Dan Snow (48:28)
I'm gonna call a quick time out here and just emphasize how absolutely astonishing this was as a moment in world history. Two massive fleets at sea facing each other. This was a paradigm shifting moment. Of course there had been naval battles before. You have all heard of Salamis, where the king of kings, the King of Persia, had watched as his oared ships were bottled up by the Greeks and his navy smashed adriftward. There was Yamen, where over a thousand Chinese ships clashed. The fate of the Song dynasty at stake. I could go on, obviously, but fear not, I won't. Those different podcasts. This though, this was really different and I ask you to remember this. This was two fleets armed with cannon about to fight a multi day battle. Not a battle in which ships crashed into each other and then crews beat and stabbed each other to death. Nor was this a battle where the ships would go to shore every night and get dragged up the beach, then pushed out to sea and fight again the next day. No, no, this was expeditionary fleet warfare in the Gunpowder age. The English had never done anything like this before. They'd never fought a battle like this. The Spanish neither. The Portuguese had fought an alliance of enemies in the Indian Ocean at Diu in 1509. But for all its importance, they only had about 15 or so ships present. And it was fought in a very different way. What was about to happen was new. Drake, for example, he'd pounced, he'd ambushed, he'd tricked, he'd raided. But neither he nor any other Englishman had ever commanded this many ships at sea against a well armed enemy. These battles coming up are ground zero for British naval fleet actions. It's a straight line from here to the Battle of Jutland in 1916. History was at a hinge point. The pages of the manuals were blank and Drake was about to pick up his pen. In the build up to this campaign, Drake and the other English naval advisors and administrators had been responsible for building a fleet of ships for Her Majesty that were not as bulky as the Spanish galleons, were not as superficially impressive, but they were faster, they were better at sailing, and they were built around a very simple concept. They were built around the cannon. The towering Spanish ships were built to do several jobs, to overawe indigenous peoples as they pushed their empire ever further, to dissuade pirates and privateers from attacking their treasure fleets. They were also designed to fight, but in a different manner, in an older manner, yes, they had cannon on board and they would shoot off their cannon, but then they wouldn't really bother about reloading them. They would then come alongside, they'd crash the ship into that of their enemy, and then the crews on board would shoot arrows and bullets from imposing towering structures on the fore and aft of the ship. They would board the enemy, they'd fight it out with cold steel. These ships were designed to take part in battles very similar to those fought on land. A kind of floating land battle in which the crews would fight it out on the decks of interlocked ships, armor clad men hurling themselves, their opponents, across spars and gangplanks. The slightest slip and they'd be dragged down into the grey green sea by their heavy metal breastplate. The English, though, they were groping towards a very different way of fighting at sea, a way that involved using cannon, big guns, to blast their opponents from a distance rather than swap sword thrusts on a crowded deck. And that's how Drake and Howard went into battle. Over the next few days, they both led a series of attacks on the slow moving Spanish Armada. They would sail in, they would blast their cannon on their broadside, they would tack out to sea, reload and sail in again and repeat like wolves scavenging around a herd of buffalo. They never got too close to get grappled. They just came in just close enough to inflict damage, to wound, to infuriate and confuse. Then what's so exciting about this campaign? These battles is over. The next week you watch as Drake is innovating. He's writing the rules on how big gun battleships fight at sea. He leads his column of ships right up to the Spanish fleet. He brings his guns to bear, he fires his broadsides and he gets his gun crews reloading as fast as they can. He starts the job here that Nelson will finish at the battle of Trafalgar. Enough on the overview, let's get back to the specific timeline here. They fight a big battle off Plymouth that first day. At the end of it, a lot of cannonballs have been shot, a lot of powder's been used, a lot of noise has been made, but the Spanish fleet are intact. They're hardly bruised. They're continuing their stately progression up the English