition of San Juan de Antón). archive.org; The World Encompassed, ed. Vaux, 1854. archive.org
- John Crossland, Pot shot at Elizabeth’s sea-dog (review of Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate, Yale University Press, 1998), Times Higher Education, 18 September 1998. timeshighereducation.com; O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake, ANU Press, 1979, ch. 9, “Nova Albion”. press-files.anu.edu.au; Carl Nolte, Point Reyes declared Drake landing site, San Francisco Chronicle, 19 October 2012. sfgate.com
- Edward Von der Porten, Raymond Aker, Robert W. Allen and James M. Spitze, Who Made Drake’s Plate of Brass? Hint: It Wasn’t Francis Drake, California History 81(2), 2002, pp. 116-133. doi.org; Kathleen Maclay, Historical journal reports secrets behind infamous “Drake’s Plate” hoax, UC Berkeley News, 18 February 2003. berkeley.edu; Allan Chen, Drake’s Plate — the end of the mystery?, Berkeley Lab, 4 April 2003. lbl.gov (archived)
- O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake, ANU Press, 1979, ch. 9, “Port St Julian”. press-files.anu.edu.au; Michael Lewis, quoted in John Crossland, Pot shot at Elizabeth’s sea-dog, Times Higher Education, 18 September 1998. timeshighereducation.com; Zelia Nuttall (ed.), New Light on Drake, Hakluyt Society, 1914. archive.org
- O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake, ANU Press, 1979, ch. 9. press-files.anu.edu.au; W. S. W. Vaux, introduction to The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, Hakluyt Society, 1854. archive.org