England's Hero Francis Drake Was Also a Pirate and a Slaver

England remembers Sir Francis Drake as the man who sailed around the world and helped defeat the Spanish Armada, and he was one of the most popular heroes of his day. He was also a pirate who attacked and robbed ships and ports, a trader in enslaved Africans, and a commander who abandoned his own comrades when they were in trouble. Both things are true of the same man. The surviving accounts split along national lines: Spanish reports dwell on his cruelty, while English ones tend to play the violence down.

The pope called him a great captain

In late summer 1588, as the Spanish Armada limped home from defeat, Pope Sixtus V was discussing Drake with Giovanni Gritti, the Venetian ambassador in Rome. The pope asked who Drake was and what forces he had, then listed what the Englishman had already done: he had burned 25 of the Spanish king's ships at Gibraltar, named in the source as Cádiz, and as many again at Lisbon. He had robbed the flotilla and sacked San Domingo. "His reputation is so great that his countrymen flock to him to share his booty," the pope said. He called Drake a great captain.

That is the puzzle in one scene. The most feared raider in the Atlantic was, to the head of the Catholic Church, simply a brilliant sailor. Drake had risen in about 20 years from humble beginnings in rural Devon to great wealth and power, and his fame had spread across Europe.

He sailed home and left his comrades behind

Drake was born around February or March 1540 near Tavistock in Devon. His father, Edmund, cut woollen cloth and was a priest, and the family moved to Kent in the late 1540s. Francis did not go with them. He went to Plymouth to live with his kinsman William Hawkins, and it was there that he learned the sea.

William's son John launched four slaving voyages in the 1560s, backed by leading courtiers and later by Queen Elizabeth herself. Drake joined them. On the fourth, which left Plymouth in 1567, he was captain of a small bark called the Judith. In September 1568 the Spanish defeated Hawkins at the island fort of San Juan de Ulúa, on the coast of New Spain, now Veracruz in Mexico. Drake did not take men aboard from the overcrowded Minion to help the stricken crews. He sailed the Judith home to England instead. Hawkins wrote that the Judith "forsooke us in our great myserie". He had to land 96 men on the shore, and many of them were captured and executed by the Spanish. The voyage still made a considerable profit, and Drake's career was not harmed by it.

A pirate with a royal licence

In the 1570s Englishmen who felt wronged by the defeat began attacking Spanish shipping and territories in the Caribbean. From 1572 the English crown licensed Drake to attack Spanish forces and colonies, which turned him from a pirate into what was called a privateer: an attacker with official permission. The Spanish did not accept the distinction.

In 1571 he commanded a small pinnace, the Swan, as part of a larger fleet and, together with French pirates, attacked settlements in Panama. In Panama he worked with cimarrons, people who had escaped Spanish enslavement, who gave him information about Spanish defences, guided his men, supplied them and fought alongside them. In 1579 his ship attacked a Spanish treasure vessel carrying gold and silver whose nickname was too crude to print here. He became the first Englishman to sail around the world, and later a leader of the fleet that defeated the Armada. The hero and the raider were never two different men.