Channel towards their rendezvous with their troops in the Low Countries. But Drake, surprise, surprise, got lucky. At this moment, two Spanish ships collided. The Spanish were really packed in tight in this great mass of ships, so the idea was that they could help protect each other. So it's a great herd of ships moving at the pace of the slowest ship up the channel. And two of those ships collided, not unsurprisingly, given the battle, the noise, the confusion. One of them was the Rosario, which was abandoned after attempts to take her in tow. In that, that big stretch of ocean in the depths of a dark night, guess who stumbled right across her? Drake, that's who. He sailed up, he told them who he was and they surrendered with embarrassing haste aboard the Spanish ship. Well, another little stroke of luck for Drake. One third of the entire money supply of the Spanish Armada. That put Drake in a good mood. He wined and dined the Spanish captain in his cabin. The Spaniards said that he was happy that if his fate decreed that he should be captured, it would be Drake who captured him. There have been many suggestions over the years that all the money on board didn't find its way in its entirety into the Queen's Treasury. Some of it, so the gossip went, got lost in handling. Over the next few days, Drake and Howard attacked the Armada again and again. Alongside them, other maritime legends. Martin Frobisher, the Hawkins boys, Drake's brothers from another mother from Devon. They fought at Portland Bill, they fought at the Isle of Wight. And although they didn't inflict body blows on the Spanish, they demonstrated a very worrying superiority in sailing and gunnery over the Spanish ships. No one had ever seen or heard naval gunnery of this intensity. On 28 July, the Armada arrived at Calais. It was now only a few dozen miles from the Spanish army in the Netherlands. On paper, Philip's grand plan was going pretty well. It was reaching its climax. As it happened, the Spanish army had been caught by surprise by the Armada's arrival. Given the storms and various things, they didn't actually know when the Spanish Armada was going to arrive. And so it would not be ready for days to even attempt to make it out to the Armada's ships. It would have to organise itself and its supplies. It would have to get into its barges, down rivers and canals to the sea and try and make it out to the Armada. The problem is, the Spanish Armada didn't have days. It didn't have days at all because it was anchored in an unprotected anchorage, so it was not in a snug little harbour. They didn't go into Calais inside the sea walls and tie up and all go to the pub and warm up. No, they just anchored off the coast at Calais and there is no particular protection offered by any headlands there, for example. And so the Spanish Armada was not sure it could just sit there off the coast waiting for the army to get its act together. There was also an even bigger problem that Philip had never wanted to properly address, and that is between the Armada and the canals bringing the Spanish army to the open sea. In the shallow waters along the coast, there was a fleet of little Dutch rebel Protestant boats. They roamed those shallows and they were on their knees every day praying for that Spanish army to come out in their slow moving barges into the English Channel, because they would have pounced on them and nobbled them them. They would have fallen upon those canal barges rammed with Spanish troops like a fox at a chicken coop door. But anyway, it wouldn't even come to that because the Spanish had a bigger problem even than the anchorage, than the wind, than the army's slowness or the Dutchman. The Spanish Armada was facing the English fleet and Drake late that evening, only Hours after the Spanish had arrived in their anchorage off Calais, once it was dark, Spanish lookouts spotted the flare of flames out to sea among the English fleet. And they knew exactly what they were. They knew with terrible certainty that one of their greatest fears was about to be realized. Fire. If you're in a wooden ship surrounded by tar and pitch and gunpowder and hemp and you can't swim, you are terrified of fire. And as soon as they saw those flames, they knew that the English had unleashed a swarm of fire ships. So we don't know who first suggested it. We do know Drake was a big advocate and he offered one of his own older ships a sacrificial victim. And so throughout the day, on the 28th, they'd been loading these ships, well, with anything that would blow up or burn, really. Gunpowder, of course, but off cuts of wood, old sails, bits of rope, anything hanging around that would burn, which in the 16th century is nearly everything. And when