Sir francis drake explorer map

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The eldest of twelve sons born to Edmund Drake, tenant farmer, and his wife, Mary Mylwaye, in Devon, England, Drake started his sea career before he was thirteen, as an apprentice aboard a bark plying the trade across the English Channel. By twenty, he was master of the ship; before thirty he had voyaged to the New World several times on ships owned by his relatives, the Hawkins family of Plymouth.

In the next few years, he took his revenge by plundering Spanish settlements, shipping, and gold-laden mule trains in Panama, sometimes teaming up with local pirates. He was a wealthy man when he returned to Plymouth in While tension between Spain and England increased in the s, the quest for a Northwest Passage attracted English commercial interests.

Drake left England in the late fall of with a fleet of five ships a sixth was added when it was captured from the Portuguese off Africa but quickly suffered a great attrition: by the time he reached the Pacific Ocean September , only the flagship Pelican remained. The Pelican was battered but not broken. Portrait of Sir Francis Drake.

Frontispiece to his nephew's The World Encompassed. London, [Rare Books Division]. Renaming his ship the Golden Hind , Drake pushed north along the coasts of Chile and Peru, attacking Spanish interests; he also acquired more accurate charts from captured Spanish ships. How far north he went has been the subject of much contention.

London, , vol.

Where did sir francis drake explore

The kingdom thus offered, though of no farther value to him than that it furnished him with present necessities, Drake thought it not prudent for him to refuse; and, therefore, took possession of it in the name of Queen Elizabeth, not without ardent wishes that this acquisition might be of use to his native country. In either view, Oregon seemed a more likely location for Drake's careening respite—not California.

In , after years of conducting its own review of the research, the Department of the Interior designated Drake's Cove in Drake's Bay, California, as a National Historic Landmark, though it did not take sides in the continuing debate. At his anchorage, Drake summarized his thoughts about the possibility of a Northwest Passage:.