By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026
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.
For most of its first decade the voyage was a state secret. Spain had a witness list; England had a queen who needed plausible deniability. The surviving record is assembled from court testimony in Seville, captured Spanish pilots’ depositions, fragmentary English narratives published years after the event, and a single brass plate that may or may not be a fake. 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 actual destination, given by the Queen’s privy council to Drake alone, was the Pacific [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 executed his second-in-command Thomas Doughty for what the trial record calls mutiny and witchcraft. Two ships were abandoned. In August 1578 the remaining three entered the Strait of Magellan and emerged into the Pacific in sixteen days, faster than any previous European passage.
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 south past 57° latitude, where Drake reportedly observed that the Atlantic and Pacific met in open ocean below Tierra del Fuego — recorded in the 1628 narrative The World Encompassed as the earliest English claim that no southern continent attached to South America [2].
Raids Along the Spanish Pacific
From early 1579 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 in December 1578 Drake took the ship Los Reyes with cargo worth around 25,000 pesos. At Tarapaca he found a sleeping Spaniard guarding thirteen bars of silver on the beach; at Arica the take was forty bars from a small storehouse. The pattern, reconstructed from Spanish viceregal correspondence to Philip II now held in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, shows a deliberate working-up of force as Drake learned the rhythms of the Pacific coast [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. The pilot San Juan de Anton later gave a long deposition that survives in Seville and is the single richest source for the appearance and crew of the Golden Hind at sea [3]. The take from this one ship exceeded the annual revenue of the English Crown.
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 claims Drake reached 48° N before the cold drove him back south. Earlier sources, including the 1589 Hakluyt account, say 42° or 43°. Spanish intelligence reports give 44°. None of the surviving English sources are first-hand journals; the original logs were either confiscated by the Crown on Drake’s return or never released. Modern historians, including Harry Kelsey in his 1998 biography Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate, have argued that the higher latitudes were inflated by Drake himself or by later editors to bolster English territorial claims, and that the voyage probably reached no further than about 42° to 43° N [4]. The matter is unsettled and the surviving record makes it hard to settle.
The Drake’s Bay vs. Whale Cove Debate
For most of the twentieth century the standard candidate for Nova Albion was Drake’s Bay on the Point Reyes peninsula in California, north of San Francisco. The 1628 description mentions “white banks and cliffs,” which matches the white sandstone of Point Reyes. A competing case advanced from the 1970s onward placed the anchorage at Whale Cove on the Oregon coast, near 44° N, on the strength of the higher latitude figures and the better natural harbor. Both candidates have living advocates among professional historians and amateur researchers. Neither has produced indisputable archaeological evidence.
The Plate of Brass
In 1936 a young man named Beryle Shinn produced a brass plate found in Marin County, California, inscribed with a claim of possession dated 17 June 1579 and signed by Drake. Herbert Bolton of the University of California, Berkeley, authenticated it and called it “one of the world’s long-lost historical treasures.” In 1977, metallurgical tests at Oxford, the British Museum, and Berkeley itself concluded that the brass was modern, rolled in mills not available in the sixteenth century. Subsequent archival work suggests the hoax began as an inside joke by members of E Clampus Vitus, a California historical fraternity, intended for Bolton and accidentally taken seriously [5]. The British Library curates the documentary trail; the plate is now displayed at the Bancroft Library as an authenticated forgery.
The Pacific Crossing and Return
In late July 1579 Drake left the California coast, crossed the Pacific in 68 days, and reached the Moluccas in November. There he negotiated a clove-trade agreement with Sultan Babullah of Ternate, which the English Crown later treated as the legal foundation of subsequent attempts to enter the East Indies trade. The Golden Hind grounded briefly on a reef near the Celebes, refloated, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in June 1580, and reached Plymouth on 26 September 1580. Drake stepped ashore and asked the first fishermen he met whether the Queen still lived.
What Did the Voyage Actually Achieve?
The bullion from the voyage, accounted for in Crown ledgers but never fully published, is variously estimated between £300,000 and £600,000, against an annual royal revenue of around £300,000. Elizabeth’s share alone reportedly funded the early Levant Company and enabled the repayment of England’s foreign debt. Drake was knighted on the deck of the Golden Hind at Deptford on 4 April 1581. Spain considered him a pirate; Philip II demanded his extradition; the English Crown maintained that no English subject had ever raided Spanish shipping in the Pacific.
The Spanish Crown’s Reading
From Madrid the voyage was a piracy followed by a diplomatic insult. Spanish records call Drake El Draque, the Dragon, and the depositions in Seville read as an evidentiary brief for an extradition that never came. Kris Lane and other historians of Pacific piracy have argued that English privateering during this period operated as informal state policy, blurring the boundary between privateer and pirate in a way the Spanish legal system never fully accepted [6].
The English State’s Reading
From London the voyage was an act of strategic depth. Drake’s commission, if a written one ever existed, was kept off the books. The ledger of Crown investment was sealed. The maps Drake drew were classed as crown secrets, and the standard 1589 published account in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations was retrofitted from witnesses years after the events [2]. 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 Drake’s confiscated journals. The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, which curates the largest UK Drake-voyage collection, treats most of these as unresolved rather than retiring them in favor of one hypothesis. 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, and is generally considered the richest single naval capture of the sixteenth century.
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. The exact location of the landing remains disputed between Drake’s Bay in California and Whale Cove in Oregon. No undisputed archaeological evidence of the encampment has ever been found.
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 Queen’s share of the bullion is generally placed between £160,000 and £300,000, against an annual royal revenue of around £300,000. Contemporary accounts claim her share repaid England’s foreign debt and seeded the early joint-stock companies that financed later Elizabethan voyages. The exact figures were never published.
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 framed as a private trading venture; Drake’s actual commission, if written, was suppressed; and the ledgers and maps were classed as crown secrets for years afterward.
Where can the voyage be studied today?
The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich curates the largest UK collection of Drake materials. The Archivo General de Indias in Seville holds the Spanish depositions and viceregal correspondence. The British Library catalogues the documentary record of the Plate of Brass affair. Harry Kelsey’s Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (1998) remains the standard scholarly biography.