the tide and the wind were right that night, small crews of brave souls set those ships sailing towards the Spanish fleet which was lying at anchor, and lit the fuses. Within seconds, flames were curling up the rig, engulfing the hulls. At the very last minute, these crewmen leapt into small boats and made their escape. And the fiery ships continued towards the Spanish of their own accord. Now, the Armada had known that a fireship attack was very likely in Medina Estonia. Done quite well. He'd issued instructions, in fact, they were ready for this attack. And despite all that, nearly every ship in the Spanish fleet absolutely lost it. They panicked. They took to their anchor cables with swords and axes rather than take the time to pull them up, and that left vital anchors on the seabed. They crashed into each other in the dark. In their haste to escape, they scattered. The defensive cohesion of the Spanish Armada, which had been one of its major strengths, was now scattered to the winds. When the sun rose the following day, the Spanish Armada was spread out in little clusters of ones and twos right along the stretch of coast. The English couldn't believe their luck. They shook out their sails and they charged. Now, everyone likes to call Drake a freebooting pirate, but it's very important to remember here it was actually Lord Howard, the Lord High Admiral, the Queen's cousin. He's the guy who saw dollar bills, as it were, and he led a great chunk of his squadron to attack a big Spanish ship that had been beached. Yes, it was a big, powerful looking ship, but it was out of the action. It was sitting on its side on the beach. It was a target to be snapped up after the battle, once the fighting strength of the Armada had been crushed. Instead, for much of the morning, Howard and his mates were focused on this ship, it's called the San Lorenzo. They tried to board her, they chased the Spanish crew ashore, but then the French governor of Calais sallied out and opened fire on them and claimed the prize for himself. It was all in all a complete waste of time and resources. For the English, anyway, that was Howard, and that meant that it was Drake who led the main effort of the English at this battle of Graveline. This time, Drake built on everything he'd learned over the previous week. He went in close, he went into 50 metres range. He wanted his broadsides to have real impact, the sort of long range duelling hadn't quite delivered. So now he wanted his men as close as he dared, but without allowing anyone on the Spanish ship to grapple them, hug them close, bring them alongside and then send Spanish soldiers swarming across to board the them. So that was Drake's battle plan, and the Spanish suffered terribly as a result. The San Felipe and the San Mateo were peppered with holes, their scuppers running with blood, their sails shredded loose, shrouds and halyards just dangling down. The Maria Juan rang with the screams of the wounded. Witnesses were shocked by the intensity of fire. This was truly a new era of war at sea. Most of the cannon on the Spanish flagship were blasted off their carriages, cannonballs smashed through Drake's cabin. La Maria Juan sank with most of her crew. Spaniards tried to fire and reload their cannon. They tried to attend to the wounded. They tried to keep their rig up and their bilges from overflowing. Now, this is a dynamic environment, so all day the wind is pushing them gently along the Dutch coast, what's now the Belgian coast, away from Calais, past the town of Graveline and the town of Dunkirk, away from the possible rendezvous with the Spanish army and as it happens, towards the terrible sandbanks of Zeeland. Medina Sidonia messaged one of his subordinates simply saying, what shall we do? We are lost morale not that high. On the flagship, the reply was, I'm going to fight and die like a man. Send more shot. Two of the damaged Spanish ships did go round on those banks and as the tide went out, the Dutch came out, murdering many of the crew and looting the hulls. The rest of the fleet was saved from that fate by a last minute switch in the wind. It went round to the southeast, which pushed the Spanish offshore away from the banks. The Spanish Armada, Medina Sidonia wrote, had been saved by a miracle. Now, remember this, listeners, because the Spanish Armada was saved. You heard me say it. You heard this leader of the Spanish Armada say it. Saved by the wind. So let's have none of this nonsense about it being the weather, not the English who defeated the Armada. They'd been saved from annihilation on the sandbanks of Zealand or sinking at the hands of the English fleet. But they had been defeated, categorically defeated. The plan, Philip's great