Francis Drake and friends
Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh were not the only Devon men who had maritime ambitions. As mentioned in the app trail, Before Gilbert’s ship was lost off Newfoundland, it was sailing alongside another English ship called the Golden Hind. That boat was famous thanks to a man from Tavistock called Sir Francis Drake. Drake started life as an ordinary Devon sailor, but went on to become a sea captain and politician, knighted in 1581 after becoming the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, in the Golden Hind.
Drake went on to play a major role, as vice admiral, in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Drake was hated by the Spanish, who nicknamed him ‘El Draque’ or the Dragon – and this wasn’t only because of the Armada. It was also due to the raids he made against Spanish ships and settlements. Some Spanish mariners were so afraid of Drake that they believed he practiced witchcraft. Drake was rumoured to possess a magic mirror that allowed him to see the location of all the ships in the sea.
Like the other ‘West Country Men’, Drake’s reputation is complicated. Heroic narratives have been spun around him for centuries, but even in his own time only some Elizabethans saw him as a hero; others were critical. Drake was a privateer who attacked Spanish and Portuguese ships, and stole their treasure. As a young man, moreover, he took part in slaving voyages to West Africa, attacking settlements in order to capture people and sell them.
Meanwhile, Richard Grenville, a cousin of the Gilberts and Raleigh from Bideford, was a politician, soldier and privateer, who seized land in Ireland, violently supressing resistance, and who made colonising expeditions to the Americas and the Azores, often raiding towns and villages. He died of his wounds after attempting to run his ship, Revenge, through a line of 53 Spanish vessels. Just up the river from Greenway, a village called Stoke Gabriel is the birthplace of John Davis, another of Queen Elizabeth’s chief navigators. Davis invented a navigational instrument that measured the altitude of the sun or moon.