English sailors: Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh and exploration
Why Elizabethans Took to the Sea
By the 1560s, Spain and Portugal already controlled most known sea routes to the Americas, Africa and Asia, and treated those routes as their private property. England was a small, second-rank naval power that wanted in. Three things drove Elizabethan sailors to push past Spanish and Portuguese monopolies: the lure of profit from gold, silver and spices; the religious rivalry that made attacking Catholic Spain seem patriotic; and Elizabeth’s willingness to license private captains to do what her navy could not officially do. The most famous of these captains were John Hawkins, Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh — all West Country gentlemen, all closely connected to the court.
Hawkins ran the first English slaving voyages in the 1560s and later redesigned the navy. Drake circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1580 and was knighted by Elizabeth on board his ship. Raleigh launched the failed Roanoke colony in 1585–87, England’s first attempt at settling North America.
John Hawkins and the First Slaving Voyages
John Hawkins made three slave-trading voyages between 1562 and 1568. He sailed to West Africa, where he seized or bought captive Africans, then crossed the Atlantic to sell them to Spanish colonists in the Caribbean in exchange for sugar, hides and pearls. Hawkins’s voyages broke the Spanish trade monopoly and made him — and his investors, including Elizabeth herself — a large profit. The third voyage ended in disaster at San Juan de Ulua in 1568 when a Spanish fleet ambushed Hawkins’s ships, killing most of his men. The young Francis Drake was on the voyage and barely escaped. He never forgave Spain.
Hawkins’s most lasting contribution was not the slaving but what he did afterwards. From 1577, as Treasurer of the Navy, he redesigned English warships into the lighter, faster, more heavily gunned vessels known as ‘race-built’ galleons. These were the ships that would defeat the Armada eleven years later. The slaving voyages themselves are a moral stain on the period: Hawkins’s coat of arms, granted by Elizabeth, openly featured a bound African captive.
Hawkins’s three voyages trafficked an estimated 1,200–1,400 Africans across the Atlantic. This was tiny compared with the later British slave trade of the 1700s, which trafficked millions, but it set a legal and commercial precedent: an English crew, with royal investment, treating human beings as cargo. After Hawkins, English slaving paused for about a century — until renewed and industrialised after 1660 — but the Elizabethan voyages are the start of that history, and modern historians and museums increasingly stress this part of the ‘Golden Age’ story.
Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation, 1577–1580
In December 1577 Drake left Plymouth with five ships on a secret royal commission to raid Spanish ports along the Pacific coast of South America. By the time he returned to Plymouth in September 1580 he had sailed all the way around the world — only the second commander in history to do so, after the Portuguese-Spanish expedition of Magellan-Elcano in 1522. Drake had passed through the storms of the Strait of Magellan, raided the unprotected Spanish ports of Valparaiso and Callao, captured the treasure ship Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion (nicknamed the Cacafuego), claimed the coast of California for Elizabeth as ‘New Albion’, and sailed home across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The financial return was extraordinary. Drake brought back gold, silver and jewels worth perhaps £400,000 — more than a year of normal Crown income. Investors received roughly £47 for every £1 they had risked, and Elizabeth’s personal share allowed her to clear most of her foreign debts. In April 1581 she came on board Drake’s ship the Golden Hind at Deptford and knighted him on deck. Spain was furious: Philip II called Drake ‘El Draque’ (‘the Dragon’) and demanded his execution. Elizabeth refused.
Drake’s circumnavigation lasted from December 1577 to September 1580. It made England the second nation to sail around the globe, brought back roughly £400,000 in plunder, struck a propaganda blow against Spain, and provided a model for later English voyages of trade and exploration.
Walter Raleigh and the Roanoke Colony
Walter Raleigh was a court favourite of Elizabeth in the 1580s — soldier, poet, courtier, and from 1584 the holder of a royal patent to plant an English colony in North America. He never sailed to Roanoke himself but bankrolled and organised the expeditions. The first attempt, in 1585, landed about 100 men on Roanoke Island off the coast of modern North Carolina. Short of food and clashing with the local Algonquian inhabitants, the colonists abandoned the site after a year and sailed home with Drake when he stopped by on his way back from raiding the Caribbean.
A second colony was planted in 1587 under Governor John White and included around 115 men, women and children — among them White’s daughter Eleanor Dare, who gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. White returned to England for supplies, but the war with Spain meant no relief ship reached Roanoke until 1590. By then the colony had vanished. The only clue was the word ‘CROATOAN’ carved on a post. The fate of the Roanoke colonists has never been confirmed.
Roanoke failed for several connected reasons. The site was poorly chosen: shallow inlets made it hard to resupply by sea. The colonists arrived too late in the season to plant crops and quickly became dependent on the Algonquian for food, which broke down into violence. Raleigh’s organisation underfunded the venture, and the war with Spain pulled every available ship into home defence after 1588. England would not successfully plant a North American colony until Jamestown in 1607 — a generation later. Raleigh himself fell from royal favour in 1592, was imprisoned by James I in 1603, and was eventually executed in 1618.
The Bigger Picture: Voyages, Trade and Profit
Behind the famous names, Elizabethan sea power had a wider dimension. The Muscovy Company (1555) traded with Russia. The Levant Company (1581) opened trade with the Ottoman Empire. The East India Company, founded just before the end of the reign in 1600, would eventually overshadow them all. Privateering — legalised piracy under royal licence — brought thousands of Spanish prizes home to West Country ports. The Sea Dogs, as Drake’s circle were known, were both heroes of national propaganda and pirates by Spanish definition. By 1603 England was not yet an imperial power, but the institutional and commercial base for empire was visibly being assembled.