plan, the one that relied on a little bit too much faith, that was now unworkable, that had failed. They were being pushed ever further from their army. They couldn't sail back against the wind. It's not easy. The best of times in those big Spanish ships, and now they've been battered, their sails and rig have been smashed, they're shorthanded. Their will to go on has been broken and the English fleet is in the way. The English fleet is still shadowing them, blocking their way back. Even if they could have tried to sail south, the only option now was to return home. Over the top of Scotland and Ireland, off they went. Drake trailed them as far north as the Firth of Forth, so round about Edinburgh. But as they disappeared ever further north into the waters off the Highlands, he broke off the chase. There was certainly nothing to be gained from taking a fleet around Cape Wrath, even in summer, as the Spanish were about to find out, that Spanish fleet was smashed by gales on those terrible coastlines. Ships were sunk, entire crews were drowned, treasures consigned to the deep. Some Spanish stragglers made it ashore to be massacred by the English garrison in Ireland. Truly, they'd escaped the frying pan only to be hurled into the fire. The remnant of the Spanish Armada limped home to Spain utterly, utterly defeated. Drake, Howard and the English had just saved Elizabeth. And perhaps they'd saved the entire nascent English trading and imperial project. It was a pretty important battle. Sir Francis Drake seems to have attracted the jealousy of some of his comrades by being hailed as the architect of victory. And to be honest, I'm not sure that that's unfair. He had led the way. Spain's defeated mariners and soldiers came home in 1588, apparently protesting that Sir Francis Drake was a dev and no man. Even that other Drake fanboy, the Pope exclaimed. He's a great captain. With what courage he had battled the Armada. Do you think he showed any fear? Philip could never be convinced to admire Drake. I don't think he read the reports telling him that 60 of his 130 ships did not return home. And he wrote, I have read it all, although I would rather not have done cause it hurts so much. He went on to say that he wished for death. So great was the humiliation. Sir Francis Drake had broken Philip. He finally had his revenge. Sir Drake has proved himself as an explorer, as a raider, a plunderer, a nuisance, an entrepreneur. He's one of Tudor England's richest self made men. He's played his part in the administration of the country and the navy. And now he's just led that navy in the first fleet action of the modern era. It's difficult to comprehend. And friends, he wasn't done. And next, well, he invaded Philip's kingdom. Following the Armada, Drake convinced the Queen to strike at Spain while it was still weak. Drake's plan was that he would sail south and finish off the battered Armada at its moorings. And Elizabeth agreed to it. He would command what some have called the English Armada. And as we'll see, Drake would come to regret the comparison. There were two major problems with this armada from the outset. One, Elizabeth said, sure, do it, but I got no money. So again, it's going to be this mismatch of private businessmen and royal ships. There's always a tension there. And stemming from that tension was the decision by some of those businessmen, including Drake, to take along Dom Antonio, our old friend, the old hapless Portuguese pretender. They thought they'd take him along and they'd restore him to the throne of Portugal and win enormous rewards from a grateful monarch. As you'll have immediately spotted, this mission has two rather distinct aims and they prove not to be compatible. Drake would command the fleet, of course. An old comrade of his, Sir John Norris, would command the land forces. Now, this was not going to be a hit and run. This was a massive amphibious expedition. Again, they keep breaking records. This was the largest amphibious assault ever sent out of English waters, British waters. The idea was to force Spain to its knees and just bring the war to an end. 180 ships, 13,000 soldiers, 4,000 sailors. Except the problems mounted. Elizabeth got cold feet as so often, and stopped them taking the artillery train that only the monarch has access to. That's the big heavy guns capable of besieging, grinding down the fortifications of strong Spanish citadels. You couldn't just pick those up from mate's warehouse. There was only one siege train in the country and that was carefully guarded by the monarch. She decided not to send it. She also didn't send enough Supplies. So the fleet set off with provisions for only a couple of weeks. And as ever, logistics would determine the