In 1577, an English Explorer Set Out to Circumnavigate the World. Here’s What His Groundbreaking Journey Accomplished

Francis Drake and 164 men aboard five ships left Plymouth, England, quietly on December 13, 1577. Few knew that the Pelican, the Elizabeth, the Marigold, the Swan and the Benedict were commencing a voyage only one other expedition had ever completed—a full circumnavigation of the earth.

“By order of Queen Elizabeth, the expedition had been cloaked in secrecy from the outset,” wrote Samuel Bawlf in The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, 1577-1580, including a rumor that the British ships were simply en route to the Mediterranean. After all, Drake’s journey would be a significant blow to Spanish and Portuguese maritime hegemony under Philip II.

Only Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer supported by the Spanish crown, had led a circumnavigation of the globe before, although he was killed in the Philippines in 1521, and only his crew completed the journey.

In a span of just three years, Drake and his men would undertake a harrowing journey from the shores of England, south across the Atlantic, through the Strait of Magellan, around South America, up North America’s west coast, through the Pacific and the East Indies, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and back to England by September 26, 1580.

But the voyage was not all smooth sailing. In fact, it began with a false start. The five ships were meant to leave on November 15, but they quickly encountered a storm of “such violence” they had to wait nearly a month for repairs in England, as Francis Fletcher, a chaplain who sailed on the voyage, later recalled.

On the way to South America, “adverse winds” and “unwelcome storms” befell the sailors, according to Fletcher. Tensions also escalated between Drake and Thomas Doughty, one of his officers, over pilfering supplies. Doughty told his crew aboard the Swan that Drake owed his success to him. Drake then accused Doughty of treason and undermining his command.

But the ships pushed ahead, bouncing along the coasts of South America. There, the Englishmen periodically encountered Indigenous tribes that Magellan had described as brutes in a region he called Patagonia, after a dog-headed monster in Spanish literature.

To Fletcher, however, “Spanish cruelties … have made them more monstrous, in mind and manners, then they are in body.” He found Doughty’s plan to lead a mutiny against Drake, allegedly “laid before the voyage began in England,” and his fate—execution for his treachery—“of far more grievous consequence” than mere scuffles with “infidels.”

Francis Drake Sails Around the World

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The ships spent the Southern Hemisphere winter in port and began to traverse the Strait of Magellan on August 20. By the time they reached the Pacific Ocean, facing anything but pacific conditions, only the Golden Hind, as Drake’s Pelican was renamed, remained.

Along South America’s west coast, the Englishmen continued to plunder the riches of Spanish settlements in Chile and Peru. Fletcher found it “very fruitful and commodious.”

A few months later, the Golden Hind made it to the coast of modern-day California and as far north as Vancouver Island. Drake called what is now California Nova Albion, after Britain’s old Latin name.

After fraternizing with the Indigenous population for over a month north of San Francisco Bay, Drake’s crew took a “sorrowful farewell,” in Fletcher’s words, and set out across the Pacific. Over the next 14 months, they charted a course back to Plymouth, securing treaties in the East Indies and buying a cargo of cloves along the way.

Despite its epic odyssey, the Golden Hind’s grand return home was quiet. Elizabeth I didn’t wish to antagonize the Spanish king with her countrymen’s successful exploits, or with the resounding profits culled from raids on Spanish towns and ships. But she nevertheless traveled down to Plymouth and “entered the ship which Captain Drake had so happily guided round about the world,” according to John Stow’s 1603 Annals of England, “and there did make Captain Drake [a] knight in the same ship.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.