Exploration, Drake's circumnavigation and the Virginia colony
By 1577 a small Plymouth ship called the Pelican slipped out of Plymouth Sound at the head of five ships, carrying Francis Drake, about 164 men and a secret commission from Elizabeth herself. Three years later Drake returned to Plymouth in his renamed flagship Golden Hind, having sailed around the entire world — only the second captain in history to do so. While Drake counted his Spanish silver, a separate set of voyages was probing the coast of North America, and by 1585 Sir Walter Raleigh had landed the first English settlers on Roanoke Island in modern-day North Carolina. Drake’s circumnavigation and the failed Virginia colony are two halves of the same Elizabethan ambition — reach further, trade more, beat Spain — but they ended very differently.
Elizabethan exploration was driven by the desire to expand trade beyond cloth markets in northern Europe, the chance to attack Spanish shipping for gold and silver, the search for a north-west passage to Asia, and the patriotic and religious wish to challenge Catholic Spain. New ship designs (galleons), better navigation tools (astrolabe, quadrant, more accurate maps) and the printed sailing directions of Richard Hakluyt made longer voyages possible.
Why Did Elizabethans Sail Further?
English trade in 1558 was overwhelmingly with Antwerp — raw wool and finished cloth across the narrow seas. When religious wars in the Netherlands disrupted the Antwerp market in the 1560s, English merchants needed new outlets. Joint-stock trading companies were chartered to push into the Baltic, the Mediterranean, Russia and West Africa.
Three other motives mattered. First, Spain’s American empire flooded Europe with silver bullion every year — Elizabethan privateers wanted a share. Second, men like Sir Humphrey Gilbert and John Davis searched for a north-west passage through the Arctic to the riches of Asia, hoping to bypass Spanish and Portuguese routes. Third, the geographer Richard Hakluyt argued in his 1582 Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America that England needed colonies for trade, prestige and as bases against Spain. Patriotic, Protestant and commercial arguments reinforced one another.
Ships, Maps and Sailors
The technology made it possible. The English galleon — refined under naval administrator Sir John Hawkins — had a longer, lower hull than the older Spanish carrack. It carried more cannon along its sides and could turn faster, ideal for the running gun battles that suited English captains. Astrolabes and quadrants let navigators measure latitude from the sun and the pole star; new printed charts (notably Mercator’s 1569 projection) made plotting long ocean courses easier. Logbooks recording wind patterns built up reliable knowledge of the Atlantic. By the 1580s an English captain could plan a voyage to West Africa, the Caribbean or even through the Strait of Magellan with a confidence unimaginable a generation earlier.
It is tempting to see Drake as a swashbuckling hero, knighted on his own deck. The same generation, however, included Sir John Hawkins, who from the 1560s ran Crown-backed voyages to West Africa where he attacked Portuguese ships and trafficked enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to sell to Spanish colonists in the Caribbean — voyages on which Drake sailed as a young man. The Edexcel spec foregrounds Drake’s circumnavigation, not Hawkins’s slaving raids, but a top-band answer is aware that English ‘exploration’ included violence and the trade in enslaved people, not only navigation. This course writes ‘enslaved person’, not ‘slave’.
Drake’s Circumnavigation, 1577–80
In December 1577 Drake left Plymouth with five ships, officially bound for the Mediterranean. The real plan, agreed in secret with Elizabeth, was to sail through the Strait of Magellan and raid Spanish silver shipping along the unprotected Pacific coast of South America. Of the original five ships, only the renamed Golden Hind reached the Pacific. Drake captured the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción — nicknamed by sailors the Cacafuego — off the coast of Peru in March 1579, taking 26 tons of silver, 80 pounds of gold and chests of jewels. Rather than return through the Magellan Strait where the Spanish would be waiting, he sailed up the Pacific coast as far as modern-day California, claimed it for Elizabeth, and then crossed the Pacific to the Spice Islands and home around the Cape of Good Hope.
He reached Plymouth on 26 September 1580. The voyage’s plunder paid every investor a return of about £47 for every £1 invested — including Elizabeth, secretly the largest backer. The queen knighted Drake on the deck of the Golden Hind at Deptford in April 1581, an act of public defiance towards Philip II that horrified the Spanish ambassador.
Why Was the Circumnavigation Significant?
The voyage mattered for several reasons. Politically, it was a deliberate humiliation of Spain and the most provocative act of Elizabethan privateering yet. Economically, the bullion strengthened the Crown’s finances and turned circumnavigation from theory into a profitable speculation. Strategically, Drake had charted Pacific coasts the Spanish had assumed were closed to outsiders and proved that English ships and seamanship could match Spain’s. Personally, it confirmed Drake’s status as a national hero and Elizabeth’s most trusted privateer — the man she would send to ‘singe the King of Spain’s beard’ at Cadiz in 1587 and command against the Armada in 1588.
Drake left Plymouth in December 1577 and returned on 26 September 1580 in the Golden Hind, having captured the Spanish treasure ship Cacafuego off Peru. Investors received about £47 for every £1 invested. Elizabeth knighted Drake on the deck of the Golden Hind at Deptford in April 1581 — a deliberate insult to Philip II.
Raleigh and the Attempted Colonisation of Virginia
In 1584 Elizabeth granted Sir Walter Raleigh a six-year charter to colonise unclaimed land in North America. Raleigh, a court favourite, never sailed himself but financed the expeditions and named the new region Virginia in honour of the ‘Virgin Queen’. A scouting voyage in 1584 reached the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina, where the captains met the Algonquian-speaking Indigenous peoples of Roanoke Island and brought back two men, Manteo and Wanchese, to London.
In April 1585 Raleigh dispatched Sir Richard Grenville with seven ships and about 600 men. Around 100 of them were left on Roanoke Island in August as the settlement. The first settlement was led by Ralph Lane, a soldier rather than a farmer, and consisted largely of soldiers and gentlemen rather than experienced cultivators or craftsmen. By summer 1586 they were starving, on poor terms with Wingina’s Roanoke people, and a passing English fleet under Drake (returning from raids in the Caribbean) took them home.
Why Did the First Settlement Fail?
Several causes combined. The colonists were unsuited to the work — soldiers and gentlemen, not farmers; food ran out within months. Relations with the Indigenous Roanoke people, fragile from the start, broke down after Lane killed Wingina in 1586, ending any hope of trade for food. Roanoke Island itself had a poor harbour for resupply ships. The promised relief fleet from England was diverted to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean. And by 1587, Raleigh’s second attempt — led by John White and including women and children — arrived to find the first colony abandoned. White returned to England for supplies, was delayed by the Armada in 1588, and when he finally got back in 1590 the second settlement had vanished, leaving only the carved word CROATOAN. The fate of the ‘Lost Colony’ remains unknown.
The 16-mark essay reward is for weighing several causes — not for picking one. Top-band answers connect the failure of the first settlement (1585–86) and the disappearance of the second (1587–90) into a chain. The poor choice of colonists and a chosen leader (Lane) suited to soldiering rather than farming created food shortages; the killing of Wingina destroyed Indigenous co-operation; the Armada in 1588 prevented relief reaching the second colony just as it most needed it. Add Spain — the wider war pulled English shipping away from Roanoke at the critical moment — and you have a multi-cause judgement that earns credit.
By 1588 Drake’s circumnavigation had given Elizabethan England a confident maritime self-image; Raleigh’s Roanoke had shown that ambition was not enough on its own. Both stories belong on the same page: an Age of Exploration that expanded trade and prestige, but did so unevenly, violently, and at a cost that the ‘Golden Age’ label hides.