course of events. The amount of food, much more so than any grandiose plans dreamed up in London. And I regret to inform you that things did not go well from the start. Storms scattered them in Biscay, some ships turned up in Bordeaux. In Dorset, repairs were made by captains who seemed to take that opportunity to have second thoughts. Maybe we shouldn't rejoin this expedition. Drake's strength dwindled right from the off and if I'm honest, we start to see a change in Drake here. Drake lacked his customary dash and decision. He was sluggish when it began. They started at Corunna, the port on the northwest tip of Spain. Drake landed Norris's men who ran rampage through the town, looting, drinking, destroying everything. It was total chaos. They did eventually get a grip and they replenished their ships from Spanish store warehouses. But then they got unlucky again. The wind blew really hard inshore, so from the sea to the shore and bottled them up for two weeks in Karuna, in which time they ate through much of their new supplies. So Norris spent those two weeks trying to blast his way into the defended upper town of Corunna. But without the Queen's heavy guns, he was woefully underpowered. They did open a little breach in the wall, they knocked down a little stretch of wall and they launched an assault. But during that assault, some more of the wall collapsed and buried the English attacking troops. They did have a bit more success with a Spanish force, about 8,000 men, which was hoping to relieve Coronna. So marching towards Corunna around the country, Norris led his men out of the city and routed them. So that's another humiliating defeat for Philip on home soil. Finally, though, the wind changed and Drake could sail. But a far more effective enemy than Spanish ships and infantry came to the aid of King Philip, the old scourge of every long range expedition in this period. Disease ripped through Drake's fleet. They had to beat south, they had to attack south against the wind, down the coast of Spain and Portugal. And as they did so, men, sickened, bodies racked with pain were laid out on the gun deck, the orlop decks. No one, of course, had any idea why they were suffering or what could be done. The dead were thrown overboard in droves. Drake's command was dwindling away and that's when he made the momentous decision not to keep attacking King Philip's ports in search of warships to destroy so not to carry out Elizabeth's specific instructions. Instead, he would attempt to seize the great prize that was Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. He'd arrive as a liberator. He'd install Dom Antonio on the throne and he'd tear an entire kingdom, in fact an entire empire, from Philip's grasp. You can see why he thought it was worth giving it a go. Drake landed the soldiers on a beach 40 miles north of the city. A great surf was running and it meant that some of the men were lost. They were drowned as the open boats were capsized in breakers along the beach. Domantonio managed to land in one piece, however, and the English would now see whether his proud boasts were real. Would his people rally to him as that force marched towards Lisbon? The Portuguese people looked reasonably apathetic. Most were not going to risk throwing their lot in with this ragtag army with no supplies or siege train marching on Lisbon. Drake took his fleet down the coast and sailed into the estuary, the Tagus there. But he didn't act with his accustomed verve. He was slow, he was cautious. Norris, for his part, marching overland, was not inundated by waves of volunteers. The streets were dangerously quiet. The Portuguese people were hedging their bets. So there was a Spanish garrison and they were shut up behind powerful defence in Lisbon. Big walled defence in Lisbon. Norris couldn't dislodge them and humiliatingly he was forced to retreat. Disease chewed through his ranks. The whole excursion cost him one third of his men. Drake and Norris had disobeyed Elizabeth and they had failed in the task they'd set for themselves. It was not ideal. They made the decision to take their shrunken force to the Azores again. It was scattered by a gale and individual captains took the opportunity to go home. Rome. They arrived separately at this oars. One of their ships, dreadnought, had only three healthy crew out of its original 300. It was a disaster. And it was Drake's first major defeat in charge. He does deserve a good chunk of the blame. He shouldn't have gambled everything on trying to stick a pretender on the throne of Portugal. And if he was going to do that, he should have acted with greater resolution in Lisbon. He should have just landed his men in the town and try and take the place by storm. But