An Elizabethan Adventurer’s End
Sir Francis Drake’s preemptive raids in 1587 delayed King Philip II’s plans to invade England, but did not scotch them for good. A year later, the combined Spanish fleet, the famous Armada, set sail. Drake played a key role in its dispersal and eventual destruction. Particularly on the night of July 29th, 1588, when he organized fire ships against the Armada assembled in Calais. In a panic, the Spanish ships sailed out of that port and into the open sea. There, they were scattered by a combination of English warships and bad weather. It was the peak of Drake’s success, as well as his popularity both with the public and in the royal court. From then on, things were mostly anticlimactic, until his eventful life eventually came to an anticlimactic end in 1596.
After a series of failed raids and attacks against Spanish America, Drake caught dysentery while anchored off Portobelo in Panama, and died. His career, with its turns from soldier and sailor to pirate, illustrates the era’s murky lines between outright piracy and legalized piracy, also known as privateering. In the years to come, the difference between a pirate liable for the hangman’s noose, and a privateer likely to receive official acclaim and adulation, was no more than a piece of paper. Those who plundered the seas with a letter of marque in their pocket were lionized. Those who did the same without such a fig of legality were condemned as pirates.