The captain set sail with five ships and 164 crew members from Plymouth, England, at 5 p.m. in the early darkness of Dec. 13, 1577. The ships headed south and vanished from sight.
He didn’t return for nearly three years, sailing back into Plymouth with only a fraction of his fleet intact. But he had the hold of his last ship “very richly fraught with gold, silver, pearls and precious stones.” In today’s terms, the cache was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
He also had the world at his feet, for Francis Drake — soon to be Sir Francis Drake — was the first captain to sail around the world and live to tell about it. (Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed during the world’s first circumnavigation half a century earlier; his crew finished the trip.)
But Drake! How he lorded over the seas!
He was in his early 40s then, the swashbuckling man of action in 16th-century England, rocketing from the rural working class to being a wealthy confidant of Queen Elizabeth and one of the most influential explorers in world history. He circled the globe, raided Spanish ports and ships from Europe to the Caribbean with wild abandon, helped defeat the Spanish Armada, claimed California for the queen and rescued the first British settlers in North America on Roanoke Island. Less admirably, he was an early slave trader and helped lead the English massacre of some 500 men, women and children on Ireland’s Rathlin Island.
Let’s get a look at him up close:
“He is low in stature, thick-set, and very robust,” reported Nunho da Silva, a Portuguese pilot Drake captured and forced into service for part of the round-the-world trip. “He has a fine countenance, is ruddy of complexion and has a fair beard. … He is a great mariner, the son and relative of seamen.”
Nearly 450 years later, Drake’s world-changing exploits are preserved at the Library in a stunning collection of contemporary maps, charts, historical accounts, letters and correspondence in several languages, many of them rare or the only copies known to exist.
This includes one of the treasures of the age, the Nicola van Sype map of Drake’s circumnavigation, the earliest printed map of the expedition. It’s likely a smaller version of the map that Drake gave Queen Elizabeth shortly after his triumphant return on Sept. 26, 1580. Since that larger map, known as the Whitehall Map, was lost years later (likely in a fire), this is the earliest map of the voyage still in existence.
The collection brings it all breathing back to life, this Elizabethan world of exploration when no one knew what the planet fully entailed, when rumors of hidden continents and waterways abounded, sea monsters were said to swarm up from the deep, when entire continents of peoples had no little or no contact with one another.
One of the most famous parts of the voyage came when Drake dropped the anchor of his ship, the Golden Hind’s (or Golden Deer, in today’s language) at what is now Point Reyes National Seashore, about 30 miles north of San Francisco. They stayed for about six weeks.
The Coast Miwok people had long lived there, but Drake and his crew claimed the area to be New Albion, as Albion was the classical name for England. They marveled at the strange climate: “… in the middle of their summer, the snow hardly departeth even from their very doors, but is never taken from their hills at all; hence come those thicke mists and most stinking fogges [fogs],” wrote Francis Fletcher, the voyage’s chaplain, in “The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake,” the first full narrative of the voyage. “… but the nipping cold … meeting and opposing the Sunne’s endeavor, forces him to give over his work.”
From there, Drake set sail across the vast Pacific, past Asia, across the Indian Ocean, around Africa and back to Plymouth.
The Library’s collection was assembled by Hans Peter Kraus, one of the most important antiquarian book dealers of the 20th century, and his wife, Hanni. The Jewish couple fled Austria in 1939 as World War II approached and Nazis seized his rare book business. The couple settled in New York, where Hans resumed his trade. He was fascinated by Drake, he said, after he learned of how the incredible wealth he brought back to England helped establish the nation as a global empire.
“I wanted to gather only original and contemporary sources, in printed books, in autographs and manuscripts, in maps, in portraits, or in medals,” he said in a 1968 lecture at the University of Minnesota. “The motive for my collecting was to learn about Drake in the same way as anyone living in Europe during his lifetime would have done.”
For all his high-flown adventures, the great mariner did not live a long and happy life. He had no children, and though he was married, lived in comfort on a huge estate and served as the mayor of Plymouth, he eventually returned to sea-faring adventures.
It did not go well. A 1589 raid on Spain was a dismal failure, enraging the queen. In 1596, after a series of failed raids on Spanish forts along the coasts of modern-day Colombia and Panama, he fell ill with fever and dysentery. He lingered for two weeks. Just after 4 a.m. on Jan. 28, not far off the coast of modern-day Portobelo, Panama, he came to his final hour.
As the ship’s journal has it: “… our Generall sir Francis Drake departed this life, having bene extremely sicke of a fluxe. … He used some speeches at or a little before his death, rising and apparelling himselfe, but being brought to bed againe within one houre died.”
The British hero of the age was about 56 (the year of his birth was never certain). He was buried at sea in a lead coffin. It has never been found — and thus, one of the world’s great explorers still lies beneath the waters that once took him around the globe and into the pages of history.
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