it's also true that weather and supplies had been against him. They went back to England, taking poor Dom Antonio with him. I feel a bit sorry for him. He went back to his poor life in a west country village. But he did at least write this to A friend, this I can assure you, that 4,000 Englishmen are equal to 8,000 Spaniards. And whenever I can embark with them again, I shall gladly do so. Especially if Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake be amongst them. For by my faith, they are gallant gentlemen. For the next six years, Drake was nearly always ashore. He was busy, had a range of military and political jobs. He spoke in Parliament about naval matters. He pushed for more spending. He chaired committees on naval affairs, set up a welfare scheme for sailors which was much needed. A pension for veterans. He must, though, have felt the call of the sea. He must have hankered after the simplicity of a rising and falling deck beneath his feet. That sou westerly wind on your right cheek is your clear rame head that we all know and love the well drilled crew who'll follow you to the ends of the earth. It must have all appeared to be a simpler life than that of court intrigue and legal disputes about prizes. And that's perhaps what took Drake back to sea one last time. In his mid-50s in 1594, he was in command of a large expedition, but again it was a flawed one. 27 ships, two and a half thousand men. Drake was going back to the Caribbean, but he was going in partnership with an old colleague, his old friend and occasional rival, Sir John Hawkins. For some very odd reason, Elizabeth insisted they shared the command of the expedition equal shares, two of them in charge. And it was a disastrous idea. Hawkins was in his 60s. He'd become slow and cautious. It took them a long time to get the ships, the men, the provisions together. By which time the Spanish knew the exhibition was coming and they knew it was headed to the Caribbean. They left in August. Hawkins and Drake were arguing about supplies, bickering. They stopped in the Canaries, but their Drake was sluggish. The townsfolk in Las Palmas had time to build defences and man them, while Drake was conducting a slow recce. It's not the Drake of old. His men were beaten back when they tried to land. He just wasn't the same Drake. He was cautious. By October they were in Guadeloupe and their only chance of success lay in speed. Speed was of the essence if they wanted to surprise and capture valuable cargoes in Puerto Rico. But Hawkins was ill and he wanted to repair his ships and Drake didn't overrule him. He settled down to wait and they didn't arrive in Puerto Rico till 12 November, by which stage the Spanish colony had been forewarned. There, off Puerto Rico, old Sir John Hawkins died second Only to Drake, in his fame and his influence on English maritime history. The town of San Juan on Puerto Rico had received warning about a week before the English arrived, and they'd gone into overdrive. Defences were built, cannon laid, shots piled beside the barrels. Drake couldn't rely on surprise, so he was going to have to batter his way in. Use kinetic force, aggression. But no. Even here, he prevaricated, he seemed unwilling to commit. As a bit of a starter, he launched an attack on some ships in the harbour. But he was met by ferocious Spanish resistance. Savage cannon fire from the shore. And so Drake abandoned the assault on San Juan. He told his men there'd be easier targets elsewhere. This was a different Drake, and the Spanish could sense it. Tales of his repulse from the Canaries and Puerto Rico spread. The Spanish felt that rarest of emotions in their chests. They felt hope, maybe even confidence. And while the opposite was happening aboard Drake's fleet, Drake's crews began to whisper. They began to question his leadership. He moved slowly up the Spanish Main. All the settlements knew of his coming. The Spanish had evacuated towns. They'd stripped them of all wealth and possessions. He burned a couple of empty towns. Actually, all he did there was just waste his time when he should have fallen like a thunderbolt. On Panama, he eventually arrived. But there, which had been his main target all along, the Spanish had time to evacuate their settlements as well. He sent a party across his old stomping grounds, across the Isthmus to the Pacific side. But they were stopped by atrocious weather. They were also stopped by a fort built just days earlier on the high ground in the center of the isthmus, and the Spanish held up their advance. This party trickled back, defeated, to the Caribbean coast. Drake was now staring disaster in the face. He seems to have fallen into depression. A colleague said that since