Chapter One - Auxilio Divino

Summary

Sir Drake, whom well the world's ends knows

Which thou dids't compasse round,

And whom both poles of Heaven once saw,

Which North and South doe bound;

The starres above will make thee known,

If men here silent were,

The sunne himself cannot forget

His fellow-traveller.

(Anon. 1581)

This epigram was one of several written by the scholars of Winchester School and pinned to the main mast of the Golden Hinde shortly after her arrival at Deptford in 1581. Here she was laid up in dry-dock on the queen's orders to act as a permanent monument to Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe.The ship and her captain generated a huge amount of public interest and the poem is a prophetic statement of eternal fame for Drake.A failure to recognize the achievement of sailing around the world would result in the stars of both the northern and southern skies – which Drake had seen and which had guided him on his voyage – commemorating the feat. In the event the stars were not needed; neither the circumnavigation nor any of Drake's other voyages would be forgotten. In this first chapter I shall explore the ways in which Drake was represented during the final twenty years of the sixteenth century and discuss the cultural implications of these constructions.

There is little doubt that Sir Francis Drake was a legend in his own lifetime. Writing in the early years of the seventeenth century, Edmund Howes claimed ‘He was as famous in Europe and America as Tamberlaine in Asia and Africa.’ But when did Drake's dramatic rise to fame begin? He certainly gained renown locally when the Judith arrived back in Plymouth, having escaped the Spanish attack in the harbour at San Juan d'Ulua in 1568. His 1572 raid on Nombre de Dios and the Panama mule trains made Drake a hero in the West Country and provided the wealth required to establish himself as a prominent property-owning figure in Plymouth. But it was the circumnavigation of the globe undertaken between 1577 and 1580, the first by an Englishman and only the second ever, that spread the name Francis Drake throughout England, Europe and the Spanish empire, and which facilitated Drake's meteoric ascent of the Elizabethan social ladder.