Plymouth, there had never once been joy or laughter on Drake's face. Drake insisted the Caribbean had changed. It used to be a paradise. Now it was a desert. There were no ships worth capturing. The Spanish were getting their act together. But perhaps it was Drake that changed. By January, the admiral was confined to his cabin. He was ill. He was dying. On the 27th, he was declining fast. He had dysentery. In the early hours of 28 January, he rose from his bed and roared for his armor so it might be buckled on and he could greet death as a soldier. His servants forced him back into bed. And that's where he died. At 4am, his men took him to the nearby town of Portobello which they torched as a fitting funeral pyre for their leader. Then they took him out to sea in the deeper water off Bajo San Medina island and gave his body to the ocean, encased in a lead coffin. As the guns of his ships blast a salute. After taking a dozen Spanish cities, 500 of King Philip's ships. After defeating his armada and capturing his treasure, Drake's career had come to an end. The English wept, but they also followed the trail he had blazed. The Spanish Main would burn over the years of war that remained. The Spanish, they celebrated his death. When news was brought to a sickly King Philip, his eyes brightened. Now he croaked, I will get well. It was good news, he declared. And that's all the eulogy Francis Drake needs, a eulogy for a low born sailor. From a little island on the edge of the world, the most powerful man on earth rejoiced at his passing. Until a generation or two ago, Drake was one of the most famous and celebrated Englishmen in history. He dominated the historical fiction read by generations of young men, young men that were being ready to follow him to sea and carry the flag of their monarch to the furthest reaches of the planet. He was the subject of endless early movies in British cinema history. When Francis Chichester completed his epic solo sail around the world in 1967, Elizabeth II knighted him with Drake's sword. Margaret Thatcher quoted Drake during a rough period in her premiership. And that made sense because as Britain surveyed its mighty empire, investigated its cause, its birth, how it had come to be, what were the roots of this gigantic domain. And the gaze of those searchers settled on Drake. He had conducted the first circumnavigation. He had claimed the first territory outside Europe for Queen Elizabeth. He was the victor of the first great sea battle of the modern age. He was the man who'd identified and captured and brought home the wealth of the New World. Now, much of this is hagiography and myth making, but there is a, I think there's a kernel of truth here. Before Drake, there was no buccaneering tradition. There was no national obsession with the riches of the Spanish Main. There was no celebrated ocean going sailors. There were no practical dreams of English empire beyond the oceans. And after Drake, well, all that, that became the English identity. He's almost Arthurian. He became the sort of archetypal English hero. He was emulated, he was copied by thousands of others. His spirit was summoned, it was cited in parliaments and pamphlets. It was used regularly to lobby for an expansive, aggressive buccaneering Protestant national strategy. Generation after generation, there was the myth of Drake's Drum. Drum unknown now, but familiar immediately to every Briton. A hundred years ago, a drum which was said to have been taken on Drake's voyages, which sits now in his old house at Buckland Abbey. Let someone beat on that drum and Drake will return to beat the Spaniards or their successors out of the Channel. Men claimed to hear that drumbeat at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. There were reports of ghostly drumbeats when the German fleet surrendered to the Allies at the end of the First World War. During the Battle of Britain, two army officers claimed to hear Drake's drum beat while they were stationed on the Hampshire coast. Today it's all very different. Thankfully, or perhaps naively, children are not raised to fear a foreign fear fleet in the Western approaches. So there's no talk of Drake's Drum. Nor is there much talk of the man who helped stir a confidence on this island. But its people, too, could join the mighty Iberian empires in exploring the world and exploiting its gold and its spice and its gems, conquering its lands. And so the story of Drake will endure. Thanks for listening, folks. More history hit podcasts coming down the slip way at you thick and fast. Don't forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcast and they'll drop smoothly into your feed like Drake coming alongside an enemy prize. Thanks for listening.
